'We Need To Talk About Kevin' directed by Lynne Ramsay.

Produced by: Jennifer Fox, Luc Roeg, and Bob Salerno.

Written by: Lynne Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear. (Based on a novel by Lionel Shriver).

Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller.

Year of release: 2011.

Country: United Kingdom and United States.

Budget: $7 Million.

Box Office: $4, 339, 547.

This was a difficult one to watch. It’s billed as a psychological thriller, but you should read that as ‘arty-movie-that-doesn’t-quite-fit-into-a-genre-so-we’ll-just-tack-on-Psychological-Thriller’. Won’t go into too much detail about the plot, you can find that on the Wikipedia entry here. To summarise it in a sentence? How about: Mother deals with life after her sociopathic son performs a massacre via bow-and-arrow at his high-school. There is another movie coming out featuring Maria Bello and Martin Sheen that deals with the same theme, but judging by that film’s trailer, it couldn’t be more different from this.

Though it’s not particularly violent (at least not until then end), it’s still a film that is unbearable to watch. This is perhaps reinforced by the recurring and uncomfortable motif of thick red liquid plaguing Tilda Swinton’s Eva Katchadourian in virtually every scene that she is in. From the beginning, Eva is covered in it in the form of crushed tomatoes when she takes place in La Tomatina, the famous festival that occurs in Spain. This first scene is a flashback that establishes Eva as a travel-hungry, adventurous, and childless woman in absolute bliss. The film quickly jumps to Eva as she is several months after the massacre that her teenage son committed. She wakes up on her couch in a faded Led Zeppellin t-shirt and hurries to go to work only to notice that her house has been vandalised by red paint, most likely by a parent of a student that Eva’s son killed. Whoever the vandals are, they manage to tag a good portion of the front of her house and the windshield of her car. Eva then has to use newspaper to remove the thick red paint from her windshield so that she can drive to work. The sight of Tilda Swinton removing viscous red substance from her property and herself is something that you’ll soon get used to. Whilst some might say that it is an obvious symbol, it’s effective nonetheless. Her constant cleaning gives us the sense that she’ll never be able mop up all the blood that her son has spilled, on a social and emotional level.

It must be said that Tilda Swinton is marvellous in this film. I’d heard a lot of buzz about her performance before I managed to see it, and it’s justified. Though a lot of this works purely because of the structure of her face. Swinton is really quite strange looking-- I mean this as the utmost compliment. I think if they were to cast someone with a more conventional appearance that the film might suffer as a result. Kevin is such an odd and hostile child, and for someone as conventionally beautiful as say...Rachel Weisz to give birth to such a sociopath would cheapen the whole event. It sounds like I’m saying that the film works because only ugly people give birth to sociopaths, but that’s not what I mean at all. Swinton is really quite striking; just in a way that is not in line with traditional Hollywood beauty. I simply think that by putting an unconventionally looking actress in the lead, Ramsay manages to highlight that each individual is utterly genetically unique, and that this could be why some babies are born sociopathic. Swinton is also a brilliant actress who takes us through such a strange range of emotions. She’ll get an Oscar nom for this, though I don’t know whether the Academy will give her another statue. Needless to say Swinton is a fucking powerhouse.

As for the central theme of the film; well it’s a complicated one that comments on the age old psychological conundrum of Nature vs. Nurture. The film presents us with the question: ‘Why is Kevin the way that he is?’ and the two answers that it seemingly hints at is that he was either born that way, or that he was made that way due to Eva’s own lack of empathy. This is one of those films that is left intentionally ambiguous. There is evidence to suggest both possibilities. When Kevin constantly mucks up as a toddler, a fed-up Eva tells him: “Mommy was happy until Kevin came along, now she wakes up every day and wishes she was in France.” Even though Kevin is only very young when she says it, it’s sort of implied that he could certainly pick up on her tone.

This film is one that will certainly inspire a lot of heated debate amongst film-goers, and I might even be tempted to write a more detailed argument about what I think the film says about the ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ issue. However, this review is already spiralling well past the five-hundred word limit. It is enough to say that it is a really riveting, though gut-wrenching film. It’s the kind that I probably won’t watch again, at least not for a while.

Four stars:

'Tree of Life' directed by Terrence Malick.

Produced by: Dede Gardner, Sarah Green, Grant Hill, Brad Pitt, and Bill Pohlad.

Written by: Terrence Malick.

Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain.

Year of release: 2011.

Run Time: 139 minutes.

Budget: $32 Million.

Gross Revenue: $54, 246, 069. 

“The nuns taught us that there are two ways through life- the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world shines around it, and love is smiling through all things.” Jessica Chastain’s Mrs. O’Brien informs us in voice over at the beginning of Tree of Life, and we the audience know that it is in for something special.

This movie was my second experience of Terrence Malick’s exceptional writing/direction, the first being The Thin Red Line, which is often unfairly compared unfavourably with Saving Private Ryan due to the proximity of its release to Spielberg’s war epic. I’m happy to report that Tree of Life is a stunning film—one of those classic films that inspired me to start writing a blog about film in the first place. Not only is it visually intriguing, and riveting dramatically, it also connects two ideas that have too long stood unrelated in the general zeitgeist: the relationship between the evolution of species and human behaviour.

If I were to recommend a companion book for this movie, it would certainly be Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. This book is a consciousness shifter, the kind that changes your entire view on life after you read it. If you have ever found yourself pondering why humans behave the way they do, then let me assure you that The Selfish Gene provies an answer, and indeed the answer to that timeless question of the meaning of life. And if The Selfish Gene provides the answer, then Malick’s Tree of Life certainly extends the reach of the book well into human psychology, attempting to explain human nature through a scientific lens. Is it successful? Probably not as much as it could have been if the run-time was extended by another two hours, but Tree of Life still stands as one of the most thought provoking films of 2011 (it is perhaps bested by Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which I shall endeavour to review at some point).

