We Need to Talk About Kevin

 Hallucinogenic scenes bathed in red, juxtaposed with an actual red-paint-splashed house, introduce us to a woman on the edge, a woman using pills and sleep in an attempt to sand off her interior pain the way she sands off the paint thrown against the stucco walls of her home.

                                                                                                                

We’ve just met Eva and we’ve no context, no clue on what’s happening.      

 Next we see her dressed professionally, getting into an old station wagon, also splashed with red paint, having what appears to be a job interview.  From the interviewer’s cryptic comment we assume there’s something important in Eva’s background, something she’s done, but she’ll be hired anyway, “as long as you can type and file.”  

 As Eva returns to her car, two women approach, one a 40-ish woman, her arm linked into a frail, elderly one’s -- her mother’s we assume.  As they move closer to Eva the younger woman says, “You’re smiling, are you?”  Then - now close - she raises her arm and slaps Eva viciously across the face, shouting, “I hope you rot in hell!”  

Eva remains there, unmoving, expressionless, without reaction, seemingly unaffected as though she’s operating in some parallel universe.  (Or, does she believe she’s deserved what just happened and accepts it stoically?)  The two women continue down the sidewalk, one’s arm through the other’s, supporting, protecting.

  

Thus begins We Need to Talk About Kevin:  harrowing and stunning, both in story and in perceptive, brutal honesty. 

 It reverses narrative so that a traumatizing, climactic event doesn’t overwhelm or permit oversimplification.                                 

                                            

My son characterized this film, from what he’d read, as impressionistic and non-linear with aspects of fantasy and horror.  He was right, and it’s exactly those perfectly applied elements that make it riveting, powerful and gut-wrenching. Sadly, they’ll also limit its audience.  So will its unusual camera angles and juxtaposition of past and present.

The film informs rather than entertains.  It took me to a place I’ve wondered about for years, a place that remains one of our last taboos, almost never mentioned or explored, at least not in readily accessible lay literature:  “How do parents of killers, especially youthful ones, cope in the aftermath?”

It’s eerily coincidental that I rented and watched this just before the horrific Colorado movie theatre massacre on Friday, July 20, 2012.  On The View a few days later (July 23rd), lawyer/journalist Chris Cuomo stated the 24-year-old shooter’s mother, who works in the mental health field, knew her son had psychiatric problems but was powerless to intervene or force treatment.  He was/is an adult, no longer subject to a mother’s control.  How sadly true of our mental health system and laws which protect civil liberties without providing adequate mechanism for preemptive intervention.  Mental health professionals can force it, but too often, too late.  

Strangely enough, I don’t recall hearing, “We need to talk about Kevin.” in the film.  Perhaps its absence symbolized the widening gulf of distance and denial that grew between Kevin’s father, Franklin (John C. Reilly), and his mother, Eva (Tilda Swinton).   Teenage Kevin was played believably, brilliantly, with quiet malevolence by Ezra Miller. Toddler Kevin was played by Rock Duer, and Kevin from ages 6-8 was played by Jasper Newell, whose performance disturbed me most.     

Nothing in the film is over the top; its effectiveness is in witnessing Kevin’s behaviour within a quiet, realistic depiction of everyday life, year after year.  Our sense of foreboding increases with Eva’s, though she never imagines the horror to come.

I’ll be honest here.  I’ve waited days before writing this.  I was emotionally overwhelmed and needed time to decompress and reflect.

There’s much I admire about this film: its courage in tackling the subject; its style, which will conversely keep many away; its sophistication in believing audiences will hang in and ultimately understand; its spare but effective use of music and impressionistic images; and finally, that it’s not overtly set in any country; it can be anywhere, anytime.  It’s a BBC production, yet it wasn’t until a near-final scene that I noticed an American flag decal near the rear window of a police car, signifying it was set somewhere in the U.S.  Until that moment, I believed it was set in England, given its tone and style.  It doesn’t involve guns.

