The Dictator
Larry Charles, 2012
Score: C+
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Screened at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival.
It’s not clear that I can usefully review We Need to Talk About Kevin, as it adapts one of my favorite novels, to which I am quite attached and which is fresh in my mind on account of being unforgettable. Walking out of the film, I found that virtually all of my thoughts and impressions were in reference to the book, which would be intolerably irritating to those who have not read it. So let me content myself with a few brief (albeit inevitably book-centric) observations:
– Ramsey makes a Herculean and partially successful effort to capture the novel’s crucial subjectivity; the first hour, in particular, is a tour-de-force of cross-cutting, a harrowing journey through the protagonist’s memory.
– Nonetheless, the movie perhaps unavoidably winds up emphasizing the Bad Seed elements of the story, which are hauntingly ambiguous in the book, but literal in the film — Eva’s son is out to get her, no doubt about it.
– Tilda Swinton is wonderfully relatable and un-hysterical in a tremendously difficult part, and Ezra Miller, who has cornered the market on teenage psychopaths, is terrifying.
– The incongruous details that made the novel so unsettling — Kevin’s preference for t-shirts several sizes too small; archery as a plot device — are mostly accounted for and have the same bone-chilling effect.
– The film is nothing if not engaging and intense; it set my teeth on edge even though I knew what was coming. I imagine it would be a singular thrill for someone who knows nothing going in.
– Ramsey inexplicably omits a key late-novel revelation that recasts and helps make sense of some of the preceding events. I wasn’t sure what to make of the conclusion without it.
-- Eugene Novikov
| Released: | 2011 |
|---|---|
| Genres: | Art, Thriller, Drama |
| Starring: | Ashley Gerasimovich, Ezra Miller, John C. Reilly, Tilda Swinton |
| Directed by: | Lynne Ramsay |
| Screenwriters: | Lynne Ramsey, Rory Kinnear |
| Rated: | R |
I hadn’t read the book but found the film neither thrilling nor revelatory. Quite the contrary.It seemed dull and predictable. And the seemingly random flashes forward and back destroyed any tension the film might have had. The symbolism was crass and leaden and there seemed to be little attempt to get beyond the crude red spatter motif. And references to the forthcoming gore such as placing Ms Swinton placed in front of a rack of tinned tomato soup or featuring a close up of Kevin’s eye wiath an archery target reflected in it just seemed pedestrian and ill-judged. I found Tilda Swinton’s performance as leaden and unimaginative as that of the director. There was no real depth to her character and the references to her earlier career were so sketchy as to be lost to a newcomer to the story. I am interested to hear that they dispensed with a voice-over for that part as I suspect that it might have helped to create one character in the film for whom the audience could feel anything. I suspect this review is a cop out. You clearly think the book is good. But have the guts to say that the film is not. The imagery is superficial, the performances are superficial and any insights into the psychology of events like this were non existent. I have yet to see a bad review of this film and cannot understand why. I enjoyed Ratcatcher on a visual level but seeing this film made me realise that Ramsay’s greatest failing seems to be getting emotive performances that truly engage with the viewer. Her direction allowed Tilda Swinton to deliver a performance that seemed as one dimensional and mute as the boy onlooker in Ratcatcher. Alarming for a character who is supposed to be a writer! What I am told makes the book so powerful is the voice of the writer. Without it, the film becomes a shallow visualization of a chain of rather brutal events juggled chronologically in an attempt to make the film seem cleverer than it is.