When I say that Malick attempts to explain human psychology via a scientific lens, I suppose you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film is a cold consideration of humanity, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. It is a sad fact that most people quickly associate the word ‘scientific’ with words like ‘cold’, ‘sterile’, and ‘non-living’. When the grandiose and beautiful reality of biology on Earth is considered, science is quickly transformed into something that is warm and wonderful (though sometimes cruel indeed). Tree of Life is filled with such warmth, and such insight into what it is like to be a human, that you'd be a pretty hard individual to not be at least a little moved by it. It successfully manages to marry the depth of human emotion with the scientific crane of evolution by natural selection in a way that would make Richard Dawkins proud.

By now, you’re probably aware that the film doesn’t follow a linear narrative path, but rather presents fragments of narrative through stunning images. This is certainly true in the first half of the film, which leads up to the much lauded montage of the big bang, right on past the evolution of simple life forms, to the extinction of the dinosaurs. After this however, Malick explores the life of the O’Brien family much more comprehensively, though altogether natural and realistic. You get the sense that you are actually witnessing real lives, as opposed to characters, and scenes where the boys of the film put themselves in danger cause a primitive emotional response; you wish you could reach into the film and tell them to stop doing what they are doing.

The film is marred a little in the last twenty-minutes, where it kind of meanders off and doesn’t really make much sense (at least not to me), but ultimately Malick achieves something that no other film-maker has; a vision that is beautiful and utterly unique. Is this not more than we can ask for as an audience of cinema? Though Tree of Life might not change your outlook on life completely, its ideas will stay with you pleasantly for weeks. It's also one of those movies (much like 2001: A Space Odyssey) that's going to be interpreted and reinterpreted for years. I thoroughly recommend this one.


                                               Four-and-a-half stars:

'The Ledge' directed by Mathew Chapman.

‘The Ledge’ directed by Mathew Chapman.

Produced by: Michael Mailer, Mark Damon and Mathew Chapman.

Written by: Mathew Chapman.

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Terrence Howard, Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson.

Release date: January 21^st, 2011 (Sundance)

Budget: $10 Million.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought that it could be interesting. It’s essentially a thriller based around the conflict between religion and atheism, a debate which has grown in popularity since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and subsequently released a bee in the bonnet of pretty much anyone that takes the concept of faith seriously. I think there are a lot of people out there tapping away on keyboards that are all too ready to proudly take a position on the issue. All you need to do is sign up to an internet message board and hang around for a while before an atheism/religion argument pops up. I’m not saying that it’s not an important debate (it’s probably the most important), I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are too many people out there in cyberspace that are arguing the issue just for the sake of arguing (this is true of both sides). For the record I’m an atheist, and for one more record, I’m not a physicist or a biologist that has dedicated my life to the pursuit of answering the big questions. So for the remainder of this review, I’m gonna do what it is people who aren’t physicists or biologists should do when it comes to questions about reality: Shut the fuck up.

As an atheist, however, I was interested to see how the The Ledge would unfold. I went in expecting heated drama motivated by two opposing views of life. What I got was an unconvincing mess of a film that was, at the best, clichéd to the point that it was laughable, and at the worst, more pretentious than your average Mac owner.  It appears that Chapman (writer/director) has written the script with a copy of The God Delusion at his side, and simply shoe-horned each argument into his plot. Whilst this is not necessarily enough to make the film shit, Chapman solved that problem by injecting his movie full of the over-dramatic cheese that only Americans seem to be capable of.

An example of this? Well, The Ledge has its damsel-in-distress in the form of Liv Tyler’s character Shana, a devoutly religious woman who is married to the worst kind of alpha-male—the one that has received a higher calling from Yaweh himself. Why is Shana religious? Because she used to be a prostitute and one of her johns had a church fetish: he liked to have sex prostitutes inside churches and then beat them up. This is no joke folks, Liv Tyler tells us so in the second act. When she says it, the first thing I wondered was how the hell you have sex inside a church without anyone noticing. The second thing I wondered was just how obvious the whole backstory was. This is the kind of writing you’d expect from a tenth grade emo kid’s creative writing assessment. The kind the teacher probably laughed at, but ultimately gave an A+ because all the other kids wrote about what they did in the summer break.

Another problem I had was that none of the characters were likeable. Indeed if film is a dessert that we enjoy after the main course that is our daily life, then The Ledge is arse-hole pie. The atheist protagonist makes it his mission to seduce Shana just because he feels like he needs to liberate her from the puritanical leash of her husband, not because he likes her or anything, just to make a patronising point. Indeed women should be mad at Shana’s characterisation here. She’s basically a fuck-puppet that gets passed from one douche-bag to another douche-bag without so much as complaining about her role in the warped power play. Of course, it’s okay to have unlikeable characters in film. There Will Be Blood had a bastard of a protag, and it’s one of the greatest films ever made. The characters that inhabit The Ledge just aren’t developed well enough. A few of them achieve character arcs, but they are uninteresting and utterly contrived. I think it took two scenes of Terrence Howard’s whole rocky family situation before I just didn’t give a shit anymore.

And the ending sucked. I won’t give it away and spoil it for those out there that want to see it, but suffice to say Terrence Howard has what is quite possibly the most retarded Eureka! moment ever recorded on film.

One star: