Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Dir. Lynne Ramsay

Year: 2011

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 112mins

The boy at the centre of Lynne Ramsey’s first film in nine years is a slip of a thing. A skinny 15-year-old boy named Kevin, played here by Ezra Miller, whose tight shirts hug his lithe frame in a way that his mothers arms never did. The scant amount of scenes featuring this boy interacting with those who aren’t his family see him as somebody who goes generally unnoticed, unwilling to rock the boat with anyone who isn’t his long-suffering (and often insufferable) mother. Was Kevin born bad or were his actions, dutifully played out in Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear’s unconventional and non-linear adaptation of Lionel Shriver novel, the result of a childhood being raised by a mother who saw him as little more than the reason she had to leave the big city. It’s the nature versus nurture debate and like the similarly themed (albeit, complete different) Elephant, the answer is probably a hearty shrug and flip of the hands, but the manner with which Ramsay has handled the material is the more inspiring accomplishment than anything resembling a resolution.

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens with a dizzying overload of sensory envelope pushing. What feels like a solid half an hour of little more than criss-crossing images from the life of Tilda Swinton’s brash Eva Khatchadourian, layered with an intricate and fragmented kaleidoscope sound design that paints a vivid and architectural image of this woman’s life before, during, and after the worst moment of her life. The bold, striking red of a visit to the La Tomatina festival in Valencia oozes into the flashing neon red of a police car’s headlights, which then flows into the imagery of Eva scraping dried red paint from the façade of her rickety house. Screams, chants and cheers merge on the soundtrack alongside Jonny Greenwood’s musical score before twisting into a stunning moment of revelation as Eva stands with her baby in a pram right next to a jackhammer at a construction sight, barely able to drown out the never-ending sound of her wailing child. Swinton’s face binds all these images and ideas together and it’s such a heady, intoxicating swell of emotions and feelings that it’s actually disappointing when Ramsay has to get down to actually telling the story that, ahem, she needs to talk about.

I was having trouble making heads or tails of the second half of this movie when a friend suggested that Swinton’s character is actually just a really unreliable storyteller. Was Kevin really that terrible of a child? Was her husband – John C Reilly as Franklin – really as cowardly and noncommittal as he appears or is it merely a figment of Eva’s unwell mind? Either way, I suspect an audience member’s reaction to the film as a whole will rely heavily on wheather they find these characters at all tolerable. Unfortunately Kevin becomes little more than a sociopathic Jason Voorhees with only one mode and a seemingly never-ceasing desire to inflict pain. Franklin on the other hand seems like such a whitewashed character that it’s almost as if there’s nothing even there for Reilly to perform.

The film’s best moments, outside of that exemplary opening gambit of a collage, are when it navigates the prickly aspects of Eva’s rotating world. The way a co-worker berates her under his breath at a Christmas party when she refuses to dance with him; her fierce determination to be normal as she waves across the street to a neighbour; the itchy skin she experiences when a wheelchair-bound student crosses her path and he proves to be the most sympathetic of all. Swinton is mesmerising to watch and her aghast facial expressions are some of her finest work. We Need to Talk About Kevin really does work best with Kevin is on the outer, a force that encroaches upon the lives of this world, but never really comes to be. It’s like when Hannibal Lector was so maniacally terrifying when seen briefly in Silence of the Lambs, and yet became a carnival freak show when given the increased camera time in Hannibal. Kevin is a forceful, powerful character on paper more than he is in flesh and blood. In flesh and blood he’s annoying and drags the film down no matter his age (played by Jasper Newell at age 8, and Rocky Duer as an infant).

