Lionel Shriver: The dangers of film adaptations | Books | The Guardian Author, author Lionel Shriver: The dangers of film adaptations Awful film adaptations follow authors for the rest of their lives but Lynne Ramsay's version of my book We Need To Talk About Kevin is terrific Director Lynne Ramsay (left) with the actors Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller at the Cannes screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA Friday 21 October 2011 17.30 EDT First published on Friday 21 October 2011 17.30 EDT Share on Messenger Close In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer , whose excellent novel Endless Love had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie. Fair enough, with its proceeds he'd been able to buy a ranch in upper New York State. But I wonder if it was worth it. Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.

So, back in April, I approached my first screening of Lynne Ramsay 's adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin with trepidation. My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off. Whenever I urge people to read Endless Love, their faces scrunch. "Oh, gawd," they say. "Wasn't that some ghastly film?" I insist how very much better the novel is, but they never rush out to buy the book. Threading from the Curzon Soho as the final credits rolled this spring – the whole audience stunned, almost perfectly silent at first, eventually murmuring as if in church – I felt I'd dodged a bullet. The film is terrific.

By some stroke of improbable good fortune, I am actually proud to be associated with this adaptation, whose high quality has little to do with me; I didn't write the screenplay, suggest the inspired casting, or edit an unwieldy four hours of footage into a taut, dreamlike, yet coherent story. Nevertheless, after this week's UK premiere at the London Film Festival, I'm more intensely sympathetic than ever with writers whose beloved books are mangled into unrecognisable cinematic abortions, to which their names will be permanently attached. In fact, for some weeks now I've been tortured by a parallel shadow universe in which the option for Kevin wasn't picked up by an eccentric, bloody-minded Scot, but perhaps by a more mainstream director from a major studio who, rather than being determined to capture the spirit of the novel, was keen on shooting a box-office hit. In that instance, casting would involve finding the biggest names available, regardless of their suitability for the roles. Thus in this doppelgänger Kevin, this evil twin of Lynne's creation, perhaps Eva, my troubled, traumatised protagonist, would be played not by the uncompromising Tilda Swinton, but a perky, pretty face like Cameron Diaz.

Instead of using a relative unknown for the adolescent Kevin – Ezra Miller, whose uneasy presence and sleazy, uncomfortable sexuality electrify the film – a Hollywood director might persuade the adorable Justin Bieber to play the part. Voilà: the whole family, the whole school-massacre story, no longer make sense. They re-title the movie High School Hijinks. In our hypothetical High School Hijinks, the novel's central atrocity would never be enacted off-screen. Oh, no. We'd spend 15 minutes of footage on a gory melee in the school gym, as Kevin picks off his classmates with a crossbow and his victims leave squiggly red trails on the basketball court while they squirm across the floor. Thematic niceties regarding "maternal ambivalence" get lost in the shuffle. This murky parallel universe has grown horribly vivid: I'm invited to my first screening, after which I mumble to the producers and distribution staff, "Yeah, that was, uh, yeah – really something!" and I'm so mortified by meeting the director face to face that I hide in the loo.

That night, I rage to my husband over a dinner for which I've little appetite: "They made up all these unbelievably stupid scenes that aren't in the book! And did you notice, even when she's supposed to be devastated, Cameron Diaz's make-up was always pink and impeccable?" Everyone I meet wants to know what I think of the movie. Privately, I fume. Friends get an earful, and – before they see it – keep assuring me it can't be that bad. But publically, I'm bound by contract: I can't bad-mouth the film. So in every interview I deliver the tight-lipped "No comment", leaving journalists to draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile, I flinch at the assault of giant posters on the tube and glossy adverts in supplements. I feel stalked, violated. Spare copies of the novel on my study shelves acquire a taint; I can't imagine picking up the volume again. The public may prove more malleable – after all, Endless Love did swell at the box office – but the critics aren't pushovers. In contrast to the effusive press that Lynne Ramsay has drawn, the reviews of High School Hijinks are lacerating.

I brave a handful before I can't read any more. A few critics mention that it's a pity, because the book wasn't half bad, but they spend most of their wordage decrying the movie's violence and sensationalism, positing that this sort of glorification of school massacres is surely asking for more of the same in real life. After the feature release, friends commiserate. "It was … pretty crap," they admit. "But look, you have plausible deniability. It's not your movie, and people can still read the book." Oh yeah? Tie-ins languish on Tesco shelves. My publisher is disappointed. I'm disappointed. I keep fighting a sense of shame. The point is, I've been spared. Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans and blighted my reputation for ever. People will often buy the original novel if it is made into a film they fancied, but never the source material for a film they despised. Thank you, thank you, Lynne and Rory. Another life just passed before my eyes, and it wasn't pretty.

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® November 8, 2000 Dear Franklin, I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear viscous drool, than this little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich. In the early days, of course, my tales were exotic imports, from Lisbon, from Katmandu. But no one wants to hear stories from abroad, really, and I could detect from your telltale politeness that you privately preferred anecdotal trinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge, say.

Marvels from the mundane helped to ratify your view that all my foreign travel was a kind of cheating. My souvenirs -- a packet of slightly stale Belgianwaffles, the British expression for "piffle" (codswallop!) -- were artificially imbued with magic by mere dint of distance. Like those baubles the Japanese exchange -- in a box in a bag, in a box in a bag -- the sheen on my offerings from far afield was all packaging. What a more considerable achievement, to root around in the untransubstantiated rubbish of plain old New York state and scrounge a moment of piquancy from a trip to the Nyack Grand Union. Which is just where my story takes place. I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria. I was in the dairy aisle and didn't need much; I wouldn't. I never eat pasta these days, without you to dispatch most of the bowl. I do miss your gusto. It's still difficult for me to venture into public.

