Charles Baker
Staff Writer
Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel is not a subtle film, but it is almost brilliant. We begin with Eva (Tilda Swinton) living in a suburban shack, assailed by neighbours and attempting to restart her life with a job as a secretary in a travel agency. Her absent son, Kevin, has done something terrible. The exact nature of his crime, though heavily hinted at, is not yet revealed.
Dispensing with chronology, Eva’s contemporary reality is interplayed with her past. We go back to New York, where she is a successful writer in a pristine apartment decorated with vinyl records and African masks, and where she meets Franklin (played wonderfully by John C. Reilly) with whom she conceives a child, Kevin. Truculent and knowing, Kevin’s early years are displayed as a battle of wills with Eva, an awkward mother who, as is suggested, perhaps regrets her decision to have a child.
As the family move into the monotony of the New Jersey suburbs, to an empty, large house, so Kevin’s brattishness hardens into something more substantially evil, a transformation his father cheerfully ignores but his mother is all too painfully aware of. This teenage Kevin (Ezra Miller) is a caustic bully who masturbates at his mother and murders his sister’s gerbil, and it is here that the two narratives begin to meet and our appalling, inevitable ending is gradually reached.
Much has been made of the brilliance of Swinton’s performance, but it is Miller who lays a marker for the Oscars here. Slit eyed and high cheekboned, the suggestiveness he can convey with a wink is startling – a star is truly born unto us. This is not an actor’s film though. Lynne Ramsay was heralded as the heiress to Ken Loach after the success of her debut Ratcatcher and her hand weighs heavily. There is little dialogue and no voiceover. Instead there is an emphasis on jarring sound, enjambing between scenes, and heavy colour, especially red. A discordant soundtrack of Americana appears now and again. Whilst Ramsay is perhaps too keen to emphasize the very cinematic nature of her interpretation, the unique fashioning of a film from an epistolary novel is a hard task indeed.
On an ultimate level this film is a meditation on nature versus nature, on whether Kevin is inherently evil or is rather the creation of an absence of love. For this viewer, in his early twenties and with children far from his mind, it was haunting enough. One hazards to guess how affecting it will be for those on the threshold of parenthood.
