Humanising the Hideous

I suppose I am obliged these days (as someone who has written essays and film reviews intermittently for almost 25 years) to say that this review contains so-called "spoilers". It is such an annoyingly grim, dull and invalid 21st century criticism of reviews. Rather, I hope to appeal to your adult sensibilities and say that I hope the details of the film I discuss below will motivate you to watch this important film. I cannot honestly see why knowing parts of it would dull your motivation to go to Blockbuster to hire it/buy the DVD from Asda or Walmart/ watch the semi-legal clips from the far East on Youtube;-) or how this would dull your engagement with the text. I know what happens at the end of "Great Expectations" and it doesn't stop me re-reading it and crying at the end. Cheers. -KoldKoffeeeyes.

Here comes the review now...


"Now I"ve got a cousin called Kevin, he's sure to go to heaven, always spotless clean and neat,the smoothest you can get 'em....My perfect cousin, what I like to do he doesn't, he's his family's private joy, his mother's little golden boy". -"My Perfect Cousin" - The Undertones (1979). Lyrics: Damian Stephen O'Neil, Michael Bradley. - Universal Music

"Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the colour of my room, where I will live. Plain blinds drawn all day, nothing to do, nothing to say". "Sound and VIsion"- David Bowie from the album "Low" (1976 EMI Records)). It famously has fewer and simpler lyrics than other Bowie albums as he was "writing a new musical language" for himself.

"I don't like a man who picks at his food". _Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard) in EastEnders (BBC ) in about 1992 when daughter Michelle (Susan Tully) got herself involved with a younger creepy boyfriend who picked at this food and who then went on to stalk her.

Only one thing hurts more than honesty. It is not the daily currency of soul -saving small white lies or reflexive dishonesty. It is the sense that a palpable and sustained effort is being made to avoid honesty.

This is the thematic juggernaut that powers through Lynne Ramsay's "We Need To Talk About Kevin". This lifeblood is pumped through the film by the economical and spartan, red, yellow and blue cinematography and most of all it is the fuel that drives some narcotically beautiful performances. This thematically well-nourished work based on the Lionel Shriver novel of the same name, provides an asessment of the American dream turned nightmare, the intrinsic isolation and emotional suffocation of the nuclear family, the impact of changing gender roles within the family and the more and more loudly whispered 21st century taboo that this could be having a negative impact on boys in particular.

Eva (Tilda Swinton) is living alone in an almost mothballed barely habitable shack and looks suspiciously like a middle-aged version of Sissy Spacek's Carrie (1976) of the Brian De Palma film of the same name. Like Carrie, Eva is reviled and vilified by those around her. It is not long before we learn that Eva's son Kevin (Ezra Miller) is in youth custody. We know from the off when red paint is anonymously thrown over Eva's house (almost echoing the pig's blood scene that precipitates the murderous denouement in Carrie) that Kevin has committed a heinously headline-worthy crime and that people are dead as a result. This has left the local heavily stereotyped "moral majority" understandably shattered upset and angry. Eva is being roundly made to shoulder the gargantuan blame, even more it seems, than Kevin himself. Tellingly, the, at times physical, vitriol comes mainly from the women in the community. Eva is both resigned and coldly defiant in the face of their retribution. It is ironic that the friendliest face is Kevin's only surviving and seriously injured victim.

