demoncleaner
Posts: 2166
Joined: 3/10/2005
From: Belfast
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Much more of a lurid folk tale than a real-world deconstruction of an outrage. Which was nice. While it’s not wholly, but fairly dismissive of the grandstand tragedy that lynchpins the film it’s still an approach that might not be entirely responsible, it might put the families of Columbine off their pick and mix for instance. Being a cynical person, I however completely enjoined with Kevin’s alt-agenda of satirising PC parenting of the middle-classes and more importantly, New Age hippy assumptions of the preternatural bond between mother and child. Inexplicably, what we have here is a preternatural, almost primordial antipathy between first born and ‘Mummer’. It’s The Omen from the Book of Darwin and Tilda Swinton is utterly fantastic as the begrudging but willingly stoic new mum. It’s perhaps a bit of a fallacy to say there’s another performance in the film worth remark. John C. Reilly does his John C. Reilly thing. Yes, Ezra Miller as Kevin is striking, but it’s quite evidently schtick (not a criticism of the actor as such, he’s playing a character who in turn is playing a broad schtick of monstrous idiom, which becomes perhaps too self-enjoyed by the end).
The origami narrative (all accounts prescribed by Shriver’s novel) is extremely well done. This kind of fractious structure might be all the rage in yer modern serious-minded fill-um but it needs expert handling and if it wasn’t there a chronological essaying would park this in Made-for-TV melodrama territory. Lynne Ramsay has a satisfying, forceful arrest of the imagery but is perhaps a tad too fond of a visual metaphor. The motif of food, and food stuffs, representing corporeal destruction gets less clever each time it’s repeated. The film will make you want to go to a Q&A with Ramsay, put your hand up and ask “what does red men in context of the film” and when she takes ten minutes to say “blood” you might want to put your hand up again and ask “what’s a metaphor?” (Well, that’s the type of time-wasting stuff I like to be at). I won’t explain it here but there’s also something in the full denouement that I feel misinforms the whole depiction of Swinton’s character from the beginning. Something that I would argue should have been addressed in the film.
Flawed, but highly watchable, much more blackly comic than I was lead to believe, a really high 4 from me.
4/5
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"I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit."
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