It takes us on a mother’s bewildered, terrified parental journey through the progression and aftermath of a horrific event.  We journey with her, witness her tormented, lonely psyche as she sees, loves and cares for a son whose behaviour has been difficult from birth, and which only grows worse with the years.  He cries incessantly as an infant, so much so that we see her standing beside a jackhammering worker, just to drown out the crying for a short time.  Kevin is adept at tailoring his behaviour, so a doctor dismisses Eva’s concern. Kevin defiantly refuses to toilet train by age four, is willfully, purposefully and selectively destructive, secretly cruel, killing a family pet and blinding his sister in one eye, though all deviously without obvious proof.  He bears his mother a virulent animosity and plays mother against father with the finesse of a champion chess player.  Typical of Brit-quality cinema, none of this is graphic.  

As the years pass, Eva, a pre-marriage adventurer and author, becomes more and more isolated in her singular understanding of what she sees and knows of her first-born.  She loves him despite, and struggles with guilt and anger that only a mother understands.  Her loving, close marriage fades away as husband denies, then proposes simplistic reasons and solutions, ultimately questions her maternal instincts, then her sanity, and finally bails. 

At pivotal points, two background music selections made powerful, thematic impacts.  The first is Buddy Holly’s charming 1957 release, Everyday.  For anyone unfamiliar, here’s a YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMezwtB1oCU

The second is In My Room, released in 1964 by The Beach Boys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQT-GjKlLw

Brave, important points:

• In showing that Kevin was difficult from birth, it suggests genes and biology play a role in disturbed behaviour, that nurturing isn’t the singular or paramount determinant --still a controversial, debated issue within the mental health field.

• Because of the above and society’s need to scapegoat, blame, and understandably find reason for the incomprehensible, many blame parents.  This film illustrates it powerfully.

• Some children are difficult, even mean and cruel.  Children come with personalities, certain traits we parents can try to shape or modify, but we don’t always succeed.  We don’t want to admit it, choosing instead to believe the more comforting, appealing myth that all children are angelic and that something dreadful must have happened to cause antisocial behaviour.  Often it has, but not always.

The latter feeds into parental soul-searching if and when negative, possibly even cruel and destructive behaviour is noted in a child.  Am I over-reacting?  How can I think this about my own child?  and the kicker is a mate who says, “Oh for God’s sake, he/she’s just being a kid!”  or “I think YOU have the problem, he/she’s just bored,” or as Kevin’s father said, “It’s living in the city, we’ll move to the country.”

Additional pain comes when a parent or parents muster up enough courage to admit there’s a problem, reach out and seek help from an idealized mental health system, only to find it underfunded, understaffed, overwhelmed, sometimes lacking in competence, and sometimes unsympathetic, casting total blame on parenting style.

Adrift in much of the above, movie-mother Eva soldiered on to a horrific movie denouement that changes lives forever.  Surprisingly, and again bravely depicted, least affected is Kevin. 

"There but for the grace of God go I” should run through any parent’s mind as the credits roll.  

This film has much to show and teach us.

March 10, 2014 Postscript
The New Yorker has published an 8-page article on Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed his mother, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and eventually himself on December 14, 2012.  The piece is based on extensive interviews with Lanza's father and gives the reader a glimpse into how he copes with the impossible.  Here is the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_solomon

Wuthering Heights

Romantic love so powerful, so soul-consuming, it dominates and overwhelms two lives and endures in one, undimmed, beyond the other’s death.

Most are familiar with Emily Bronte's  Gothic novel.

A remote, sombre manor house named Wuthering Heights towers over bleak, windswept English moors.

A street orphan, dark in appearance and temperament, is brought there by the home’s well-meaning master.  Heathcliff grows up with resentful adoptive brother Hindley and Hindley's high-spirited, willful younger sister, Cathy.  Heathcliff and Cathy fall in tempestuous, ill-fated love which consumes, and ultimately destroys, both of them.

The classic endures, as does our fascination with it. 

I read the original in my teens, viewed different film adaptations over the years, re-read it a couple of years ago, and recently watched a 1967 BBC version on DVD.  

The latter is adequate and faithful to the novel, but lacks passion and intensity.   A young Ian McShane is Heathcliff, but without the towering voice and gravitas he exhibits today.  Angela Scoular was miscast as Cathy, but Anne Stallybrass is outstanding as Nelly, the maid.

