As I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I was taken by the performance of
Ezra Miller, the guy who played Patrick, one of the main characters in the
film. So taken was I that I wanted to
know what else he’d been in. I did my
research and it brought me to We Need to
Talk About Kevin. This movie is a
horror/thriller kind of movie, with Ezra Miller playing the title role. Tilda Swinton plays Kevin’s mother, Eva Katchadourian. She struggles throughout the movie to deal
with not only how Kevin acts throughout his childhood, but also the aftermath
of something terrible that Kevin has done in his teen years. John C. Reilly is Eva’s husband Franklin, who
is a successful photographer whose assignments take him away from home a lot. This is a different role for Reilly, as I
usually see him in comedies rather than dramas.
The movie is told in a series of
flashbacks from Eva’s point of view. It
starts with her participating in a La
Tomatina, a big tomato fight that is part of an annual festival in the town
of Buñol, Spain. I thought it was an odd way to begin a movie,
but it establishes Eva as a writer for a travel magazine. After the tomato fight fades, the film cuts
to a high school, where several people are being carried out of the local high
school on stretchers. Something terrible
has happened there, but we don’t really know what it is. Once the tragedy has been established, we see
Eva is living alone in a rundown shack.
Her nominally white shack has been covered with red paint, as has her
car. Her neighbors know who she is, and
they show their displeasure with vandalism.
She wakes up with plates and wine bottles and various pills scattered
all over the place. She awakens, gets
herself together and goes to a strip mall to interview for a secretary position
at a travel agency. The travel agency is
close to the prison that houses her son, Kevin.
The first time we see Eva
visiting her son is brief. She’s sitting
at a table waiting for him. Then a guard
escorts Kevin into the room. He sits
down opposite his mother and says nothing.
What we do see is him taking bits and pieces of fingernails out of his
mouth and setting them on the table.
Okay…Kevin is difficult – he always has been. Despite all of her best efforts and
intentions, Eva does not have seem to have the knack for motherhood. As a baby, Kevin cries incessantly. One time we see his crying was so bad, and
Eva was so desperate to not hear her son cry anymore, that she takes Kevin out
in a stroller and stands next to a construction worker who is using a jackhammer. She would rather hear the sound of the
jackhammer without her using any hearing protection rather than to hear Kevin
crying. Finally, Eva gets Kevin to quit
crying and gets him to sleep. She’s
resting on the sofa when Franklin walks in.
As he is a new father, Franklin wants to interact with his new son. But Eva pleads with him to leave Kevin alone
because of the difficulty she had in getting him to sleep. Eva is exhausted and her nerves are frayed,
but Franklin doesn’t have a clue. So he
picks up Kevin and starts talking to him, and pretty much tells Eva that she’s
going about getting Kevin to sleep in the wrong way. The weird thing is, when Franklin picks up
the infant Kevin, he doesn’t cry – not a peep.
This adds to Eva’s frustration.
Besides having her house and car
vandalized, Eva endures other indignities.
In one scene, she’s at the store to buy groceries. After she picked up a carton of eggs and put
it in her basket, she spied a woman whose face look familiar. The woman was one of the concerned parents the
night the tragedy happened. She ducked
out of sight so the other woman wouldn’t see her. But when she went to pay for her groceries,
the cashier opens the egg carton and sees all of the eggs are broken. Eva insists on paying for them any, just so
she can get the hell out of the store.
In another scene we see Eva on her lunch break. As she’s on her way to lunch she crosses
paths with two other women. One of them
asks her how her day is going, and before Eva answers she slaps her, wishing
that she would go to hell. Such is life
as a parent of a kid who committed a heinous crime. Meanwhile, in other flashbacks…
As a toddler, Kevin wouldn’t
speak. Eva took him to the doctor to see
if anything was wrong with him. Why
doesn’t he talk – is his hearing bad?
The doctor confounds Eva when he tells her that he doesn’t see anything
wrong with Kevin. At home Kevin doesn’t
show an interest in anything. She sits
on the floor with him and rolls a ball to him, hoping that he’d roll the ball
back to her. But instead of rolling the
ball back to her, Kevin just looks at Eva.
It’s the kind of look that says “fuck you, I’ll slit your throat when
you’re asleep.” Kevin also resists toilet
training. This goes on not for months,
but for years. So, even after his toddler
years, Kevin is still in diapers. In
another flashback, we see Eva and Kevin at the prison. The camera focuses on his arm, where he’s
running his finger over a scar. As he
does so we finally get to hear him speak.
He asks Eva if she remembers how he got that scar. He opines that the reason he got the scar was
the “first honest thing” she’d ever done to him. So how did he get the scar? Back when he was a kid [not a toddler] in
diapers, there was one day Kevin was being especially difficult. After she changed his diapers [he’s so big he
needs more than one], he deliberately takes a crap immediately just to piss her
off. It worked because in a fit of rage
she picked him up and threw him across the room into a wall, breaking his left
arm. They return home, and when clueless
Franklin asks how he got a cast on his arm, Kevin lied about it. So now he’s got that hanging over Eva’s head
– “if you don’t do what I want I’ll tell Daddy how my arm got broken” – that
sort of subtle blackmail kind of thing.