Eva takes us on a psychological assault course and visceral non-linear journey of flashbacks and flash-forwards, comparing and contrasting her memories of her affluent and oppulent past life with the broken shell and very empty nest that is her present. The sense of foreboding is there at the start of the film when we see the pre-Kevin Eva; the younger free -spirited, traveling, travel writer in Spain enjoying the factual La Tomatina festival (Ooh the red. FYI the real life annual festival involves the local men wallowing in a theatre of faked aggression where they needlessly throw tomatoes at each other and bathe in their juices for a couple of hours or so it would seem) in all of her liberal stereotyped scarf -wearing desert-booted long -haired glory. We know that this is the last time Eva will feel this free and that this is the last time Eva will see masculinity expressed in a such an authentic and apparently benign way. This is contrasted with her more humble old beige suit and shoes, relics from a more affluent designer era, that she wears to go to a job in a down-market beleaguered travel agents that has seemingly not absorbed any cultural and technological influences since the 1980s. Her life is a degraded and degrading parody of what it was. We are guided through her fledgling and apparently joyous B.K. relationship with the hapless photographer Franklin (John C. Reilly) He is obviously very much in love with her. She on the other hand isn't so committed. We know this when he asks her when she is coming home from her Spanish jaunt and leaving the tomatoes and Southern European men behind , when he says he is 'taking her back to his ship' and also when he asks her "never to go away again". Damn. She agrees that she is never going away again. She promises in fact. We are taken to the real and joyous lovemaking that leads us to Kevin's conception, Kevin's conception itself and then into the resultant, unintended, apparently healthy, though unhappy pregnancy. Eva's long hair has been sacrificed and her white uptight smock in amongst all the relaxed and freely bare-bellied women at the ante-natal class tells us that she is struggling to cope with the prospect of the oncoming physical demands and what she perceives as the social demotion that motherhood is about to bring. No more unbridled, stage managed Southern European masculinity for Eva. Dad, mug, and villain- to -be Franklin is ecstatic. He has Eva right where he wants her. He turns his eyes, shoulders and soul away from Eva's apprehension towards the whole enterprise whilst prematurely and blindly setting up the swing- chair and myriad toys that the baby will be too small for, for a long time. Eyes wide shut and this is how it will continue. Franklin's honesty avoidance begins here. When Kevin arrives, Eva's maternal instinct does not unfurl. She is symbolically chastised by the midwife for resisting while giving birth to him. and Eva then has to try to forge an anti-naturalistic connection with her child. She holds screaming baby Kevin in mid air almost at arms length as if if he is a diseased alien rather than a crying baby boy whose only crime so far is a need of a naturally occurring cuddle,that she apparently cannot provide. She is not "in love" with Kevin to the extent that a Mom should be with her new baby. She is in fact bloody hopeless at the natural Mom thing and Kevin knows this better than anyone. Whilst Kevin is never neglected in the traditional starved unwashed sense, it is there in his sloe-gin coloured eyes throughout that their connection is one borne out of legal, social and familial necessity rather than the joy of motherhood. This is cruelly 3 line whipped when Eva suddenly becomes bloody good at the natural Mom thing when she has (tellingly against Franklin's initial wishes) , a daughter named Celia. Poor wee Celia has her own wee honesty avoidance programme going on. She certainly wants Kevin to be her friend and her big hero, as he ought to be. The situation is made worse when Eva still never becomes bloody good at the natural Mom thing with Kevin or at least not until it is far far too late....

Throughout this journey, the death row appropriate crime that teenaged Kevin has committed is torturously and intermittently drip-fed to us, or at least as much as what Eva knows of what he did as the snapshots are all based on her memories. She has not borne witness to the bulk of the incredulous hideousness of the crime itself so like the proverbial dead cat growing in the attic until the walls burst open, the horror of what Kevin has done, as presumably documented in court etc, only grows in her imagination. Though never graphic, the signifiers used including the gargoyle expressions on Kevin's face are used to frightening effect. We feel what he has done, rather than see it. Grimly, we feel why he has done it too. The explanation is unmistakable and we cannot avert our eyes from it. Neither can Kevin. This is the problem.

The main discussion throughout is whether Eva's lack of free-wheeling maternal love for Kevin led him to do what he did or if there is such a thing as "the bad seed" (or bad egg) that carries the fiendish potential truth that any one of us could have entered the world evil and that the basic tenets of personality are based entirely upon a genetic roll of the dice. Kevin is of course a double 6 on all sides if that could be possible. Clever, perceptive, witty at times (his reaction when Eva loses to him in a round of mini-golf and she unceremoniously walks away from him is priceless), poisonously pretty throughout his life and able, at light speed, to get to the basic life that animates of every person he meets.(his Dad, his sister, the nurse, though not the family doctor who can evidently see through the non-verbal infant Kevin like a net curtain) He seems though, to struggle with himself. "What personality?" is his worryingly advanced and emotionally arrested childhood response to Eva's suggestion that his bedroom be made 'special" to "reflect his personality." Kevin doesn't want the segregation of individuality or his own space. He wants a bond....