You would think, in a country that so famously has "no sense of history," as Europeans claim, that I might cash in on America's famous amnesia. No such luck. No one in this "community" shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eight months -- to the day. So I have to steel myself when provisions run low. Oh, for the clerks at the 7-Eleven on Hopewell Street my novelty has worn off, and I can pick up a quart of milk without glares. But our regular Grand Union remains a gauntlet. I always feel furtive there. To compensate, I force my back straight, my shoulders square. I see now what they mean by "holding your head high," and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a small measure less mortified. Debating medium eggs or large, I glanced toward the yogurts. A few feet away, a fellow shopper's frazzled black hair went white at the roots for a good inch, while its curl held only at the ends: an old permanent grown out.

Her lavender top and matching skirt may have once been stylish, but now the blouse bound under the arms and the peplum served to emphasize heavy hips. The outfit needed pressing, and the padded shoulders bore the faint stripe of fading from a wire hanger. Something from the nether regions of the closet, I concluded, what you reach for when everything else is filthy or on the floor. As the woman's head tilted toward the processed cheese, I caught the crease of a double chin. Don't try to guess; you'd never recognize her from that portrait. She was once so neurotically svelte, sharply cornered, and glossy as if commercially gift wrapped. Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water. Besides, there are women who keep themselves sleek and smartly turned out less to please a spouse than to keep up with a daughter, and, thanks to us, she lacks that incentive these days. It was Mary Woolford. I'm not proud of this, but I couldn't face her. I reeled. My hands went clammy as I fumbled with the carton, checking that the eggs were whole.

I rearranged my features into those of a shopper who had just remembered something in the next aisle over and managed to place the eggs on the child-seat without turning. Scuttling off on this pretense of mission, I left the cart behind, because the wheels squeaked. I caught my breath in soup. I should have been prepared, and often am -- girded, guarded, often to no purpose as it turns out. But I can't clank out the door in full armor to run every silly errand, and besides, how can Mary harm me now? She has tried her damnedest; she's taken me to court. Still, I could not tame my heartbeat, nor return to dairy right away, even once I realized that I'd left that embroidered bag from Egypt, with my wallet, in the cart. Which is the only reason I didn't abandon the Grand Union altogether. I eventually had to skulk back to my bag, and so I meditated on Campbell's asparagus and cheese, thinking aimlessly how Warhol would be appalled by the redesign. By the time I crept back the coast was clear, and I swept up my cart, abruptly the busy professional woman who must make quick work of domestic chores.

A familiar role, you would think. Yet it's been so long since I thought of myself that way that I felt sure the folks ahead of me at checkout must have pegged my impatience not as the imperiousness of the secondearner for whom time is money, but as the moist, urgent panic of a fugitive ... Continues... Excerpted from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Copyright © 2006 by Lionel Shriver. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. We Need to Talk About Kevin, review - Telegraph Film Reviews We Need to Talk About Kevin, review Tilda Swinton is mesmerising in a vital, visceral adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin. 5 Dir Lynne Ramsay; starring: Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly, Ezra Miller 15 cert, 112 min Sometimes a film’s best moments come not in any particular shot, but in the gaps between them.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant and bracingly assured adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about a mother whose teenage son commits an unspeakable crime, is just such a movie. It shows you one thing then shows you another, and asks you to connect the dots to dizzying, ferocious effect. Ramsay’s film – her first since 2002’s Morvern Callar – breezily dispenses with the structure of the original book, which read as a series of letters from Kevin’s mother Eva to her husband Franklin, in which she reflects on their sociopathic son’s misdeeds. Instead, we see Eva (Tilda Swinton), Franklin (John C Reilly) and Kevin (Jasper Newell as a child and Ezra Miller as a teenager) across four distinct time periods. There are snatches of Eva’s pre-motherhood life as a travel writer. There’s Kevin’s upbringing, in which a strange psychological feud is waged between mother and son from birth (at one stage, in an unsuccessful attempt to drown out her baby’s constant screaming, and possibly punish him for it, Eva parks his pram next to a pneumatic drill).

There’s a fragmented account of the day on which Kevin commits his crowning, headline-grabbing atrocity. Finally, there’s Eva’s subsequent existence as one of the most hated mothers in America. Related Articles Tilda Swinton finds bed better than Bafta after-party 15 Feb 2011 Ramsay’s narrative cuts between these four strands freely and often, but she gives it structure with ingenious visual rhymes that force the audience to make links between Kevin’s crime and what came before it. Some of these are roaringly unsubtle – oozing jam sandwiches and splattery arcs of crimson paint make us think of, yep, blood – but the significance of others take a bit more decoding: one scene shows Eva spitting out fragments of eggshell she finds in a hastily-prepared omelette, and we can’t help but think of the way Kevin bit off his fingernails earlier, ejecting the clippings from his mouth and placing them in a neat row on a table. These visual parallels pose some tough questions, to which Ramsay has a lot of fun not giving us any straight answers. Do Kevin’s actions spring from nowhere, or are they somehow prefigured?

