We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lynne Ramsay (2011)
Reading We Need to Talk About Kevin last year, I never stopped resenting Lionel Shriver’s prose, always felt she was showing off. (I was grateful for the information in the ‘Afterword’ in which Shriver wrote about herself and her approach to the novel because I doubt I’ll read other books by her.) But Kevin is a remarkably sustained piece of writing: Eva Khatchadourian isn’t an appealing narrator but she becomes a more and more compelling one. Shriver, childless herself (when she wrote the book at any rate), cleverly taps into the guilt and fears of career women entering into motherhood – guilt about not wanting the child enough, fears of what they might be giving birth to: in Eva’s case, a Columbine-type teenage killer. (Although Kevin Khatchadourian is too hideously controlled even to go on the rampage: he securely locks the gym and does all his killing from the same high vantage point.) The domestic detail in the novel is highly convincing. What’s less convincing is Eva’s marriage to Franklin. They both have exciting sounding jobs – she’s a travel writer, he’s a photographer – but not much else in common beyond mutual physical attraction. Lionel Shriver seems to like the idea of Franklin rather in the way that he likes the idea of America. He’s set up as an antithesis to Eva – in his political views (Republican), in always seeing the good side of Kevin, in not wanting a second child, in his impatience with Kevin’s utterly pacific little sister Celia. When Eva mentions regretfully, as a significant point in the decline of the relationship, their not going to see Crimes and Misdemeanors, you don’t believe it. You don’t believe the super-square Franklin would ever have gone willingly to a Woody Allen picture.
I struggled with the book early on but, from the point at which Kevin starts to impose himself as a personality rather than as Eva’s troubling psychological preoccupation, it becomes and stays gripping. (I think the turning point is when Kevin develops his own vicious, sarcastic language – saying ‘nyeh’ over and over, in sarcastic imitation of each of the syllables his mother, and occasionally his father, has just spoken.) Soon enough, you’re waiting with a knot in your stomach for the next awful thing Kevin will do; and Eva’s own personality has been so strongly realised that what should be seen, in the overall scheme, as minor events – like Kevin’s trashing the roomful of travel memorabilia that Eva’s carefully designed – are just as bad as physically abusive or violent acts. And though Lionel Shriver is naturally selective of key incidents, she gets across the erosive continuing experience of Eva’s life with Kevin. The tension is so great and virtually unrelenting that the massacre itself risks being an anti-climax. Shriver avoids this (even if she seems a little unsure that Kevin really could have locked everyone in the way he does) then delivers a twist which is stunning, at least at the moment of delivery. The very ending – when Eva visits Kevin in prison and they talk as never before – is relatively weak. If Kevin’s softening is meant to leave you doubting the veracity of Eva’s account, that’s a bit artificial. Too many of his misdeeds have been substantiated by the reactions of others (it’s this that makes Franklin’s continuing, unquestioning defence of his son hard to believe). The novel is written as a series of (unanswered) letters from Eva to her ex-husband – a distinctive narrative style, which occasionally seems contrived but which eventually justifies itself. You naturally wonder how a film adaptation will be able to reproduce or somehow emulate that. You wonder too if two good actors can make the partnership of Eva and Franklin live in a way it never does in the book.
It’s not that often the writer of a novel praises a screen version of their work when they haven’t been involved in the script or the production so Lionel Shriver’s public enthusiasm for Lynne Ramsay’s picture is an important selling point. The shape of the screenplay looks bold: Ramsay and her co-writer Rory Stewart Kinnear have collapsed the narrative of a book which is dominated by the first-person voice of its principal character. Yet this semblance of imaginative independence is illusory for a very basic reason: Ramsay’s treatment is highly dependent on familiarity with the novel. (It’s not hard to see why the splintered time sequence and persistently startling imagery of the film appeal to Shriver, who knows what she was writing about.) Without having read it, I’d have got from the film that Eva liked holidaying abroad but I wouldn’t have understood about her career as a travel writer. I wouldn’t have got much sense that the importance of that career and an innate unease about childbearing combined to make her strongly resistant to the idea of maternity. I wouldn’t have had a clue that, during her first pregnancy, Eva is increasingly fearful that the way she feels about the new life she’s carrying inside her will mean that it turns out bad. There’s a scene in the film when Eva and Celia, sitting in a car, see Kevin on the opposite side of the street looking into a bookshop window filled with a hugely blown-up photograph of Eva’s face, and advertisements for a book signing by the ‘great adventurer, Eva Khatchadourian’. It’s the first and only time that an explicit connection is made between Eva’s professional expertise and her inexperience in charting the terra incognita of motherhood. It’s hard to say what Kevin’s meant to be feeling as he sees this display but he couldn’t be blamed for thinking ‘I didn’t know my mother was a celebrity’.
