I saw the entirely remarkable Morvern Callar for the first time at the Toronto Film Festival in 2002, and aside from the film itself I’ll never forget the way its director, the gangly, slightly wired, fedora-sporting Lynne Ramsay introduced it: “Well, yah, it’s the sort of movie where you’ll wanna go and talk about it over a few beers with your mates.” Hmmm, I thought as the end credits rolled, that’s one way of looking at it…
It’s genuinely outrageous that it’s taken almost a decade for Ramsay’s latest feature to materialize, and part of me was weirdly hoping it wouldn’t be particularly strong, because then I’d be less exercised about the wait. No such luck. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a pretty staggering cinematic acheivement and the most committed and effective horror movie I’ve seen in years. Here’s my review for MSN Movies.
Good review. This is the “Feel Bad” Movie of The Year in more ways than can be possibly enumerated. Tilda is great as always. Her NBOR win was a surprise. It’s not an “ennobling” part. That’s why an Oscar win is impossible – and even a nomonation is a long shot.
What’s striking about it is while the set-up screams “Columbine!” the weapon of choice is bow and arrow. Thus quite different mode of psychotic violence than we’re used to seeing.
I also saw Morvern Callar at a fest in ’02, and got lucky enough to have Samantha Morton introduce it, with Lynne sitting off to the side.
“Entirely remarkable” is correct. A fully immersive cinematic experience.
I do confess to not being all that surprised that it’s taken so long for her next feature to get off the ground, however, even though I fully share your sense of injustice of it all.
I’m quite excited to see We Need To Talk About Kevin, so I’ll skip reading your review until I do so.
The bow-and-arrow was actually one of my very few problems with the film, which I thought was outstanding. It seemed such an improbable (though not impossible) massacre method that the climactic tragedy seemed slightly outlandish.
My other problem was that the surprise revelation near the very end (no spoilers here) made it hard for me to believe that everyone would treat Swinton’s character so horribly – I’d think this revelation would make everyone see her as a victim too.
But overall, a really stunning film. Maybe someday Ramsay will make a clinker, but not yet.
I keep forgetting about this one. I want to see it so very much, but I worry about the whole “should I read the book?” scenario, which is pretty highly regarded, at least among a group of readers I know whose taste I regard highly. Have you read it, Glenn? (You may say so in your review, but the computer I’m using won’t load that page.)
@ bill, I haven’t read the Shriver book, but given the way Ramsay approached the original material of “Morvern Callar” I’d say that wouldn’t be immediately necessary. Not a dismissal of original material, mind you, it’s just that I think Ramsay, like Cronenberg did with “Spider” for instance, approaches the stuff she’s adapting as a springboard for something not un-complemental but definitely discrete.
The book is quite good, and Ramsey is one of the few directors who could maybe get at its curdled interiority. So much of what makes the story important is the split between the narrator’s mostly-impeccable behavior and her deep antipathy for the child (and her questions about how much that antipathy made Kevin what he is, though I would assume the movie can’t get much into that).
Thank you, Glenn and Fuzzy. I will take this all under advisement. Please wait for my decision.
I generally loathe the writing of Lionel Shriver, which I’ve always thought of as affected chick-lit. (That novel she wrote with the “Sliding Doors” premise was particularly godawful.) I thought “Kevin” had good ideas, but was never able to overcome the faint sensationalism of its premise. I remember putting that book down feeling that the whole thing hadn’t been done in very good taste. (I also hated the prose itself, which I found very arch and mannered. Why would a woman writing letters to her husband – regardless of the “twist” – adopt that super-formal 19th century epistolary tone? But that’s another matter.)
I didn’t think the Ramsay film was able to fully overcome the sensationalism aspect either, but I was much more impressed with her form. The whole thing is pretty fascinating purely from the notion of how subjectivity is handled in the cinema, compared to literature. It’s amazing how Ramsay and Kinnear took a book that was basically one long interior monologue and turned it into a movie with very little dialogue, and yet retained that impression that everything is happening *in her head*.
I definitely hope it doesn’t take another decade for Ramsay to make another feature. I listened to an interview with her, and her next film sounds wildly ambitious. She’s said she’s working on a loose adaptation of “Moby Dick” that will be set in outer space; with shades of “Das Boot”. But not in 3D, she hastened to add!
FWIW, Ms. Ramsay spent much of the almost-decade since Morvern Callar developing The Lovely Bones for the screen only to have it taken away from her as box office expectations got bigger and bigger. I’m glad to hear some positive feedback on this one as initial word out of Cannes was a big ‘meh’. Really looking forward to it.
Yeah, like Sal says, Ramsey’s LOVELY BONES, even if it failed would have been a way more interesting failure than the Peter Jackson poop we were left with. I still remember the Xmas tree lights in MORVERN CALLAR and some of those perfect Aphex Twin music cues. And RATCATCHER and her early shorts are on another level altogether.
I can’t shake the feeling that Ramsey’s ‘Lovely Bones’ would have been a bit of a masterpiece. It’s a tragedy that Jackson muscled her off the project and then made a complete shambles of it.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, Glenn. It’s a masterpiece, and Ramsay is one of the best working today.
