we need to talk about kevin lionel shriver book review

The film begins a fairly linear approach with the birth of Kevin (his conception is announceded by the flashing red digits of a bedside clock announcing the witching hour). Ramsay continues to cross cut between present, where Eva deals with red paint vandalism and personal attacks on the street, and the recent past of flashing police lights hinting at large scale tragedy. (I'm not even going to get into the weirdness of casting Tilda Swinton as an *Armenian* as she's so good and the character's cultural heritage is jettisoned in the adaptation). Reilly ('Cedar Rapids,' 'Terri') as Franklin. The tomato bacchanalia represents Eva's life before Kevin, but you'd be hard pressed to realize what she had before from this and a brief montage of a long-haired Eva running about the city with the seriously miscast John C.

This is just the beginning of Ramsay's red onslaught which becomes almost laughably overdone (no grocery store stocks an entire wall of tomato soup cans). After we see curtains billowing inward to the sound of a lawn sprinkler outside, Ramsay cuts to Eva crowd surfing over revelers gleefully smashing tomatoes, a scene which resembles carnage in an overhead shot. If one is unfamiliar with the book or with Spain's La Tomatina Festival, the film's opening sequence could prove a bit disorienting. Still, a terrific performance from Tilda Swinton and the three beautifully cast actors tagged to play Kevin at various ages (the amazing Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and 'City Island's Ezra Miller) combined with Kubrickian compositions and great sound design mostly overcome the film's faults. Reilly, 'Cedar Rapids,' 'Terri') is presented a completely different face from his son, finding the fault instead with his wife in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin.' Cowriter (with Rory Kinnear)/director Lynne Ramsay ('Morvern Caller') has been drawn to macabre tales involving the young (she was originally attached to 'The Lovely Bones' before it was mauled by Peter Jackson), but in adapting Lionel Shriver's novel, she leans a little too far into the self consciously arty and the horror aspects of the tale at the expense of the psychological. Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton, 'Michael Clayton,' 'I Am Love') loves her life as a globe trotting travel writer based out of New York City, but things change dramatically when she has her first child.

We need to talk about kevin lionel shriver book review