The cinematography carries the stark debate well albeit in a blunt fashion. It certainly simplifies the debate for the viewer in a medium where it could have become messy. At times, though, it came across as an adrenalin fueled trichromatic smorgasbord, put together with over-enthusiastic gusto by hungover absent-minded Film and Media students at a 3rd age university for a tutorial the following morning that they'd only just remembered...at 3am. I acknowledge that the team had 30 days to film and a very limited budget. I have wondered often what Lynne Ramsay and co would have done with more room to breathe on these fronts .Red, red everywhere and not a drop of blood to drink. It is there in the jam that Kevin binges on and spreads in a lascivious manner on to bread when he accepts a date with his Mom (Hey don't balk. Eva and "Kev- the walking- oedipus-complex" both know a date is what it is). It is in the wine that Eva never admits she drinks too much of and it even shows up in the lip-plumping gloss the make up team ladle onto Ezra Miller's lips to make him look the only just achievable 2mm to the wrong side of weird. Kevin's bedroom colour is blue, blue electric blue. The blue is there to reflect the biggest honesty avoidance of all which is Kevin's assertion that he is emotionally sterile. This is contrasted with the sickly yellow and neutrals in the family scenes. The red and yellow are at their most pronounced in the food imagery. The food imagery made me feel nauseated. Maybe it was supposed to. Kevin like a lot of real-life sociopaths seems to have a desiccated relationship with food. Indeed he likes desiccating it himself breaking it up and turning it into tiny uniform neatly laid out balls or cells. Even in prison his fingernails aren't exempt from this obsessive compulsive re-ordering. The first time we see Kevin, and before we see his face, he creepily presents the orally stored (yes honestly) nail clippings from his mouth, as if they are gifts, in a straight line on the prison table to his mother . Is that an eating disorder he has? I think we are to infer that as she was the first person to feed him he associates food with his negative feelings towards his mother. It seemed that more of it ended up hurled on to the fridge door than in his belly when he was an infant. He can't be doing with anything pureed or in one single dollop (except jam). It has to be in solid segregated pieces hence his apparent childhood devotion to Cheesy Wotsits. Other aspects of the photography are outstanding. The monochrome frames of Kevin's conception are unnerving. His subdividing cells seem to have a black -eyed malevolence all of their own. It's as if his cells are watching you. revealing to you before revealing to Eva that he is going to be an evil swine. The editing throughout is concise and powerful. Eva' putting her face in water and for Kevin's face to emerge from the water is just one example of how the similarities between Kevin and Eva are demonstrated and serve to emphasise that Eva cannot escape blame. Kevin is of her. He is a chip off the old emotionally absent block and Eva knows this. They have more in common than just having a V for Void in the middle of their first names.

The univeral honesty avoidance exercise is performed in a mind-blowing manner by all concerned. Swinton brings both sympathy and ambivalence to Eva in equal measure. Her vulnerability as a struggling first time mum is blended well with her at times lethal emotional withdrawal. The triumph of Swinton's performance is that, it is difficult to tell where the vulnerability ends and the withdrawal begins... a bit like Eva and Kevin themselves. John C. Reilly is outstanding as Franklin. He brilliantly conveys his underlying heartbreak and evidently dumbstruck and desperate refusal to acknowledge Kevin's malevolence, in the lack of strength in his voice. His vulnerable at times slightly broken voice also conveys his subconscious belief that " If Kevin is damaged, Eva is to blame for this". His inability to face the home truth that Kevin's incessant Brady Bunch charm offensive towards him is unnatural and that Kevin does not love, respect, or even like him is almost breathed out by Reilly. The diminutive and dominating genius that is Jasper Newell brings an intelligent and terrifying malignancy to Kevin's childhood. (This boy is fantastic by the way. He is one to watch) When he firstly, takes up archery as a childhood hobby, following Eva's reading of a Robin Hood bedtime story to him when he is ill, you sense through Kevin's eyes and sense of purpose that he is already beginning to play a slow, painful endgame. Something has been decided by him. The wearing of the Robin Hood hat seems to be a means to and end rather than child's play. Robin Hood is an outlaw who rescues Maid Marion (shiver) using bows and arrows. Some acts of Kevin's premiere league passive aggression will shake you. They shake Eva too. She goes to Ecuador for two months to recuperate....

