We Need to Talk About Kevin  (UK, 2011, Lynne Ramsay)

Ben Livant:

I am going to give the book I have not read on which the film is based the benefit of the doubt.  I am going to assume that the novel is a compelling read because it successfully provides the psychological interiority of the character of the mother who recalls the story from her first person point of view.  It is precisely this inner mentality that the film fails to deliver. Or, maybe the fault does reside with the original source material.  Either way, the film never gets inside the head of the mother. 

 

Tilda Swinton puts in a strong performance as Chistopher Walken's twin sister, a pale death-mask to be sure.  Director Lynne Ramsey demonstrates that she can decorate a room in the house that Hitchcock built, albeit decked out with art-house dread rather than his main-frame suspense.  The total picture does not add up to more than the sum of its parts, however.   It presents a portrait of a terribly dysfunctional family due to a horribly sociopathic member who victimizes another member.  But this comes over as an almost objective account that never reveals the deep subjectivity of the victim.  This it must do in order for the narrative to bring out from our palms the clammy recognition that we are in the presence of pure evil.

 

Meanwhile, the notion of pure evil has always offended me conceptually.  No doubt, there are homicidal maniacs that walk the earth.  And admittedly, there is a biological basis for the depravity of these individuals.  But as Mary Shelly makes clear in no uncertain terms, monsters are made.   Some sinister electricity has to be jolted into bad flesh in order for it to come together as Frankenstein.  So-called natural born killers need nurturing too; nasty nurturing, but nurturing nonetheless.

 

We Need To Talk About Kevin gives but a single nod in this direction.  The mother was ambivalent about becoming a mother and this is for the boy a corrupting cause insofar as he has always had a sixth sense that he was not wanted in the first place.  Other than this extremely vague suggestion that he is reacting to what he intuites to be a false show of love on her part, his socio-pathology is presented as utterly innate.  It is absolutely mysterious in relation to his immediate human relations.  It is plainly laid out that mom wants to love him but he does everthing in his power to prevent her from doing so.   How his larger social environment beyond his home life shapes him we are shown not at all.  Honestly, more than once watching the film I flashed on The Excorcist.  Kevin is essentially possessed by The Devil.  From his first screams in the stroller to his last arrow shot in the school gym.

 

I  would not take offense with this - yet another Hannibal Lecter tale - if it did not so easily play into the most reactionary, right-wing sentiments.  To make the ideological point with a slogan, there is a direct line from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the death penalty in Texas, (the B-movie camp of the former withstanding.)  We Need To Talk About Kevin gives at least a couple loud cues to lean in this direction.  The inclusion of a scene featuring Kevin as a sexual being is vital to demonizing him.  The mother accidentally invades his privacy while he is masturbating and he suffers no shame.  Quite the contrary, he wickedly continues his beastial act, perversely compelling his mother to be his witness.  The incest implication is candid within this exhibitionist rape.

 

More subtle but perhaps even more off-putting, the dialogue in the the final jail-house scene notifies us that because he was tried as a minor, Kevin will be out on the streets soon enough.  I have already noted that this lends itself to conservative ranting about the need for more punishing law and order.  The present point is that the audience is supposed to leave the theatre knowing that killer-Kevin is waiting for them.  If not tonight, tomorrow night.  And while it is dramatically legitimate and perhaps even emotionally gratifying for the kid to confess at the end that even he does not understand his own motivations, this is hardly comforting to contemplate after he is out on parole.  In short, the film finishes with a hack shock effect.

 

Clearly, this sort of movie is just not my cup of tea.  I will acknowledge that it is to be commended for refraining from overt sensationalism.  There is almost no violence and very little gruesome graphics.  A staggering degree of menace is achieved simply at the level of atmospherics and I suppose for fans of the sicko genre We Need To Talk About Kevin is thinking-man's stylish.  But I believe the best horror penetrates beyond external vibe to internal thought-process and I have to reiterate that the film never truly takes us within mom's head.  Think of any number of films by Polanski for the standard that is informing me.

