‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’: The muddy waters of motherhood

In Ramsey’s confounding yet stylistically beautiful adaptation, it is Swinton who provides the adequate humanity that seems to be lacking in the director’s vision.

With an editing structure that freely moves between the present and the past, we observe the point of view of the 40-something Eva, a woman whose psychotic son has pulled off a Columbine-type massacre in the suburbs of what we assume to be New York or Connecticut.

The opening shot is only the beginning of Ramsey’s fixation with the color red throughout the story. In present time, we are shown Eva’s house, which has been smeared with the red paint of angry locals, and then with a sharp cut, we are thrown into the depths of her memory, in which she enjoys a tomato festival in Spain. She seems so happy in her travels, alone, by herself in the anonymity provided amid a crowd of festivalgoers. Where did it all begin then, this problematic question of her tarnished son Kevin’s abnormality? Is it Eva’s fault, or was Kevin just a bad seed from the beginning, someone who just happened to succumb to the perils of modern society?

We see that Eva endures postpartum depression; she cannot bear the sound of her son’s cries, she cannot wholeheartedly embrace the toddler in her arms. Her husband Franklin (the soft-spoken John C. Reilly) avoids this problematic mother-son relationship from the beginning and merrily continues on with his life as if nothing is wrong. When Kevin is 5 years old, we see the status quo remains. The child, long past the diaper age, refuses to potty train and turns his mother’s life into hell by way of vicious games. He deliberately soils himself and later on transforms Eva’s study into a wreck. Eva is still unsure of how she should handle this boy, but nevertheless, she keeps trying. In fact, she tries so hard that, even after a horrible event during the boy’s teenage years, she becomes a sort of martyr who has given up on herself to try to understand her son (played by “Afterschool” star Ezra Miller).

There are many questions in this film, and the foremost is whether mothering is really a biological and natural instinct that every woman must give in to or if it’s just another role that social norms expect from women. And whatever the answer to this question is, must a woman take the entire blame when a child has transformed into a monster?

Ramsey plants these huge questions throughout the past and present of the life of this nuclear family, and Swinton duly portrays the self-doubt and guilty dilemmas. However, we never truly get a substantial standpoint, neither from the script nor the direction, as Swinton wades through with her own performance to elevate this film to a higher meaning.

While Eva searches through her memory in order to figure out where it all went wrong, we cannot get a genuine clue as to the reasons for Kevin’s abnormality. And in the meantime, the film brandished stylized scenes of highly dysfunctional family life. Perhaps it is never Ramsey’s intention to provide an ultimate reason for catastrophe, perhaps it is all random and pointless violence and Eva’s own disposition is devoid of meaning, but then if this is the case, we cannot get a feeling for this kind of nihilism either.

The teenaged Kevin, acted with frightful believability by Miller, appears as a cunningly smart and manipulative brat who loves to give his mother and sister a hard time. But what is it that drives Kevin to be the way he is? Is it sheer hatred of his mother, or does he just think he can get away with everything? Neither we nor Eva nor Kevin will ever learn the answer to this important question, and thus, what remains with us from this powerful yet fragmentary film is an iconic image of the forlorn face of Swinton, which personifies all that is unsaid about motherhood.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” leaves too many loose ends for it to fully impact you, but it will surely take hold of your psyche as you witness poor Eva eternally struggling for a lost cause.