When it was over, I said to Ray Soleil that We Need To Talk About Kevin was the most anhedonic movie that I’d ever seen. There was hardly anythink about it to take pleasure in, although, later, when I was thinking about it, I was fairly blown away by Ezra Miller’s performance as Kevin. I said to Ray that I was in no hurry to see Lynne Ramsay’s picture again anytime soon, but I’m not so sure about that, now that I’ve thought about the movie for a day. In fact it woke me up this morning, thinking about Kevin.

Perhaps there are people who can come away from a movie in which a teenager slaughters fellow students — hardly a commonplace in American life, but a few stories go a long and wearisome way — without wondering how the catastrophe could have been avoided, but I’m not one of them, and I think that I’m in the majority. Of those of us who can’t help wondering, some will conclude that the teenager in question was just bad — evil. Others, like me, will go for “troubled,” meaning that someone might have done something to help. I don’t really think that there was any way to save Kevin Khatchadourian, not by the time he got to high school and perfected his archery. But I read the flashback scenes in which his mother was pregnant with him and then responsible for his colicky infancy as evidence or proof or something that Kevin was an unwanted child. There must be lots of unwanted children, and most of them — most of them? — don’t grow up to be murderers, much less angry, functionally sociopathic murderers. But Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her little boy are both very smart, and they’re engaged almost from the start in a contest for control. At one point — Kevin will later tell his mother that this is the only honest thing she ever did — Eva is so provoked by her son’s insolence that, instead of changing his diaper (again!), she throws him against the wall and breaks his arm.

Some people (Ray, for example), will be drawn to the idea that by the time of the arm-breaking incident, Kevin is already lost as a human being, whoever the cause. But he seemed to think — Ray, that is — that you could simply insitutionalize such a child. I think that he’s wrong about that, at least in the United States. There was a time, yes, when “Reform School” was an effective invocation, but it was already a fiction when my parents were frightening me with it. There are very expensive private schools for difficult children, but really bad kids get thrown out of them.

I want to see We Need To Talk About Kevin because I was distracted by thinking that things were going to get worse for Eva — worse than they were at the “beginning,” when her little house by the tracks and her car are splashed with red paint. This is of course the beginning of Eva’s self-inflicted atonement, her refusal to run away to a town where nobody knows her. (You don’t realize until the end how awfully free she is to make this resolution. She thinks that Kevin’s crime is her fault — she has no doubt about it. But in fact things don’t get worse for Eva. She finds a job, keeps it; she scrubs the paint away. She visits Kevin — in a twist, he has not taken his own life, but, in another, he has not stopped at fellow students — every week, and eventually they talk. At the end, Kevin is old enough to be shipped off to a real prison. He’s scared about that. Eva doesn’t think that he’ll be in for very long; being a smart kid, he went on his killing spree days before his sixteenth birthday, and flooded his bloodstream with Prozac. Time’s up on their interview. Kevin gives his motehr a hug, a real, desperate hug. I have to see this movie again.

I will say this: I think that Eva ought to have nixed the archery. No real arrows, at least.

***

What a weekend! It could not have been more bon bourgeois on the outside, quiet and at home. So much for (non-)appearances. In reality, I spent much of yesterday and most of today in a Polish space capsule of how-dumb-am-I humiliation. If there is a moment that I’d like to have preserved on film, it would be the shot of me when I realized that the late Princess Margaret has what in the theatre is called a big speaking part in the finale of Edward St Aubyn’s third “Melrose” novel, Some Hope. Surely she must have died before it was published; she might have sued for libel otherwise, even if every line attributed to her was notarized verbatim. St Aubyn simply skewers her, shifting his polarizing lens between “beastly” and “inane.” The effect is too cumulative for quotation. I haven’t been so shocked since Vile Bodies, which I read as a teenager. St Aubyn one-ups Waugh by replacing the fantastically burlesque with the plausibly ludicrous. 

WHY DID IT TAKE ME SO LONG TO READ THIS BOOK? I’m haunted by the honte of being the last boy on the block. And as if that weren’t bad enough, I saw Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day For Night) for the first time. Why? Because, when I was writing up (or down, more likely) Pico Iyer’s book about Graham Greene, and leafing through Shirley Hazzard’s far more vivid book, I came across her mention of scolding Greene for his stiff performance in the movie. He plays an insurance broker who has to tell the director played by Truffaut himself that scenes involving the star (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has just died in an auto accident cannot be re-shot with another actor; the film will have to be “simplified” to make use of the existing footage. I didn’t think that Greene was bad, really, but, Lordy, hearing his ripe RP accent was a shock. Here’s this “hard case,” sounding like a footman in Buck House. When I mentioned my surprise to Kathleen at dinner, she asked if Damon Runyon spoke like his characters. A point, as Addison DeWitt acknowledged…

Plus the whole weekend’s Timeses and two chapters of The Princess Casamassima plus most of Andrew Pettegree’s chapter about Luther’s impact on the printing business throughout Europe (wildly varied), Season Five of Lewis (sinking me in the conlcusion that nobody but nobody can play Patrick Melrose except Laurence Fox, which you probably regard as a total duh). Plus the regular Saturday tidying (to Lohengrin) and two tasty dinners, not to mention laying the bacon out in the pan last night so that all I had to do this morning, in order to make sure that we were done with breakfast in time for Kathleen to go to Mass, was to turn on the oven. Plus a letter or two, and spending really rather longer than intended on a superb playlist featuring Jessica Molaskey, Jane Monheit, Kurt Elling, Stacey Kent, and a number of other stylish troubadors. Not to mention finally uploading seven of our ten Manhattan Transfer CDs, along with the latest Pink Martini.

Plus.

***

Eg:

“Are you going back to Ireland?” his father asked.

“No, I’ll be in the cottage through August,” said Seamus. The Pegasus Press have asked me to write a short book about the shamanic work.”

“Oh, really,” said Julia. “how fascinating. Are you a shaman yourself?”

[PATRICK/LAURENCE ->] “I had a look at the book that was in the way of my shoes,” said his father, “and some obvious questions spring to mind. Have you spent twenty years being the disciple of a Siberian witch doctor? Have you gathered rare plants under the full moon during the brief summer? Have you been buried alive and died to the world? Have your eyes watered in the smoke of campfires while you muttered prayers to the spirits who might help you to save a dying man? Have you drunk the urine of caribou who have grazed on amanita muscaria and journeyed into other worlds to solve the mystery of a difficult diagnosis? Or did you study in Brazil with the ayabuascaras of the Amazon basin?”

“Well,” said Seamus, “I trained as a nurse with the Irish National Health.”

“I’m sure that was an adequate substitute for being buried alive,” his father said.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2012 at 6:30 pm.