It’s understandable that Lynne Ramsay felt that radical changes were needed in order successfully to translate the epistolary novel into material for the screen. But fragmenting the story in the way she’s chosen flattens the piece dramatically. For the reader, resisting Eva’s opinionated, self-centred personality and – at the same time – feeling sorry for her awful plight makes for considerable tension. It’s to Ramsay’s credit that she didn’t rely on first-person narrative – but, without Eva’s idiosyncratic and insistent voice, she’s disempowered. She’s someone who, from the start, we see is in a bad place, and our relationship to her is simplified and diluted.
No less crucially, given that the visual compositions are the heart of the movie, the chopped-up time sequence detracts from some of the most important images too. There’s been so much vividly-coloured explosive splatter on screen in the first half hour that, by the time Kevin’s desecration of his mother’s precious maps happens, it’s almost bound to be a letdown. In the event, it’s not even that – it’s just an example of Ramsay’s tendency to over-design things, which is one of the film’s besetting faults. In the new house that she hates, Eva uses one of the rooms as a shrine to her aborted travels and interrupted career – but the wall coverings that she constructs in the film lack the variety and abundance of the emblems of her wanderlust created by Lionel Shriver. Kevin’s work on the room looks almost decorative – as Sally said, it gives the otherwise clinical maps a bit of sub-Jackson Pollock life. Ramsay may intend this to be one of the points where we question Kevin’s malignity: perhaps we’re meant to wonder whether he really was trying to make the room (as he claims) ‘look special’, and that it’s Eva’s selfish prejudice that sees it as ruined – but, for that point to be made effectively, surely his additions to the walls should be more artless and messy. The rather graceful stippling indicates not just malice aforethought but precocious artistic talent (especially since he wreck things in the few minutes that Eva’s on the phone in another part of the house). More generally, Ramsay loses the distinction between settings because these, almost without exception, appear to express Eva’s unhappy state of mind – we don’t see much anyway of the beloved Tribeca loft she left behind for the characterless suburban dream- house Franklin moves the family to. It wouldn’t make much difference if we did, though, because everywhere is steeped in the protagonist’s gloom.
While knowledge of the book helps to clarify the characters and their situation, it also detracts from the imagery – exposes it as too obvious. The film opens with Eva at the ‘Tomatina’ festival in Valencia[1]. She emerges from the crowd, borne aloft by other semi-naked revellers, ecstatic, drenched in bright, pulpy red. The sequence probably goes on too long anyway – if you know that Kevin will eventually cause terrible bloodshed, it goes on much too long. Individually, the succession of red images in the film are impressive; collectively, they are tediously, obviously patterned. Eva concentrates furiously on scraping away the red paint which hostile neighbours have daubed on the house after the high-school mayhem; yet the same paint washes easily off her car windscreen as soon as she sets the wipers going. Shopping in the supermarket, Eva tries to hide from a shopper whose child died in the school massacre. She takes refuge against a wall of tins of tomato soup, which the Warhol connection is bound to make look arty.
