[dropcap style="font-size: 60px; color: #9b9b9b;"] W [/dropcap] e Need To Talk About Kevin is called Tilda Swinton’s Tour de Force. But let’s face it, Tilda Swinton’s Tour de Force is her face and her ability to look like the entire world has come down upon her when her toddler son won’t roll a ball back to her across the floor. This movie looks like it’s going to be an updated and more subtle version of The Omen….especially when we see trailers of the youngest version of Kevin staring sideways at his mother with an “other worldly” expression. In actuality, it’s more like Another Happy Day, where dysfunctional families thrash at each other in perhaps less violent, but similarly destructive ways. Strangely enough, Ezra Miller, who plays the eldest version of Kevin, is also in Another Happy Day, so maybe he has that stereotypical juvenile delinquent thing going on just like Tilda has the world’s a-crashing look.
This is an unusual role for John C. Reilly because his pudgy, beat-up face wants to be smiling and there is nothing he has to smile about in this role. He is the beleaguered and non-paranoid father of Kevin who has to suffer through felatio-interuptus, Tilda’s facial expressions, Tilda’s disdain for his McMansion and ultimately, Kevin’s love for archery. I’m not sure he was well cast here and all that believable as the unwitting husband and father, whose profession affords him the money for the McMansion, but not the means to furnish it.
I guess the undercurrent here is the Robin Hood theme from Kevin’s childhood bookshelf. Children take from the rich and give to……not so much the poor, but in this case the undeserving. Kevin decides that he has been so put upon by mom, that he will make her suffer an eternity of indignity, Halloween pranks and correctional facility body searches…..all because she had raucous, tomato-strewn sex one night with his father and was uncaring and undeserving of a child….wow…. that pretty much can be adjusted to fit most modern day parents, so where is the lesson here?
Ultimately, this movie was best described by my wife two thirds of the way in when she leaned into me and said….I really want this to end.