Was he born evil, or did his mother make him that way? The chemistry Ramsay builds between Eva and Kevin is rich, ambiguous and scorchingly intense, and she’s helped along no end by a trio of terrific performances from her leads. Tilda Swinton is complex, brittle and totally plausible as Eva. Jasper Newell, the young actor who plays Kevin between six and eight years old, is the best kind of unsettling, with a nightmarish half-grimace smeared across his face like so much cheesy powder from a bag of Wotsits. Ezra Miller, as the teenage Kevin, is both entrancing and repulsive; two poles of a magnet in one person. He has a way with words that isn’t so much withering as herbicidal. Miller’s Kevin has nothing in common with your common-or-garden paedophobic horror villains such as Damien from The Omen, but Ramsay has a hoot playing up to the stereotype in a brief Halloween scene in which Eva is tormented by young trick-or-treaters.

The sequence is set to Buddy Holly’s Everyday, but, while a lot of the soundtrack choices including this one are fairly on the nose, others are completely inscrutable: a few scenes even end with a twangy oriental flourish, like the announcement of a tableau in a kabuki play. This is Ramsay’s most accessible film by some distance, and even its ethereal opening scenes – a voile curtain billowing in front of an open patio door, and a seething crowd at a Spanish tomato festival, slathered in red pulp – turn out to be grounded in grim reality. It’s testament to her skill as a director that even though her adaptation of Shriver’s book is a ruthless one, the film feels entirely faithful to its spirit. More importantly, Kevin is a piece of vital, visceral cinema in its own right; teeming with words and images to mull over, pick apart and talk about. And you will need to talk about it.

We Need to Talk about Kevin: Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney Seven rating: * * The image that dominates Lynne Ramsay’s screen adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need To Talk About Kevin is Tilda Swinton’s face: pale, fearful and alert, a tortured mother-bird dipping and dancing endlessly to the demands of her devouring, angry cuckoo, her monstrous son Kevin. The film itself is a pungent depiction of maternal torment, but its weakness is that the torment never lets up. The structure – which hints from its opening scenes at some terrible adolescent event for which the mother, Eva, is widely blamed – steals away suspense. We’re left in little doubt, early on, that a very bad thing happens, and it quickly becomes clear that Kevin is at the root of it. The question shifts from the “what” to the “why”, revealed in passages of jumpy flashback: on this question, too, the answers are sparse. Eva is mysteriously unhappy with her pregnancy: at yoga class, her sad face sits atop a swollen belly.

When Kevin is born, he cries constantly, for no perceptible reason, stopping only when his father holds him: even then, his sole purpose in life appears to be to cause his mother misery. As a small boy (Jasper Newell), he thwarts her at every turn, refusing to potty-train or play ball, in any sense. Her sing-song voice, faking that of a naturally loving mother, gets higher and more desperate. Kevin smells the play-acting, and despises her for it. By the time he has hardened into an adolescent (Ezra Miller), sloe-eyed and ruby-lipped, his anger is seeking ever more flamboyant forms of expression. Swinton is superb as a mother estranged from her child, whose frustration with Kevin is so immense and terrifying she can’t permit herself to express it – except once, when she pushes him over and he fractures his arm. He colludes in her lie about how it happened, and then slyly taps his scar when she attempts to deny him his will: a tiny, unlovely blackmailer. Whose fault is it: is Kevin the cause or the effect? There is less complexity over that question in the film than the book.

Kevin’s escalating appetite for confrontation demands to be countered with steel, but meets only mush from a father (John C Reilly) who seems oblivious to the problem, and a mother struggling to cope. Yet his own character is devoid of nuance: he is born bad, it seems, and graduates to evil, and the focus of his greatest hatred is his mother: all other casualties are merely pawns in his chess game of loathing with her. The film is often powerful, but this one-dimensional quality makes it curiously unenjoyable. It depicts an airless, cruel world, filled with unremitting pain; a pile-up of dreadful events. It’s less a credible drama of human nature than a grim fable of a bad seed growing to throttle a family. The blasting horror consumes the art. By the end, I felt as if I had seen everything and understood nothing. Start your free 30 day Amazon Prime trial» The Counterlife - The New Yorker The Counterlife Lionel Shriver’s speculative fictions.

By Christine Smallwood In Shriver’s novels, redemption often hinges on an acceptance of one’s ordinariness.CreditIllustration by Montse Bernal It took the American novelist Lionel Shriver a long time to get our attention. Her first six books, published in the course of two decades, were met with a critical shrug and sales that Shriver later described as “in the toilet.” Her seventh, an epistolary novel narrated by the mother of a school shooter, was rejected by thirty publishers before a small house in England (Shriver’s adopted homeland) paid her all of two thousand pounds for the manuscript. The book made her name, and her fortune. Published in 2003, “We Need to Talk About Kevin” became a best-seller, won Britain’s Orange Prize, and was turned into a vermillion-smeared film starring Tilda Swinton. Since then, Shriver has used her novels to explore the vicissitudes of recognition, and the fate of the almost-made-it that she herself almost became. “The Post-Birthday World,” published in 2007, includes a fable along these lines.

It describes a children’s book, illustrated by the novel’s protagonist, about a boy named Spacer, who very much wants to win the sack race at his school’s Sports Day. Spacer practices diligently, but on race day he doesn’t place. It is typical of Shriver, a writer who relishes delivering bad news, that the book’s author “refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it’s not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year. Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn’t good enough.” How we cope with the fact that life’s resources—talent, beauty, wherewithal in the sack—are not evenly distributed is a concern to which Shriver’s novels repeatedly address themselves.