We Need to Talk About Kevin is, like its UK quad posters suggest, some sort of radicalised horror movie. A demon child story in arthouse clothing with a villain as wise-cracking as Freddy Krueger and unrelentingly clunky as Michael Myers with Tilda’s Eva his tortured "final girl". Lynne Ramsay here is always doing interesting things with the medium and that certainly makes for involving filmgoing even when the characters and their actions are frustrating beyond belief. As it plays out in frenetic bursts, I admired its audacity, but just wished that somebody had indeed talked to Kevin rather than merely about him. B-

Review: I Am Love

I Am Love
Dir. Luca Guadagnino
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 120mins

Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, The Deep End) has inspired directors for nearly 20 years now. From her work with Derek Jarman (Edward II) and Sally Potter (gender-bending Orlando) in the early 1990s to last year’s career-best work in Erick Zonka’s Julia, she has proved to be an enigmatic muse for directors of the arthouse and mainstream. Perhaps the most fawning of these directors is Luca Guadagnino who has crafted an opulent and visually resplendent melodrama around Swinton’s beguiling face in the form of I Am Love, an Italian-language film about the sexual awakening of a married middle-aged family matriarch.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag

I seriously could have gone on and on about this beautiful movie. Please see it. It's out this Thursday here in Australia, currently in limited release in America and various stages of release around the world (DVD, cinema, etc).

Review: Julia

Julia
Dir. Erick Zonca
Year: 2008/9
Aus Rating: N/A
Running Time: 144mins

A quick search on IMDb for the title "Julia" brings up roughly ten or so other projects with the exact same name, not to mention some called Julia Julia and Being Julia. That one of the Julias stars the likes of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards is like giving any movie there after with that title a push backwards. However, for as many films have been called Julia throughout the history of cinema, it's hard to imagine any of them are quite like the one that Erick Zonca presents. And while many pundits are calling for Meryl Streep to win her third Academy Award for playing a very different "Julia" - Julia Child in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia - having now seen Swinton storm her way through Zonca's film, I can't help but wonder why everyone isn't screaming to high heaven for Swinton to win her second. Julia Vs Julia would be an interesting notion, sure, but one in which there is an easy and predictable winner: Tilda Swinton.

It's hard to properly explain just how fantastic Tilda Swinton truly is in Zonca's two and a half hour sprawling thriller. It, however, ranks as a performance of such ballsy bravura that it can easily rank alongside Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE and Charlize Theron in Monster as such a towering, all-encompassing beast of a performance. Playing the permanently-sozzled lush title character as if her life depended on it, Swinton charges out of the gates at full speed. Dancing up a storm to the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and Sam Cooke's "Shopping Around" in the opening scene, gyrating on multiple partners and pouring alcohol into her gullet like petrol into a car.


I'm not going to even discuss where the film goes because, quite frankly, half the fun is getting there and not having a single clue as to what it going in (much like Julia herself has no idea what she's doing most of the time, too). Julia is not an "easy" watch, that's for sure, but it's hardly the gritty, miserable experience some may present it as. Sure, Julia is a despicable character for the majority of the films running time, doing everything including drugging children, stealing from gangsters, extorting money from drying tycoons and leaving a kid out in the desert by himself, but even when the viewer's eyes are bulging at the sheer audacity of what Julia has the guts to show, one has to admire it. Where does one, and I'm asking Erick Zonca personally here, get the nerve to write and direct a scene in which a grown woman wearing a mask waves a loaded gun in front of a child's face before tying him up to a pipe and putting masking tape over his face?

Julia isn't just a good film, however, due to Swinton's performance and the sheer audacity of Zonca's convictions. It's a technically efficient film with superb cinematography by Yorick Le Saux, interesting sound design and some sly second fiddle performances from the likes of Saul Rubinek, Kate del Castillo and Bruno Bichir. However, in the end, it really does all come down to Swinton and Zonca who have teamed up to present us with one of the most brazen films of the last few years. It is hardly surprising that the film only a got a four-night engagement at one cinema here in Melbourne. A barely attended four-night engagement, to be exact.


By the time Julia's almost comically perverse trip through Los Angeles suburbia and Mexican border towns comes to an end I felt exhausted and exhilarated and all but jumping with glee. To watch Tilda Swinton act hurricanes in Julia is to watch a master at work giving the performance of a lifetime. And if people do not go and see it because they would rather see New Moon so as to notch up some blog visitor numbers and some sarcastic tweets then so be it, but anybody willing to experience the pedal-to-the-medal bombastic tour de force of Julia will surely be enthralled from start to finish and even if one thinks the dismount that Zonca performs on the character of Julia is a discredit to the her - although I think it sits perfectly in with how the character is presented in early scenes with del Castillo - you surely cannot deny that it's a wild ride getting there and one that is completely and utterly unpredictable in every way. A-