@bill – I loved the book (which is pretty fuggin far from “affected chick lit”; god…) and wouldn’t trust any film adaptation to get close to the head space it occupies(though Ramsey is one of the best choices I can think of).
Meanwhile, The Lovely Bones was such lousy source material I’m kind of glad Ramsey never got around to it. But we can all cluck our tongues at Jackson and pretend her version would have been a masterpiece since it exists an alternative reality. Me, I’m partial to David Lynch’s RETURN OF THE JEDI myself.
I liked the film a lot. I don’t understand these glib dismissals, or accusations that the film “exploits” its subject matter. They’re thinking of Elephant. Still mulling it over, which is usually a good thing, I think.
I really want to read your review, but there is something screwy with the MSN site. I tried with Chrome, and ads overlapped the copy, and when I switched to Explorer, the review didn’t come up at all. Not that I’m blaming you or anything.
Josh, I don’t want to go into too much spoiler territory here, but I found what Ramsay was willing to show at the end of the movie to be incredibly exploitative and tasteless, especially since we knew what we were going to see well, well before we actually saw it. And I don’t think there’s anything glib about pointing that out.
Peter, can you elaborate with a spoiler alert? I saw the movie last night and, like Josh, saw nothing exploitative or tasteless. I thought Ramsay was extremely economical, showing only what had to be shown to avoid ambiguity.
OK, um, SPOILER ALERT–and will still try to be as ambiguous as possible.
As soon as Swinton returns home at the end of the movie, and she sees the white curtain, which is I believe the first shot of the film as well and was mentioned by Glenn in his piece–at that point it’s pretty clear what’s on the other side. By the time Swinton reaches the curtain I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that everyone in the audience should know what she’s going to find and the shot where she crosses that threshold is really graceful I thought, and is followed by what has to be four or five shots that are wholly unnecessary and gratuitous (she follows one close-up with a further close-up I believe). There’s an obviousness and heavy-handedness to it that’s really jarring and annoying and, in my opinion, highlights the stupidity of the film’s premise, especially within the context of the extreme ambiguity of the plot’s basic mechanics (another example of this: the extreme close up on Kevin’s eyes as he says “there is no point. that’s the point.”)
I share Glenn’s feelings on Morvern Callar though.
Thanks, Peter. I disagree but appreciate how well (and gingerly) you make your point. I guess compared to “Elephant” – which seemed at times like Van Sant was attempting to eroticize Columbine – “Kevin” felt like a model of restraint.
Peter: Now that the cat’s slightly out of the bag, I have to say I disagree. (Although I guess I could have said that before.) The whole point of those shots is to show the viewer precisely the thing that they are hoping not to see, but sort-of know they are going to see anyway. This is what I meant when I wrote about how the movie attaches itself to Eva’s experience like a barnacle. It doesn’t give us the option of looking away from what she has to see. Whether that is in fact vulgar and exploitative is arguable; I obviously don’t think so. But I think, however you feel about the effect, its intention is…well, is “pure” the right word?
Glenn, that’s fair. I don’t think this necessarily contradicts your argument, but for me Ramsay’s authorial point of view is so distinctive that it’s hard to see this just as Eva’s experience and not also as a filmmaker making a series of aesthetic and moral decisions. Which is true in any film, of course, but the filmmaking is so front and center here, and there is a tone established throughout that is quite independent of Eva’s POV–this is most clear in the Christmas office party, and the somewhat condescending (and certainly cartoonish) characterizations she employs there (I don’t really mean condescending in a strictly negative way; like many people who grew up in an American suburb, I have pretty ambivalent feelings about those kind of places as well).
I’m about 110 pages into the novel, for all you who couldn’t stand not knowing. It is *bone-chilling*, and no one’s even died yet. Shriver’s willingness to say the unsayable is bracing, while making me cringe. Deeply unpleasant, and excellent. So far, anyway.
Just saw it, loved it. A couple of questions:
Why does a film need to ‘overcome’ a sensational aspect? I don’t see the reasoning. For what it’s worth, I thought the sequence in question above re: the door and curtain was not at all exploitative but appropriate and beautiful in a terrible way.
I agree with GK that the movie is firmly rooted in Eva’s subjective experience, as visualized by Ramsay’s directorial approach. I don’t see the conflict here, unless you think Ramsay is one of the one or two dozen filmmakers who have ever lived with such a distinctive style as to overwhelm any other issues of perspective.
Also, am I allowed to love both this film and Elephant? Similar subject matter, vastly different approaches, but both valid I’d say.
The spoiler being danced around here took me quite by surprise in the novel. Which I ended up not liking very much, when all was said and done. Somehow, this makes me want to see the film even more, to see if Ramsey was able, or wanted, to dodge the number of pitfalls Shriver eventually found herself tumbling headlong into. Also to see if Ramsey can write better dialogue. “I should have known! It’s Khatchadourian!” I mean, for Chrissake.