Many of her memorable characters—the mulishly dutiful Shep, in “So Much for That,” whose dreams of absconding to a Third World paradise are delayed when his wife is diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer; the frustrated, self-pitying Edgar, of “The New Republic,” whose desire to stand out leads him to concoct an imaginary terrorist organization—can be seen as grownup versions of Spacer: also-rans, whose redemption, such as it is, hinges on how they bear the fact of their ordinariness. Her most memorable character is Kevin Khatchadourian, who, rather than accept the fate of being like everybody else, blows the whole sack race to bits. Shriver is a tart, unsanctimonious writer. Her characters like to joust and provoke. In “The New Republic,” a privileged man named Henry Durham complains that there’s nothing to spend money on that will make him happy.

When another character suggests philanthropy, Henry scoffs, “People have to die of something.” Henry’s wife chimes in, sharing her dismay that no one can even fantasize about wealth properly: When I taught remedial English in the East End, I had my students compose their own best- and worst-case scenarios for ten years later. The nightmares were fabulous: lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure. The pipedreams were all the same: a string of products and brand names. They read like mail-order catalogs. My students’ visions of the Good Life were so vapid and depressing that you could have got the two assignments confused. If this morbid exchange is indicative of Shriver’s illusionless candor, it also points toward another one of her abiding preoccupations: the counterfactual. For a writer so insistent on an unvarnished apprehension of things as they are, Shriver often seems less concerned with the events that take place in her novels than with how her characters imagine, and mourn, the events that do not. “What possessed us?” the narrator of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” writes to her husband: We were so happy!

Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. In “Kevin,” Shriver takes the dare further than we at first realize: the book concludes with the revelation that the husband to whom Kevin’s mother has been writing is dead—he was killed by their son on the day he murdered his classmates. “The Post-Birthday World” plays a more literal game, alternating between two story lines, one in which the protagonist stays with her partner of almost a decade and one in which she leaves him for a famous snooker player. The novel is not about which choice is right but about how both choices lead to lives haunted by unmet expectations and thwarted possibility.

Shriver’s new novel, “Big Brother” (Harper), is another ghost story, a broad, sometimes grotesque satire about how things might have turned out. The book is narrated by Pandora, a forty-something entrepreneur, who lives in quiet satisfaction with her husband, Fletcher, an unsuccessful maker of custom furniture. The action revolves around a visit that Pandora receives from her older brother Edison, an obnoxious jazz pianist who has recently gained a lot of weight: he now weighs three hundred and eighty-six pounds. Edison is another Spacer, of sorts. For a while, he had seemed destined to place first in life’s sack race, or, at least, he talked that way. But lately the gigs have dried up, and his refrain—“I’ve played with some heavy cats”—has become pathetic. Biographical inference can be a mug’s game, but readers of the English press, where Shriver moonlights as a waspish and galvanizing social commentator, will be aware that the author is herself the real-life sister of a fat older brother.

In 2009, Shriver wrote a column for the magazine Standpoint, later republished in the Guardian, in which she reported his weight (three hundred and thirty pounds), height (once five feet seven, vertebrae compressed to five feet three), and “genius-level IQ.” She accused the fat-pride movement of aiding and abetting, and declined to accept that obesity is “an unassailable state over which we have no control.” At fifty-five, Shriver’s brother was considering a gastric bypass, and his doctor had asked for her assistance in sticking to a post-surgery diet. She was still deciding what to do when she wrote the column. A few days after she sent it to her editor, her brother died of a heart attack. “Big Brother” explores the possibility that he might have been saved. Many of Shriver’s plotlines trace a downward trajectory, in which one step off a straight and narrow path leads to chaos, often of the sexual kind. In her first novel, “The Female of the Species,” a sixty-year-old virgin anthropologist falls in shattering love with a charismatic graduate student; “The Post-Birthday World” pivots on a kiss.

This kind of deterministic plotting puts Shriver in the company of naturalists such as Zola and Dreiser. Like them, her characters are not so much free actors as they are socially conditioned animals, helplessly participating in their own demise. Naturalism came to the fore in the late nineteenth century, when human actions were increasingly chalked up to social and biological forces. In such periods—and we might include our own early-twenty-first-century moment of chronic debt and MRIs—we become interested in who controls us, and what happens when we get out of control. Shriver typically presents collapse as a loss of discipline over the body. When her characters reach for an extra glass of wine after dinner, or eat an extra slice of cake, trouble is usually afoot. In “Big Brother,” the unravelling is not about gaining weight but about losing it. Pandora, who has put on some weight herself, assumes the role of Edison’s sponsor and sergeant, and together they embark on a liquid diet. Whereas many recent novels about obesity abound with lavish inventories of consumption, “Big Brother” starves its two main characters, who limit themselves to protein powders and cups of tea.

In short order, dieting becomes an obsession as dangerous as chocolate-chip pancakes and baby back ribs. Too much control, in Shriver’s vision, is another form of anarchy. Both evade the responsibility of moderation. “Eating nothing is easy,” Pandora says to Edison when she finally forces him to take down a spoonful of canned cream-of-chicken soup. “Eating something but not very much is an ever-loving bitch.” Shriver constructs her novels tightly around governing motifs; here Edison is opposed to Pandora’s husband, Fletcher, a health nut named in honor of Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator of the late nineteenth century, who recommended chewing each bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing. Whereas Edison smashes a wineglass and breaks a chair with his “wide berth of shielding flab,” Fletcher takes his whole-wheat toast dry, and avoids dairy. He and Pandora are serious, careful people, with no use for leisure time; she fell for Fletcher when she saw him shaking water from his hands in the sink to avoid splattering drops on the floor.