Lynne Ramsay’s preoccupation with visual effects borders on the offensive. There’s a succession of oral images: Kevin in jail removing pieces of bitten fingernail from his mouth and lining them up on the table in front of him; Eva extracting shell from her mouth as she eats the meal of eggs broken by the retributive supermarket shopper she failed to avoid; Kevin, on the day that Celia loses an eye while he was looking after her, peeling a lychee and savouring, in juicy close-up, its resemblance to an eyeball. Even when Ramsay has an undeniably strong visual hook – like the centre of an archery target superimposed on Kevin’s own eyeball – she tends to hold it too long. A short sequence of Eva driving through the neighbourhood streets at Halloween with ghost- and ghoul-masks shooting into her field of vision works better – at least the images are on the move.
In the supermarket, the checkout girl opens Eva’s box of eggs to discover they’ve all been smashed. We understand what’s happened and don’t need to be shown the avenging mother watching from the back of the frame as Eva looks in horror at the contents of the box before insisting on taking them home and making a proverbial omelette. Her enduring love of travel moves her to get a job in a crummy local outfit (‘Travel R Us’). We see her at lunchtime, about to pop out and asking if any of her co-workers need anything bringing back. They stare at her in malignant silence. There’s no indication that this is her first day in the job – if they always do this, why does she keep asking? The one exception to the prevailing office hostility is a no-hoper man who tries to get off with Eva at the Christmas party. When she rejects him he hisses vengefully that she’s in no position to be snotty with anyone. This scene, like most of these bits that don’t rely principally on images, is crudely done. Lynne Ramsay downplays some of the more obvious and unsatisfying elements of the novel – Kevin’s intimations of humanity in the prison cell, Franklin’s all-American sunniness – but she has nothing to replace them with. In the novel, Shriver characterises, without much imagination but sharply, some of the schoolkids and staff who becomes Kevin’s victims. Ramsay completely cuts them out. So in the film, the high school massacre – in spite of the effective moment when Eva realises Kevin’s been involved – is an anti-climax.
So what’s left to admire? Tilda Swinton. Ramsay’s disintegration of the storyline gets in the way of her developing a character but Swinton’s physical tension is extraordinary. The loss of a linear narrative makes it harder to convey the relentlessness of Eva’s routine, trapped in the house with Kevin (whose infant incarnation is a little boy called Rocky Duer). Yet Tilda Swinton performs miracles in imparting Eva’s exposed nerves: the rigid, almost ghastly grin as she lifts and tries to smile at her yowling baby son; a brilliant bit in the street when he’s in his buggy crying and Eva is momentarily soothed by the power drills that drown him out. John C Reilly gives Franklin a clumsy boyishness which shows him to be a helpless innocent in the family – decades younger than either his wife or his son, closer in age to sweet-natured Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich). It’s disappointing, though, that Reilly and Swinton aren’t much more believable as a couple than Franklin and Eva were on the printed page.
I didn’t like the look of Ezra Miller as Kevin in the trailer for the film – he appeared to be acting nasty – but he’s better, more emotionally various than I expected. He still doesn’t deserve, though, the praise he’s getting in some quarters and in one crucial scene he’s quite wrong. This is the sequence in which Eva and Kevin go out for a meal together and he launches into a tirade against her, smiling diabolically and raising his voice: the only good detail is the way Miller works bits of the bread he’s not eating into tiny balls. Otherwise, his anger gives Eva too much to feed off: Kevin needs to be unreachably negative. There’s more spark – a disorienting mix of antagonism and complicity – between Swinton and Jasper Newell, the child who plays Kevin between the ages of six and eight. This starts to come through after the infuriated Eva throws her son across the room, breaking his arm in the process, and he doesn’t tell the doctors or his father what really happened. In the immediately following sequences – when Kevin is in bed with some kind of virus, at peace with his mother as she reads to him and irritated when his father returns from work to interrupt them – something interesting seems to be developing. The basic weakness of Ezra Miller’s characterisation – and it may be the director’s fault rather than his – is that we need to see Kevin from Eva’s point of view yet not see him in quite the same way. We need to stay uncertain as to whether the chief villain of the piece is the boy, for being inherently evil, or his mother, for withholding love from her son. And we don’t.
22 October 2011
[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘La Tomatina …is a festival that is held in the Valencian town of Buñol, … in which participants throw tomatoes and get involved in this tomato fight purely for fun. …‘