The Brits produce quality theater, always attentive to detail; one I noticed was still a custom where I grew up. A small dark arrangement called a funeral crepe (sometimes just something black) would be placed on the outside of a home, usually the door, to indicate a death had occurred within. The custom has long-since disappeared, of course, and I’m really not a hundred years old.  In the film, a large black funereal bow appeared on the entrance to Wuthering Heights after the master, Mr. Earnshaw, passed away.

Two aspects of Wuthering Heights intrigue me:  the mystique of romantic love and the mystique of death.  Both captured my young soul; both still do.   

Death was glorified where I grew up, steeped in ignorance, secrecy, superstition, ritual, reverence and fear. 

Love was rarely expressed or acknowledged.  The word "love" was usually only heard in Bible quotations.  Emotion and love were repressed in the belief  they were embarrassing, almost shameful, and that they inflated and damaged ego and discipline.   Their role in reproduction was never mentioned – strictly taboo!  The stork brought babies, and there was visible discomfort with the religious virgin-birth concept.  Protestant churches fiercely avoided the word "virgin" altogether.

 Wuthering Heights took me away from the rigid, suffocating, dull social and intellectual boundaries of my youth; it confronted and challenged prevailing social taboos, and it spoke openly of great passion and love which death itself would not diminish.

Despite its darkness, the themes of Wuthering Heights are as provocative and thrilling today as they were when it was written over a hundred sixty years ago.  Devoted fans now post Twitter comments at #WutheringHeights and #EmilyBronte. There are Facebook pages for both.

Here are some beautiful excerpts from the film (hardly changed from the book) and from the  book itself:

Cathy to Nelly in the film:
 

Whatever our souls are made of, Heathcliff's and mine are the same.  Nellie, I am Heathcliff; he's always in my mind, not as a pleasure, but as my own being.  He IS me!

 Heathcliff in the film just after he learns Cathy has died:               

 I pray one prayer, Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living.  Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, but do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you.  I cannot live without my life.

     
        
Heathcliff in the book when Nellie tells him Cathy has died:

And - did she ever mention me? he asked, hesitating, as if he dreaded the answer to his question would introduce details that he could not bear to hear.  

Her senses never returned; she recognized nobody from the time you left her, I said. "She lies with a sweet smile on her face; and her latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days.  Her life closed in a gentle dream - may she wake as kindly in the other world!"    

 May she wake in torment! he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion.  Why, she's a liar to the end!  Where is she?  Not there - not in heaven - not perished - where?  Oh, you said you care nothing for my sufferings!  And I pray one prayer - I repeat it till my tongue stiffens -- Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living!  You said I killed you - haunt me then!  The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe.  I know that ghosts have wandered on earth.  Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad!  Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!  Oh, God!  It is  unutterable!  I cannot live without my life!  I cannot live without my soul!

Eighteen years later, Cathy’s husband dies and his grave is dug beside Cathy’s. Heathcliff secretly arranges for the sexton to dig on the other side of her coffin.

Heathcliff tells Nelly in the book:

I’ll tell you what I did yesterday!  I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin-lid, and I opened it.  I thought, once, I would have stayed there when I saw her face again  -- it is hers yet!—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up; not Linton’s side, damn him!  I wish he’d been soldered in lead.  And I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I’m laid there, and slide mine out too; I’ll have it made so; and then, by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!

You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!  I exclaimed, "were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?

I disturbed nobody, Nelly, he replied; and I gave some ease to myself.  I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you'll have a better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there.  Disturbed her?  No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly -- remorselessly - till yesternight; and yesternight I was tranquil.  I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.

And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you have dreamt of then? I said.

Of dissolving with her, and being more happy still! he answered.

And tells Nellie in the film as he gazes at Cathy’s portrait eighteen years after her death:

You know I sleep in her room; when I walk on the moors I expect to meet her, and when I come back to Wuthering Heights I hurry in case she's there.  I only have to close my eyes and she is outside the window and in the room.  I open and close my eyes a hundred times a night, but she's too quick, she kills me, not by inches but by fractions; those breadths.  Last night when I saw her, I thought I might lay her ghost, but no ... no!  I know she is above the earth.