They share a home with Fletcher’s two teen-aged children from a previous marriage, which ended when his wife got addicted to crystal meth, a habit she finally kicked with the help of Christianity. In Shriver’s world, characters must go it alone, even if their power over their own lives is tenuous. “Big Brother” suggests that Edison’s quest is hopeless: more than once, Shriver tells us that, of those who manage to lose more than thirty pounds, the long-term average weight loss they maintain is only seven pounds. Whereas the psychological coup de théâtre of “Kevin” had a satisfying sense of inevitability, the twist ending of “Big Brother” is jarring. Shriver seems to suggest that Pandora is at once impotent and morally culpable. That might be a fine way to sum up the feeling of being in a family. For Pandora and Fletcher, Edison’s obesity is a symptom not merely of his thwarted aspiration but of a broader cultural sickness that they are trying to inoculate their kids against: the fate of joining a nation of prima donnas who can’t cope.

Edison’s obsession with making it turns him into a selfish monster, and, worse, a wanna-be “artist.” Pandora, who has recently become wealthy from a custom-doll company, prefers an approach in which the daily, humble rounds of work and routine make living itself a form of craft. This is a politics, equal parts escapist and entrepreneurial, that turns inward for meaning. The medicine that the novel prescribes is a course of anonymous toil. “Only gradually do you come to appreciate that the occupation you aspire to is harder than you thought, that the supply of other young, self-anointed apples of their own eyes is inexhaustible, and that you’re not as uniquely gifted as you’d thought,” she says. Far better to spend ten years “fetching lattes” than fall victim to a big break: “It’s surely a fine emotional art—dousing your hollow hauteur without quenching the fire in your belly altogether—but the kids who master it come out the other side both shit-hot at their professions and bearable as human beings.” A theory of satisfaction slowly emerges from this novel about insatiable appetites. “However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse,” Pandora thinks.

“We are meant to be hungry.” Edison burned hot and young, and when things got tough he despaired, and pigged out. Unlike little Spacer, he never confronted his dashed hopes manfully. For Shriver, disappointments do not occur in spite of meaningful work—they are what make work meaningful, by giving us something to work for. This isn’t to say that Shriver gives out gold stars just for showing up: her novels, far from dispensing with competition, welcome the tough knowledge that comes with both winning and losing. Having spent decades building a body of work in relative obscurity, she knows the virtue of keeping your head down and slogging it out. Still, what writer isn’t ambitious when it comes to Sports Day? Shriver recently told a reporter that after fourteen years in the U.K., she is considering applying for citizenship. She wants to be eligible to win the Man Booker Prize.

♦ More: We Need to Talk About Kevin Reviews & Ratings - IMDb IMDb 195 out of 267 people found the following review useful: A fantastic film by a great director from The Netherlands 27 October 2011 We need to talk about Kevin is easily one of the most harrowing films I've ever seen and left me completely empty. Lynne Ramsey succeeds where so many others dealing with a similar subject matter have failed, as she abstains from sensationalism and bloody detail. Instead she focuses in on character and relationship development and breakdown. Tilda Swinton gives a truly great performance and even though the main thread of the story is clear almost from the start, she and the rest of the terrific cast manage to keep the viewer glued to the screen. One of the most interesting facets of the film was that it showed how much power children can hold and execute over adults if they are given the opportunity. We need to talk about Kevin is quality from start to finish and deserves to become a classic. I'm looking forward to seeing many more films by Lynne Ramsay. Was the above review useful to you?

158 out of 209 people found the following review useful: Guilt trip from London, UK 21 October 2011 Lynne Ramsay's film is a tour de force of economy. There's not a single shot wasted. Not a moment goes by that isn't informing, telling the story, adding to the cumulative exploration of a dysfunctional mother- son relationship and its purgatorial fall-out. It's also a rather gentle film (dare I say it, a feminine film): the narrative is constantly split between past and present, the tone moving between all-pervasive paranoia, drudge and romance. The movement isn't jerky though, with regular pacing of the flashing back and forwards, meticulously edited cuts and a very clever original + co-opted soundtrack that often works in contrary motion to the tone, smoothing it out. This is a film about a mother confronting motherhood across an overlapping three-act structure: before Kevin's birth, with Kevin, after Kevin's crime. Tilda Swinton is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for her assumption of the role, her selection of uncomprehending thousand yard stares far removed from the opaque look favoured by many other actors working to this level.

It helps that the three Kevins who play the title role are all uniformly superb as well - hideous, sly, handsome. It's the visuals that pulled me up and pressed me back down over and over. The opening 5 minutes or so are worth more than many hours of mediocre film making that I'm perfectly happy to sit through as a general rule in a cinema: the Boschian Tomatina fight, with the equivocal vision of a blissed out Eva buried in the blood red Sartrean- viscous filth is a particularly arresting opening statement (think of the bleaching-white flour of Morvern Callar). It's not an easy watch, although there is no sensationalism. It is, however, always poetry. 9/10 Was the above review useful to you? 179 out of 254 people found the following review useful: Bad Mother or Evil Seed? from Birmingham, England 30 October 2011 This is quite simply one of the best films of the year. Even the book's author, Lionel Shriver (a woman) praises the film, calling it 'a brilliant adaptation'. Being a first-time dad, the story fascinated me.

