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:
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