Movie Commentary: We Need to Talk About Kevin

I admit I don't know what all it takes to make a really really great movie.  So many pieces need to be turned out and fitted together perfectly.  And in addition, a great movie must not include too much nor leave out anything necessary to the story. 

I will say what irks me anyway, and that is a director and actors giving interviews and audio commentary as extras on DVDs that explicate a movie so as to render more meaning than the movie itself bears out.  The meaning should be in the movie.
   

Tilda Swinton remarks in an interview in the special features of the DVD We Need to Talk About Kevin that less is always more.  I get that statement, generally.  However, it seems that movies are awfully wanting these days.

It seems We Need to Talk About Kevin leaves out too much of the right kind of stuff.  By right stuff I mean that which would deliver a consistent movie message.  For example, all the talk in the interviews about the mother’s ambivalence and detachment from her son causing the kid’s criminality just doesn't wash for me.

If there are any truly clear messages in this film, they are that the father is oblivious to the son living under his roof and the mother is ashamed and implicated by her own guilt and therefore unable to throw a bright light onto how dangerous her son has become.

I think the director might have played up the latter and played down the sinister.  The child and teen actors in this movie played like progeny of Gomez and Morticia Addams and were no match for Tilda Swinton.

As a side note, I mention I have followed Tilda Swinton’s career with interest.  Recently she was featured in a minimalist film bicycling around the perimeter of Berlin where once stood the wall separating Germany from itself.  That was a spare film if ever there was one, and it seemed to work.

Swinton herself projects a kind of otherworldly edginess that comes, I suppose, partly from her androgynous appearance.  In We Need to Talk About Kevin she rightly looks spooked, disheveled, and utterly world weary.  As the mother of a sociopathic teenaged killer, she trudges on like a soldier.

But in the end I find this movie disturbing because it uses the tragic events of school shootings in a stylized and confused way that neither is realism nor full-throttle thriller.