What happens if you don't love your own child... and they know it? Tilda Swinton, not normally a favourite of mine, is exceedingly good as Eva, the mum uninterested in maternity. Gravid when she least wants to be (she's career-minded), out pops Kevin, her little Damien. You know from the moment she refuses skin-to-skin things are not going to bode well. She has no idea how to deal with a baby. Her idea of subduing him is to stand next to a pneumatic drill to drown out his relentless screaming. Kevin grows up knowing he is unloved and demonstrates this through devilish behaviour towards Eva. Gradually Eva, if not embraces motherhood, then at least gets better at it. Perhaps this is due to her giving birth to her second child, a girl, who Kevin of course hates with a passion. Or maybe the idea of being a mum sinks in, along with the realisation that a career is not the most important thing in life. Eva's betterments do nothing to placate Kevin: he gets worse. Eva's attempts to complain are met with ridicule by the father (John C. Reilly), who thinks she is delusional.

Years of unintentional, but sometimes intentional, neglect take their toll on Kevin, and the film's tragic conclusion seems inevitable. The origin for Kevin's behaviour has polarised audiences. Did Eva create a monster by failing to form a bond early on? Should she have sought help from professionals if she felt she wasn't coping? Or was Kevin simply a bad seed; an innately evil child who no one could have cured? Now that I've had the chance to reflect, I think it's unfair to judge son or mother. I'd be surprised if Ramsay wanted audiences to do that. What would be the point? The film is a starkly brilliant exploration of a failed relationship and the consequences that has on a family and an entire community. If Swinton can win an Oscar so easily for her role in 'Michael Clayton', she should be celebrating her second win now. It's one of those performances which needs months of detoxification and psychoanalysis to move on from. Her acting is matched by new-kid-on-the-block Ezra Miller, who plays her lovelorn son. He brings to his role a controlled ferocity we are not used to seeing. His portrayal works, apart from his first-class acting, because he's not the stereotype.

To look at him, you would say he was handsome and ingenuous. But looks are deceptive. It's hard for people to be repulsed by films nowadays, but there are scenes which will shock. So rare is it to see this kind of film. They vanish as quickly as they appear. I implore you to see this if you can. You'll be moved if not entertained. 25 September 2011 *** This review may contain spoilers *** I saw this film at Telluride by the Sea (Portsmouth, NH) prior to its general release. This is not a film I would choose to see normally, based on its subject matter. However, as a festival-goer, this was what was offered for the late evening screening. This film is visually stunning, and masterfully composed. You know early-on that a Columbine-style ending is inevitable, nonetheless hope that some miracle may yet occur to avert this disaster. Swinton is absolutely magnificent (as always) as the mother desperately trying to cope with raising a psychopathic child, but equally impressive are the performances of the actors who portray the developmental stages of Kevin from early childhood to the brink of adulthood.

What elevates this film is the visual and musical narrative that accompanies the initial time-skipping introduction and then the more linear progression of Kevin's growth to its final, terrible conclusion. Interestingly, the emotional crescendo of the film occurs not near the end when Kevin carries out his horrific violence, but rather in the middle of the film at moments when we observe the impossibility of living a "normal" family life with a child who is incapable of feeling or expressing the human emotions that bind us together. Was the above review useful to you? 159 out of 244 people found the following review useful: Phenomenal Filmmaking, Flawless Acting from Glasgow, Scotland 21 October 2011 After watching this film twice in two days I can honestly say it is among the most affecting and gripping movies I have ever seen. The use of sound and the wonderful camera work made my hair stand on end. I enjoyed it even more the second time as I was able to make sense of the opening scenes without straining myself, this however is not a criticism; rather it is a testament to the intellect and emotional power of a film where every member of cast and crew excel themselves.

Sadness, joy, pain, nostalgia, elation and confusion are just a fraction of the feelings this roller-coaster provokes, and the audience's sheer awe was summed up by the 10 seconds of breathless silence as the screen faded into credits before an eruption of applause broke out.......Astounding. Was the above review useful to you? 69 out of 83 people found the following review useful: Cupid's Arrow from Dallas, Texas 4 March 2012 Greetings again from the darkness. The Brady Bunch, this isn't. It's also not the place to look for helpful parenting tips. In fact, the story revolves around Eva, a woman (Tilda Swinton) who apparently didn't want to have a child ... at least not at this time, and certainly not THIS child. If you have seen The Omen, you probably gave thanks that you didn't have a child like Damien. At least we knew Damien was the spawn of Satan. Eva's son Kevin, is instead a good old fashioned psychopath. One who has an inherent need to cause pain and misery for his mother. What a pair Eva and Kevin make.

From day one, Kevin seems to sense his mother's lack of joy in parenthood. And he seems to have a genetic disposition of making her pay. As with many psychopaths, his above average intelligence makes him even more dangerous. He is tricky enough to keep his dad (John C Riley) clueless as to his nature, while causing much doubt in the dad's mind as to the stability of his wife. My favorite part is actually how director Lynne Ramsay structured the storytelling. It goes beyond non-linear and actually bounces throughout three key periods: Kevin as a baby/toddler, Kevin as a 6-8 year old (Jason Newell), and Kevin as a teenager (Ezra Miller). Each age is progressively more frightening and disenchanting, and the film begins with what is an undetermined catastrophe. This event is slowly revealed over the course of the movie, though we witness events leading up to it, as well as the resulting fallout. There are a few scenes where Eva is scrubbing the exterior of her house in an attempt to remove the red paint that was purposefully splattered.

As a viewer, we understand that she has blood on her hands and she seems resigned to the fact that she is now a social outcast, even a pariah. We spend much of the movie in Eva's jumbled thoughts as she tries to piece together what has happened and why. Of course, there is no answer. The title explains what was missing all along. There was no communication and no willingness to confront the problem ... a psychopathic son. To say they all paid the price is an understatement. This film has a very limited audience, though my claim is that Ms. Swinton was quite deserving of an Oscar nomination. She wears defeat like a mask and lives in isolation better than most could. Even the music is offbeat and unusual in its use ... thanks to Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. As filmmaking, this is high art. As storytelling, it's a bit muddled and quite a downer. Was the above review useful to you? 56 out of 77 people found the following review useful: Disturbing, brilliant, and robbed of Oscar nominations.