While the love story of Heathcliff and Cathy is central to Wuthering Heights, other tales are intertwined though I’ve not mentioned them. As much as they expand, inform and enrich, they’re peripheral.

I cling to the belief that a love like Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s can exist.  Perhaps I’m just a crazy, unrealistic romantic, but I still love and admire their love and devotion.

Generations have embraced this tale; something about it captivates and enthralls, but is such consuming love possible?  Normal?  Desirable?  Obsessive?   

Must romantic love be reciprocated to truly exist and endure, and if not, will it ultimately burn out? 

Where and when does romantic love cross into obsession? 

Can pre-death love endure at the same intensity after one lover is gone?

What impact does time and separation have on lost love?  Does it reflect the quality of the love, the lovers, or both?

On the latter question, a good friend recently shared a secret.  She’d unexpectedly become reacquainted with someone from her past, someone she’d been in love with thirty years ago.  They were young then, unsure of their mutual commitment, and ultimately went their separate ways.  Now, all these years later, it’s as though time stood still.  Cold embers reignited, and they’re once again powerfully drawn to one another.  A platonic relationship is complicated and unworkable, yet my friend says when they’re together, “I feel I belong there.” 

I saw my friend again a few days ago.  In response to my veiled reference, she gently shrugged her shoulders, acknowledging futility, yet her face lit up with warmth and happiness.  In return I could only say what I believe:  their special connection matters and maybe it’ll be enough.    

While obtaining my friend’s permission to disclose, she says she doesn’t believe the embers were ever really cold, at least not for her. 

 Don’t know the answers to most of the questions – they’re probably different for everyone.

What do I believe?

I believe that hearts and souls can connect, entwine and endure in ways as powerful as Heathcliff and Cathy’s. 

I also believe we can be powerfully attracted to more than one person at the same time.  It happens rarely, especially for women, and if it develops into love, I don’t think we love each the same way and to the same degree.  [Cathy didn't love Edgar Linton, the man she married, the way she loved Heathcliff.]  It's not a concept generally or warmly received or accepted and I don’t pretend to understand it, especially if it happens when one or both are already in love and committed, but do any of us fully understand attraction and emotion?  We can control emotions, or at least try to once we’re aware of them, but we don’t control their sudden, spontaneous emergence.  We’re often blindsided.

And for some, there'll be more than one great love in a lifetime.

My friend’s experience tells me romantic love can and does survive and endure.  As does “Wuthering Heights.”   Another movie version was released last year.  There are now more than twenty around the world, in addition to radio and stage productions. 

Read the book first, then watch a film version. 

The book ends this way:    

I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor; the middle one grey and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

Great expectations; great disappointment.

Released in 2009, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond wasn't screened where I live, and there was a long wait for the DVD.

Now I wonder:  Did I sabotage fair assessment with my long and eager anticipation?  Were my expectations realistic?  Is it possible to put Tennessee Williams' work on the screen authentically today, given contemporary audience and financing challenges?

Teardrop Director Jodie Markell says she developed "an affinity" for Tennessee Williams as a teenager and read everything of his ever published.  Later, a New York acting school teacher, aware of her interest, introduced her to an unproduced collection of Williams' screenplays, among them The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.  She identified with unconventional Fisher Willow, acquired rights, and shot the film in Louisiana in twenty-eight days.  Written in 1957, the story is set in 1923 Memphis.

Ms. Markell and I appear to value different aspects of Williams' work; she (from her own words) relates to his empathy for society's misfits; I to Williams' cogent exposure of society's hypocrisy, injustice, willful ignorance and cruelty.  While the latter themes are in the film, they're peripheral, muted and vastly subordinate to Fisher Willow and her personal emotional journey.

Director Markell also says she wanted to faithfully embody and convey Williams' words and story, yet the film lacks his historic essence, his fearless intent and remarkable ability to make us see and powerfully feel everyday kindness and ugliness.  

Paraphrasing a favourite line from Madam X,  
This film is not the substance of Tennessee Williams, only the shape and shadow.

The plot is available at Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss_of_a_Teardrop_Diamond