So many times now we’ve had to endure the tragic news story of a disgruntled teen who shoots up the whole school and then kills himself. Sympathy goes to the victims and their parents, as well it should. Hatred and blame have to go somewhere, especially when the shooter has taken his own life. The first thought on many minds is “what kind of a mother could raise such a monster?”
Such is the paradigm in Lynne Ramsay’s unsettling, unforgettable new film, "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Ramsay wisely comes at the film not wanting to give any answers, but to ask one specific question: Whose fault is it? We’re not really comfortable with the idea that a sociopath could just be born that way. We’d much rather have someone to blame – and that someone is, without fail, the mother.
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It’s unusual to see a film not back down from the uncomfortable dynamic that there is always a need to place blame somewhere, because only then can you have a pathway out of the nightmare to a world that makes better sense. But Ramsay and co-writer Rory Kinnear go there.
Played with hollowed-out magnificence by Tilda Swinton, this mother is tortured by her own guilt throughout the film – first, for not really feeling connected with her child at any point, not knowing how to reach him and never forming a positive bond with him. He is too smart, knows her too well, and mostly knows how to hurt and disturb her every day of his life. They do form a bond eventually, but it is an unhealthy one.
The film covers years, and Swinton must play the mother at various stages of this story. She is the young bride-to-be. She is the young mother. And eventually, she is the shattered, barely surviving mother of a mass murderer, a woman who has lost everything. Her face is a canvas in and of itself – not just because it’s wide and flat, and white like a movie screen, but because she controls her expressions so well. She never gives away too much, but drives the plot with one facial tick.
In the film, as in life, all eyes turn on the mother when something goes wrong – and yet, in the thick of it, if a mother dares to speak ill of her child she is judged as being bad, uncaring, cold. Here, that societal eye is embodied in the husband, played by John C. Reilly. His own denial and general absence forces him to see his wife as a woman who can’t accept her own child.
If Swinton’s character is guilty of anything, it’s not trusting her own instincts about her kid – not finding someone, anyone, who will listen and try to somehow control the boy. And as we all know from reports of school mass murderers, sometimes even intervention can’t prevent something like this happening.