12 February 2012 *** This review may contain spoilers *** Touted as the "feel-good movie of the year" by those who are most sarcastic, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" could not be further from the truth. Golden-Globe-nominated Tilda Swinton, who should have been nominated for an Oscar for this performance over even Meryl Streep, plays Eva Khatchadourian, a woman who never quite connects with her son, who becomes increasingly unstable and savage as he grows older, resulting in a high-school killing spree. An absolutely disturbing film about the possible outcome of parental disconnect, "Kevin" is an incredibly honest and frightening look at a mother who tries to build a relationship with her son while knowing, deep down, there is really no feelings there at all. Swinton, with her facial expressions and perfect body language, is so incredibly affective and riveting as the desperate mother, both while Kevin is growing up and when we see her life after the massacre. I have difficulty finding the words to express the emotions that her performance stirs as you see how much she suffers while not understanding how a mother could give birth to a child she doesn't love.

Kevin, played by three young actors who look so incredibly alike, it's almost creepy, is so compelling, whether played by a toddler named Rock Duer, a child named Jasper Newell or teenage Ezra Miller, the mere presence of any incarnation of him on screen will make your skin crawl. The film is so very affecting because most cannot imagine a situation such as this, yet the film is not supposed to be presented as a horror film. There is no supernatural evil at work here. I am sure this happens in real life, hopefully with not such a shocking and truly gruesome outcome. You watch in horror as the lack of emotion from the mother is frightening, yet when you see the actions of this child, you cannot help but have empathy for Eva, even though she almost comes across as unwillingly abusive at times. The film is set up in somewhat jarring flashbacks (which really should have received an Oscar nomination for editing) as you see a completely broken Eva dealing with the aftermath of her son's actions as she reflects on the upbringing of a child who grows into a person without feeling. No, "Kevin" is NOT the feel-good movie of the year. In fact, it is a difficult film to watch.

You should not go see this film if wanting to leave the theatre with a smile on your face. However, as a character study, this film is one of the most affecting that I have seen in a long time, and if there is one actress who was robbed of an Oscar nomination, it is indeed Swinton, who is nothing short of brilliant. Was the above review useful to you? 50 out of 67 people found the following review useful: I wanted to like this film more than I actually did...but it's still well worth seeing. from Bradenton, Florida 30 May 2012 While the idea behind "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is exceptional, I was put off by the direction of this film. While I know that a non-linear way of film making is popular these days, it's often overused--and here it is not used effectively. Too many times, the film jumps about in time and this took me out of the experience. This makes the film too unnecessarily confusing--so I am glad that I knew the plot so I could understand what was happening.

Additionally, the film used a very deliberate artsy style--such as the overuse of the color red (the tomato fight, the stack of tomato soup cans, the paint)--resulting in sledgehammer symbolism. For me, the story was very strong on its own and didn't need all these tricks. Tilda Swinton stars as a mother of a child who is seriously disturbed. However, her husband (John C. Reilly) is in complete denial and inexplicably the kid is never taken to see a therapist (or exorcist). As the film progresses, the child grows from an Oppositional-Defiant child to a cold and ruthless sociopath as a teen. You never ever hear about how he is perceived by teachers and neighbors--an odd omission. However, including the child killing animals, having one of the parents in complete denial, sexually offensive behavior and the hasty behavior towards his sister are all excellent touches--which I noticed since I used to work with folks like this (which would explained why I eventually gave up being a therapist and became a teacher). Unfortunately, as the film is out of sequence, you already know that sooner or later this will all lead to Kevin committing some atrocities.

Overall, this is a very compelling but frustrating film. I already talked about the film style which left me flat, but I also thought it very odd how the only one who seemed to notice anything unusual about Kevin was his mom. Even clever sociopaths are noticeable--perhaps not to everyone but to only be apparent to one person? Odd... The film is worth seeing but it just misses the mark for me--it could have been great. Was the above review useful to you? 56 out of 79 people found the following review useful: Gripping tale of guilt, grief and shame 15 December 2011 *** This review may contain spoilers *** 'We need to talk about Kevin' is a tale of guilt, grief and shame of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son Kevin (Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller) has committed an atrocious massacre at his school. Based on the acclaimed novel by Lionel Shriver (2003) and directed by Lyne Ramsey who has been missing from the movie horizon of recent years, a powerful and excellently constructed piece of cinema is upon us. The storey encompasses the mothers' outlook on life before, during and after the event.

The use of a non-linear time frame allows the film to be constructed in such a way that to those unfamiliar with the original text will be led in one direction of thought as to the characters progression only for the film to turn on its heels and lead you in another direction. The casting and acting is of paramount importance in a film where the primary relationship between two characters forms the basis of context for the others. Swinton offers an excellent drawn out, confused, guilt ridden mother whereas Ezra Miller as Kevin gives us an unflinching look into the abyss of a sociopath. The casting of as the father John C. Reilly for me was the only flaw, simply due to his recognisable and somewhat comical appearance, which when compared to the subtlety and non-obtrusive nature of the remaining cast and extras stands out although his performance was strong. Ramsey's use of symbolism and carefully inserted mise en scene gives those with a more discerning eye glimpses of the details of the emotional frailties evident in the novel but which are often so hard to convert when any literary text makes the transformation into the medium of film, we all know the saying 'the book was much better'.