As time rolls on, Kevin doesn’t
get any nicer. He’s an evil kid. One day Eva was decorating “her” room with a
bunch of maps. That’s what she likes,
especially since she writes for a travel magazine. Kevin doesn’t like the look and says so. Then
Eva made a mistake. She left Kevin alone
in “her” room. When she came back, she
found that he had taken a super soaker squirt gun, filled it with paint, and
used it all over her maps. With all of
these things happening between Eva and Kevin and all of the evil things that
Kevin does, Eva is very concerned about Kevin’s behavior. She tries to talk about it with clueless
Franklin, but he doesn’t want to hear it.
They never really have that “talk about Kevin.” Then there’s a surprise – Kevin shows an interest
in something. One time when he’s
confined to bed with a fever, Eva reads him a book about Robin Hood. He can’t get enough of it. When clueless Franklin interrupted Eva’s
reading of the story, Kevin told him to leave.
It’s the first real time where Eva and Kevin bonded over something. Afterwards, clueless Franklin buys Kevin a
bow and arrow set and teaches him archery.
Kevin practices his archery a lot and becomes an excellent
marksman. Eventually, as he gets older
Kevin graduates from the rubber toy bow and arrow to the real thing. Hmmm…an antisocial kid who is sociopathic
with a weapon – not a good combination…
Frustrated Eva and clueless
Franklin have another child, Celia.
Unlike Kevin, she’s a happy kid who is fun to be around. But Celia’s presence only adds to the
problem. Kevin doesn’t like her and is
jealous of her. Years later, Celia’s pet
guinea pig disappears. Then, while Kevin
was supposed to be watching her, Celia loses an eye. She had an “accident” with some cleaning
fluid which blinded her eye. Eva
suspected Kevin was involved with both incidents, but clueless Franklin
dismisses these incidents as accidents for which Kevin is blameless. As a teenager, Kevin keeps to himself and his
laptop computer. One day Eva decided to investigate
one of the discs from Kevin’s room. But
when she puts the disc in her own laptop, a virus launches which ruins her
computer. Kevin knew she was going to do
what she did, and after he came home from school he taunted Eva by asking if
her computer was completely trashed.
Kevin is a demon seed. He knows
every which way he can hurt his mother.
He puts on an act of being the doting son where his clueless father is
concerned
One night Kevin received a
package. The package contained bicycle
locks. Clueless Franklin asks about the
locks. Kevin tells his dad that he got
them cheap on the internet, and that he’s going to see them at school. But then we find out what the bike locks were
really for. Eva is told by one of her co-workers that
something terribly wrong has happened at Kevin’s school. Like any parent would do, she raced to the
school to find out if her son was ok.
When she arrives, she sees many people covered in blood, some of them
dead, some of them still alive, but all of them with arrows stuck in them. Kevin had taken all the bike locks and locked
a lot of people inside the school gymnasium.
He also had his archery gear with him, which he used to try to kill as
many people as he could. When he runs
out of arrows, he gives himself up to the police after they cut off one of the
locks. But the tragedy isn’t over for
Eva. After Kevin’s arrest, she arrives
home to an empty house. She calls for
her husband and her daughter, but nobody answers. The back door is open, and all one can hear
is the sprinklers. She goes to the
backyard to see that clueless Franklin and innocent Celia were also perforated
by Kevin’s arrows. He did it before he
committed his crimes at school.
The last scene shows Eva visiting
her son. This time, it’s the last time
she’ll see him in juvenile detention because he’s about to turn 18 and go spend
some time in real prison. She asks him
“why did you do it?” For once he didn’t
have a snappy or snarky comeback. He
just looks at her and says something to the effect of “I used to know but I
don’t anymore.” Before he gets taken away to prison, Eva gives Kevin a hug –
the first and last time we see such a thing in this movie.
So was Kevin the sociopath the
product of a “bad mother?” Eva has been
tormented by all of these flashbacks, as if each and every one of them is a
part of a cause that made Kevin act the way he did. She definitely feels all-consuming guilt,
especially when her neighbors treat her as if she had committed the crime
instead of her son. Or was Kevin really
a demon spawn from the beginning, as suggested by his incessant crying and
refusal to be potty trained? I don’t
know – the movie keeps you wondering about that very thing.
As mentioned earlier, this is the
second movie in which I’ve seen Ezra Miller act. Every scene he was in for The Perks of Being a Wallflower he stole,
and he gives a chilling and mesmerizing performance as Kevin. Tilda Swinton is amazing as the worn-down,
scared shitless mom who is coming apart at the seams. John C. Reilly is a perfect fit for a
clueless dad.