What of your own journey with Eva? I have to admit to being defensive from the start. As a non-parent and someone who has done a fair amount of travelling, I was annoyed that Eva as a woman who once had a more free-spirited lifestyle and visibly and understandably missed it should be punished for this in the literary world with an evil son. I thought "Oh here we go. Blame the free-spirited woman as usual." I thought that as a travelling woman in my age group Eva and I would probably have been friends if we'd met. You feel for her when she has to go to the detention centre to visit Beelziebub's brat. You reel however when she chillingly leapfrogs over Kevin's sad and intelligent childhood remark prior to sister Celia's birth "you can be used to something and still not like it. You're used to me" She answers with "Yes, well, we'll all have to get used to someone new soon" WHAT?? After Kevin has virtually destroyed the most valuable things in her life, you are also left wondering at her response to their lawyer, when he says that she will need to sell the house she lived in with Franklin and Celia and her business. " I don't care. I hated the house". is her arctic response. In spite of Eva's own chilling tendencies, I did so want her and Franklin to jettison their apparent fearful and irrational devotion to liberal parenting (they are both such stereotyped middle class weeds) just long enough for them to kick Kevin's bum from one end of their invisible picket fence to the other and to perform chinese torture on him with their scary garden sprinklers. Jasper Newell did so well that he made me want to put arsenic in Kevin's Cheesy Wotsits or drive him to the nearest cliff and throw him off it. Yes you will recognise your own demons in Kevin just as Eva recognises hers In him only too well.

I was shocked to find that in spite of myself I did not want to see Kevin graduate on to death row at the end of the film. Under US law he couldn't have mind you as he was, as Eva pointed out, tried as a minor (Tried?? Stone me. Did he actually plead "Not Guilty?"). I think he was in the wrong State jurisdiction for the death penalty also. I am in fact struggling to articulate my assessment of the quite incredible powerhouse that is Ezra Miller as teenaged Kevin. Miller's performance is one of the most breathtaking I've watched in a long time. Yes Kevin is demonically evil and yes it is plain fact that his pain behind this is palpably horrendous. Just watch his face when he speaks to Eva in the restaurant and when he participates in the voyeuristic post conviction TV documentary. Did Ezra watch Diana Rigg's performance as Helena in the" Oedipus complex in reverse" drama "Mother Love" (BBC 1989) per chance? The facial expressions were very similar. Throughout the film Kevin asserts both explicitly and implicitly that he is emotionally as empty as the jotter in his room. On the contrary. Kevin's emotions are as volcanic as they are repressed. As part of natural maternal love, a child's emotions need to be acknowledged and disciplined in equal measure and indulged from time to time. Indeed in an early conversation in the detention centre , Kevin seems to say that he would have preferred a more assertive physical disciplining hand in his upbringing when he talks about the disastrous approach taken in regards to his potty training, which he deliberately resists purely to inconvenience his mother, until a worn -down Eva seriously assaults him, inadvertently breaking his arm. None of this emotional conversation ever happens to Kevin. This is probably where the blame does lie at Eva's unsure feet. Kevin's emotions are stuffed down until they can be stuffed down no more. Through the anti-naturalism of his maternal relationship and the resultant lack of bridging of the "primordial wound" between mother and son, Kevin has not forged the necessary neural pathways to express these emotions in a measured or lingusitic manner....and to be honest, between Arctic Eva, and passive -aggressive Franklin there's no-one you'd want to express them to either. We sense this upsetting primordial gap when we see Kevin's emotional remoteness. It is all too apparent when we see Kevin looking small as he fixes his feelings, (like a girl does with a poster of her favourite pop star) onto a giant 2-dimensional Eva in a poster hanging in the bookstore window display. There is even pain in his eyes in the immediate aftermath of his crime as he looks at his mother through the Police car window as if he is desparately trying to get her attention (approval?) The camel's back is broken in 10 places when Kevin bears witness to his parents unnaturally civilised discussion about the end of their relationship. The "end of their relationship" has been one of Kevin's oedipal ambitions that he did not write down in his empty bedroom jotter . He has always wanted Franklin out. Yes it has Freud and psychosexual development stamped all over it. Ironically, it is Franklin (who at this stage you just want to thump for his shocking lack of support shown to his wife and his creepy weaponisation of his unhinged-and he -knows-it son. Was he subconsciously punishing Eva all along for not being 100% into the "ma, pa and the weans" picture? He is a dweeb. You nearly forgive Kevin for hating him), who is jumping his own leaky ship that he invited Eva onto in the first place and he is so civilised he wants to "keep things going until the school holidays". Thump! For Kevin the oedipal ambition backfires when it looks like Franklin's "no brainer" custody strategy is for Kevin to live with him. When Franklin says "no brainer" you know that for him it has been a" no-brainer" that Eva has never loved Kevin. Franklin tries too hard to fudge over this when Kevin bearly, stuffing down his hurt and rage, hears this on the stairwell. Kevin treats the fudging with the contempt it deserves. To hear what he has always known being articulated by his father is too much for Kevin. You know drastic action is not far off...