But here the both Lynne Ramsey and Roy Kinnear develop an excellent screen play that will satisfy both those who have read the book and those who have yet to. The sequencing of opening shots in most scenes allows a strong sense of atmosphere to develop even before the characters have entered the scene or dialogue has even commenced. The overall impact of the film rides through peaks and troughs. With some sections brilliantly gripping and others making you wish away the remainder of the film. In general the film does carry a strong and unsettling momentum until the final credits. For those looking for an action soaked gore fest will be left waiting as will those looking for the docudrama styled film similar to Gus Van Sants' Elephant (2003). The film won't be for all or maybe even for that many, but those who enjoy carefully layered cinema creations will be drawn to this title like a moth to a flame and with good reason. Was the above review useful to you? 59 out of 85 people found the following review useful: Your worst nightmare 9 December 2011 *** This review may contain spoilers *** We Need to Talk About Kevin is certainly a movie that will be every parent and would-be parent's worst nightmare.

This movie gained a lot of praise at the Cannes Film Festival and attempts to explore the themes of society, parenting and psychology. Eva Khachaturian (Tilda Swinton) is a middle-aged mother hated by her community and struggling with the aftermath of a tragedy. Her sociopathic teenage son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), has committed a school massacre and she has to deal with the results of the sins of her child and explore how Kevin turned out this way in a dual narrative. After being unable to make her version of The Lovely Bones, Lynne Ramsey turned to adapting this Lionel Shriver novel instead. She delivers a haunting, slow-moving film that looks at the personal and social impact of the tragedy through one person's eyes as well looking at the struggles of raising a troubled child. Ramsey made sure there was a grim, somber tone and kept a minimalist view of the world, yet still adds her own visual flair with intense, slow close ups and red imagery throughout the film to symbolise blood on Eva's hands. There is a deliberately disjointed narrative throughout the movie, cutting from the present to the past as we examine Eva's inability to bond with her son.

Ramsey took the bold step to avoid showing any of the actual massacre and most violence is committed off screen. We do not need to see it to understand its impact on people. Nor did we see Kevin's preparations for the massacre: We Need to Talk About Kevin is Eva's story, not Kevin's. But there is a major problem with Ramsay's approach to the story: she seems to ignore the entire concept of nature vs. nurture. Eva being portrayed as a bad mother is outweighed by the way Kevin is shown as practically the product of Satan's loins. Throughout the film, Kevin is always pushing his mother's buttons and made out to be evil from the day he is born. There is no subtlety in his portrayal, even with basic things like reaction shots. We Need to Talk About Kevin should have been more ambiguous, because the whole point of the film is to raise a debate. The audience is not meant to have a clear answer. Swinton's performance was highly praised and she is worthy of an Oscar nomination as her character Eva, who starts off both as a woman at a real low end and her struggles with a child she does not want.

She is a disaster of a mum to Kevin as a young child, a child who tests her patience. Swinton was able to bring real depth to her character. When she does make the effort, the damage is already done. Throughout the movie, Swinton plays a tragic and lonely figure who is isolated in some form, a character who is a shell of her former self. Kevin is strongly played by two actors: Jasper Newell plays Kevin as a little brat, pushing his mother with his behaviour and playing Eva and his father (John C. Reilly) against each other. As a teenager, Erza Miller portrays Kevin with a sociopathic and nihilist outlook. He has a sharp mind, but enjoys inflicting pain on others, including his little sister (wonderfully played by the young Ashley Gerasimovich). He is a character who believes in nothing and takes a destructive path as a sinister air is always around him. Reilly plays Franklin as a normal suburban dad, someone who wants to do the right thing for his children. It was a wonderfully natural performance of a man who just sees Kevin's behaviour as being typically boyish. He is very deserving of a Best Supporting Actor nod for such a believable performance.

There is a permanent, chilling sense throughout the film thanks Ramsay's low key direction and the power of the performance. This is a film that should stick in your head, but We Need to Talk About Kevin should not have been so clear-cut. Was the above review useful to you? Page 1 of 32: We Need to Talk about Kevin | Film from RadioTimes We Need to Talk about Kevin Video clips are automatically supplied by broadcasters and distributors. RadioTimes.com is not responsible for the clip's contents. Lynne Ramsay (2011) Our Score by Damon Wise Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel took the form of a series of letters from the mother of a teenage boy to her husband, trying to fathom how their son became a sociopathic killer. This beautifully crafted but disturbing film takes a more traditional approach, flashing backwards and forwards through the story of Eva (Tilda Swinton), a former travel writer whose love/hate relationship with her child has made her life a living hell. Swinton is excellent as the worn-down Eva, and newcomer Ezra Miller makes an indelible impression as the loathsome, conniving Kevin.

However, the director is the real star here, as Glasgow-born Lynne Ramsay, with only her third feature, has fashioned a dazzling, sensory drama with a suffocating, dream-like atmosphere. The back and forth narrative makes a few plot points hard to follow, but overall this is an artful portrayal of every mother's worst nightmare. Summary A mother leads an isolated life after her teenage son commits a terrible crime. Tormented with guilt and grief, she begins to pick apart the key events of his childhood, trying to work out if she ever truly loved him, and if she is responsible for turning him into a monster. Drama based on Lionel Shriver's novel, starring Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly and Ezra Miller. Cast & Crew

Question: Whose book "We Need to Talk about Kevin" was made into a film starring Tilda Swinton?
Answer: Lionel Shriver