Telluride at Dartmouth: We Need to Talk About Kevin

This post continues to chronicle my attendance at the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 can be found here.

Lynne Ramsay is a director of exceptional visual and aural skill, as anyone who has seen her films Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar can attest. I adored Ratcatcher and found Morvern Caller rather a bore, which seems to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view, as lots of people who saw both loved the second film even more than they did the first. What we can all agree on, though, is that a new Lynne Ramsay movie is a cause for celebration. And when that new movie stars just about my favorite living film actor, Tilda Swinton, it becomes for me a great event.

I have not read the acclaimed novel by Lionel Shriver that We Need to Talk About Kevin is based on, and I was just about to read it when I heard about the film, so I decided to wait. I have seldom wished I had read a book before seeing a movie based on it, and so whenever possible, I don't read the book first. That turned out to be, it seems, an especially good decision here, because I had dinner after the film with friends, some of whom had read the book, and it was clear that that would have changed my viewing somewhat by adding more context to Swinton's character of Eva.

Ramsay is brave and nearly alone among narrative filmmakers in her willingness to subsume almost all exposition within image and sound -- to suggest, hint, and gesture toward exposition rather than state it. (It is no surprise that Tarkovsky and Malick are to her taste, and in Ratcatcher she even used some of the Carl Orff music from Malick's Badlands.) What we get in We Need to Talk About Kevin, then, is not so much a story as a portrait of a psyche. Things happen, certainly, and there's a major climax that the film works its way toward, but the movement of the film is associational, imagistic, musical. Meaning is created not through dramatic scenes, but through colors and sounds, camera angles, montage, repetitions. The story is not presented so much as unearthed -- this is filmmaking as psychic archaeology.