There are times when reality is stretched beyond breaking point in this saga. I found myself comedically urging Eva to buy a dictaphone (surely to god as a writer she had one) or even just set up her cell phone to record Kevin's unstinting daytime hostility towards her so that she would play it back to a returning Franklin in the evening before looking up the phonebook for a child psychologist. I also asked myself, "Did this kid ever do anything normal or pleasant?" Was he ever one of the 3 wise men in the school concert? Did he ever go to others kids birthday parties? He must've learned to ride his bike that he went on to not ride as a teenager. Who taught him? Eva? Franklin? He spent years at school and was evidently billed as a gifted pupil esp. at maths. He must've got past the psycho radar of most people. (in the novel, a teacher, seeing him merely as an isolated geeky loner, tries to befriend him with tragic and predictable consequences). It is odd that Eva concentrates the journey on his grimier moments. The tragedy would have been more pronounced if this had been interspersed with normal behaviour. I also had the thought that no woman worth her salt would've stayed in their house with her daughter after the domestic "accident' that leaves poor little Celia seriously injured and without an eye (more oedipal imagery). If she genuinely thought her son had orchestrated this, rather than waiting until the school hols, Eva surely would have told Franklin to "get knotted" and that she would help the situation by leaving the home herself with her daughter for a return to her beloved city, whilst muttering under her breath "lets see how long you last with oedipus upstairs". Much that Eva does have rages, we seldom ever see her cry. Eventually , in reality for most people there would have been a weak moment and you would have cried out "Why do you hate me?" at Kevin. It has also been agreed on many responding child psychology forums that Kevin as an 8 year old boy would not have been capable of thinking through some of the things he did even if he was an advanced child. This is all before we get to Eva remaining in contact with the imprisoned Kevin post -denouement... Would you? Tragically, all they have left is each other mind you and that is the perfect ending for Kevin. "Boy gets Mom" , as Ezra Miller said at a press conference.

These misgivings are almost waived by the last 10 or so minutes of this film. You might just cry when you see Eva re-creating a memorial replica " Kevin's room" in her slowly improving shack. Shockingly, there is no Celia's Room or any photos of Celia or Franklin in the house. It is as if she almost wants to fantasize that she is the free-wheeling loving Mom to Kevin. The final dialogue between Swinton and Miller will stay with you for a long time. It exposes the biggest honesty avoidance of all. In much the same way that Eva 's honesty avoidance is her anti-naturalistic love for Kevin and not the maternal" in love" required, Kevin's mirroring honesty avoidance is his anti-naturalistic hatred of his mother. The tragedy is, he worships the ground she walks on and wants this to be naturally reciprocated by her and more than that, he wants to be in no doubt that it is naturally reciprocated. Ironically, now that he is away from Eva, those missing neural pathways are starting to knit in Kevin's head in prison. Kevin is starting to access and almost articulate his feelings. This is what makes Ezra Miller's Kevin so hideously human.

In this age of disaffected male youth and Columbine style scenarios ," We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a film that was crying out to be made. Sadly, the conversation hinted at in the title never really happens. Yes we do need to talk about Kevin. In the 21st century, there's too many of him and it is a tragic waste of masculinity. What happens to those amazing things called boys in the American cultural empire? At least in Spain the boys there have the tomatoes...

KoldKoffeeeyes - 17/04/2012.

PS. According to WH Smith Online,, when you look up Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk about Kevin", readers also bought "How to Bring Up Boys".....

9/10