“Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
Adapted from the eponymous 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as stylized and artful as it is inadequate and muddled. The compelling story of the book, about a mother’s experiences with her serial-killer-to-be psychopathic son, undergoes in the film a diffusing of its chronology through the mother’s wounded and burdensome memory. This takes on a tour of Kevin’s upbringing the often addled and sobered viewer, who might feel (as I did) that the spiritless agony of the failed motherhood of Tilda Swinton’s Eva Khatchadourian was in need of more dimensions, and other characters, than We Need to Talk About Kevin can offer.
In its own way the film is so well-made that I wish it were better, because many of its elements have a quality that should merit a better treatment. But the film must stand as it is: We Need to Talk About Kevin is worthwhile as well as disappointing.
It begins with a reclusive and pariah pill-popping mother who lives alone in a run-down bungalow splattered with red paint, the first of many heavy-handed symbols of her satanic spawn and—what the film points to with excessive hand-waving—her own unique form of martyrdom. Eva Khatchadourian is the outcast of her small town, where her son has murdered the children of the mothers who see her every day, now with an apparently vengeful disdain for this woman to whom they’ve ascribed responsibility for the murders.
The film makes too much of this homebound-pariah role of its central character, who for unknown reasons has had to stay wherever her son slaughtered the children of her neighbors—not at all a recipe for neighborliness. She clearly wants to be near her imprisoned son, but couldn’t she make do with a commute? Eva in some way wants to suffer, to feel herself atoning for what she can’t help loving, even if her love is ambiguous and tinged with the many resentments of who her son is. And so comes her inevitable martyrdom.
But this martyrdom the film overplays because it sets her against these unthinking and embittered neighbors, who all have to have someone to blame. They are all antagonists, but their cumulative effect is to overdramatize Eva’s tenuous martyrdom, which is already self-imposed, without providing evidence of a real person in that neighborhood capable of thinking that she might not be responsible, that there are other reasons than upbringing that a child might shoot up his school. But this person doesn’t exist—in We Need to Talk About Kevin it is Eva against the world.
The want of characters with dimension, other than Eva herself, is also apparent in the character of Kevin, who is played at three distinct ages by three different actors. Who Kevin is, and why he does what he ends up doing, is left completely undeveloped; one can infer that he likely has a kind of zero-empathy disorder such as psychopathy, but the idiosyncrasies of this disorder, and the personality traits that would make of Kevin an individual rather than a disturbing demon of a child, are lacking in him as much as in the neighbor characters who vilify Eva. We Need to Talk About Kevin is clear that its focus is that of the swirling memories of its mother, but her character could have benefited from the adding of dimensions to the other characters, to her neighbors, and especially to her son.
This film has style, even though it is of the heavy-handed and somewhat flashy kind, emphasizing deep blood-reds (as in the opening sequence) and the comparative pallor of their suburban wasteland. And its cinematography is great, showing glinting and painterly close-ups such as those of the eyes, faces, and hair; its only drawback is that it tries again and again to evoke by these enigmatic close-ups the secrets of a character—such as Kevin—which needs more than visual tricks to draw out its substance. However proficient, a camera alone cannot create character, nor can it give depth to what is already shallow—it can only enhance. And We Need to Talk About Kevin does too much trying to give depth, and not enough enhancing.
The great interest of this film, much distracted by its overplayed martyrdom and undercut by its lack of character, is that of the relationship between the mother and her son. Kevin might not feel love—not if he has a real empathy-disorder, which would ensure that he loves only himself—but Eva sure does, and she loves him totally, in her own difficult and desperate way. But what does it say for love, especially for the hallowed amor matris, that love can be so parasitic, self-destructive, and life-ending? That love must be ridiculous, instinctive to be sure, destructive, selfish, and stupid—like nailing your foot to the ground but then lamenting that to move it, you’ll have to shed some blood.
Sometimes and with some children, removing the nail is painless; sometimes it can be painful, if not unendurable, as Eva herself has lived to attest. And so loving anyone is in a small way consigning yourself to insanity. At least, loving just one person.
