Movie Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin

Ever since I heard of the plans to film Lionel Shriver's novel about the tumultuous relationship between a mother and her high school massacring son, I've been eager to see the movie. It's an excellent book and the combination of director Lynne Ramsay and actress Tilda Swinton seemed the ideal choice to deliver a unsensationalised, dramatically non-Hollywood conversion. The distributors didn't make it easy though. For such a high profile, well-reviewed adaptation of a bestselling, prize winning novel, the film's UK release has been shoddily handled. Most of the multiplexes dropped it after one week while even the arthouses seem reluctant to give it much time. Curious then that the showing I finally managed to attend on Sunday night at the Hebden Bridge Picture House was sold out. Audiences do apparently want to see this movie... but I guess it's just not glamorous, star-studded or CGI-encrusted enough to devote mainstream cinema space to. In decades gone by, this would have been a major release. Can we say dumbing down?

It's even more galling then that Ramsay's movie proved to be one of the best pieces of moviemaking I've seen in a long, long time. Perhaps not the most enjoyable and certainly not the easiest to watch, but as an example of cinematic storytelling: damned hard to beat. Shriver's novel is a long and detailed account of the relationship between Eva Khatchadourian and her troubled son Kevin, and this could so easily have been a wordy, staged adaptation. Instead, the screenplay by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear is a textbook example of how to show rather than tell, using the medium of film to its full extent and respecting the intelligence of the audience, allowing them to fill in the gaps. It's a haunting, nightmarish translation that eschews meaty exposition in favour of dramatic visuals, shocking symbolism, taut-yet-restrained performances, a smart soundtrack and some of the meanest stares ever committed to screen. Clint Eastwood would lose a staring contest against any of the three young actors playing Kevin, and the permanently fraught Swinton gives as good as she gets.

If you've read the book, you'll know what to expect from the movie... but that won't stop you being devastated. If you haven't: prepare yourself for a genuinely shocking, provocative and challenging film that will remain with you long after the drive home. If you can find a cinema that's actually showing it in the first place...

The Post-Birthday World

I always enjoy it when someone takes a genre premise and writes a serious literary novel around it, so Lionel Shriver's Post-Birthday World has been on my hit list for a while now. I was a fan of Shriver already from her last two books, Double Fault and We Need To Talk About Kevin , so I knew exactly what to expect - and this didn't let me down.

PBW follows children's book illustrator Irina McGovern as she's faced with a life-changing decision - whether to kiss a man other than her long term partner Lawrence. The man in question is snooker player Ramsey Acton, a volatile, sexed-up bad boy: the complete opposite of Lawrence. In the moment of that decision, Irina's story diverges into two alternate realities: one where she goes for it and pursues the affair, another where she plays it safe and lives with her regret. Neither turns out the way you'd imagine, though both lead ultimately to the same conclusion.

If the premise sounds a little chick-lit or Sliding Doors, then chances are that's exactly how it'd have turned out from a lesser author. Thankfully Shriver brings weight and depth to the storytelling and shines an uncomfortably bright light on modern romantic relationships that should make even the most secure of readers question the decisions they've made in such matters. As Shriver herself points out in the afterword, "I'm as fascinated with the contrast between going to the supermarket with one man versus another as I am in the difference our selection of partners makes to our careers". What happens to Irina in these split realities proves there's no such thing as a black and white / right and wrong decision in matters of the heart. Whatever you choose, things will go wrong... and right... and wrong again. And there's no such thing as a perfect partner either.

Like David Nicholls' One Day, Shriver's excellent novel traces a path through contemporary history, from the death of Diana to 9/11, using such events to highlight the opinions and attitudes of the central characters and draw parallels between their concurrent storylines. It also mixes real people with fictional - most notably snooker players like Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry who clash with Ramsey in his quest to win the World Championship. (I'm never sure how novelists square such usage against the "all characters are fictional" disclaimer that appears in the front of the book.)
The only problem I had with Double Fault was that sometimes Shriver took the tennis metaphors to a corny extreme that distracted from the story. Here though the snooker forms an amusing and well-researched back drop, though the author does keep self-consciously apologising to American readers who probably won't know the sport from tiddly-winks.