The trailer

The Mill and the Cross 

Ben Livant:

I know you (editor's note: that would be me, Dan Jardine) have only seen the first few minutes of this film (editor's note: I've since seen the whole film. And really dug it), so I won't spoil it for you.  Not because I am going to shut up about it.  Because there is nothing to spoil.  Well, that is, insofar as we all issue spoiler alerts only with respect to divulging information about plot.  Is it possible to spoil setting, characterizations, atmosphere, theme?  I guess so, in the most basic sense of not wanting to hear the opinion or analysis of something not already personally experienced.  You might save this review for after you've seen the film yourself, but I don't think it will make a difference.  The Mill and the Cross is unspoilable.

This is because this movie is not a "movie."  Falling squarely between being an etude and an homage, it is an essay.  Inspired by and entirely about Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting, The Way to Calvary, The Mill and the Cross is very much a companion piece to the book of the same name by the art historian, Michael Francis Gibson.  This might give the impression that the film is a public-television style documentary.  Wrong impression.  Or it might give the impression that the film is a history-channel style dramatization.  Again, wrong impression.  But enough impressionism.  We are talking about the Flemish Renaissance.

 

 

Not talking about it, actually.  The Mill and the Cross is almost completely free of of language.  Human bodies make all sorts of sounds, including vocal utterances, but there are very few words spoken.  And the few words that are spoken are not conversations between two or more people.  There is no dialogue.  Instead, a mere handful of cursory speeches are given by individuals who just happen to be in the company of others.  Ostensibly said to these other characters, these monological acts are actually soliloquies a second-step abstractly removed.  These meta-thought-balloons belong to Bruegel himself or his patron, not as historical personages but rather as "colour commentators" on the concepts present in the painting.  This holds as well for the female figure drawn by the film-maker from the painting.  Any other vocalizing is so much theatrical-extra "rhubarb, rhubarb" equally meaningful only at a second-step abstractly removed.  It ushers not from dramatic characters properly understood but rather painted images that have been "brought to life" as cinematic images.

 

 

This bringing-to-life is the raison d'etre of the film.  The Mill and the Cross is an animation of a still life.  But be clear.  The purpose is not to enhance the non-moving picture by making it move for us.  The exact opposite.  The purpose is to appreciate the non-moving picture but making us move into it.  This is no trivial difference.  The former would be a lame Disney cartoon.  The latter is a remarkable non-movie movie.  The Mill and the Cross is two-dimensional celluloid in motion at 24 frames per second.  Yet the experience of watching it is akin to moving about a three-dimensional model of the painting, walking around inside a museum diorama, interacting with a hologram.

 

 

Slow and a little bit boring, yet this feels absolutely as it should and dialectically makes the experience captivating and intense.  Hyper-accelerated as we are today by the speed of our technologies, it is quite a profound feeling to stay still and actually contemplate anything.  The Way to Calvary certainly merits our sustained attention.  The Mill and the Crossprovides a sort of stoner's take on Bruegel's masterpiece, if the stoner happens to be a scholar with expertise in the work of the genius painter.  It is at once intellectually acute to the point of being a pedagogical pronouncement and mysteriously enveloping to the point of being a trippy scene.

 

 

This feeling of sleep-walking through a realistic world unrealistically conjured by a sorcerer is achieved by the truly artistic application of CGI.  The obvious artificiality of CGI that so often obstructs the very effect it is employed to obtain, in this instance serves to create a mesmerizing interface of details from the painting and the extrapolation of these staged for the camera.  After all, the original work is itself an artificial representation.  Using the phoniness of CGI to interface with the phoniness of painting, The Mill and the Cross manages to liquefy the heavy oil long ago dried solid on the canvas.

The trailer

Melancholia (Denmark, 2011, Lars von Trier)


Ben Livant:

Just as NHL addicts love to pick and choose from the whole league to create their dream team, film buffs make Top Ten lists.  And just like a hockey fan who wants to see nothing more than a show-down between his best goalie and his favorite forward, cinema enthusiasts enjoy programing the ultimate double-bill.

I rarely read reviews so I really do have to ask:  Is it just me or has everybody else also observed that this film paired against Terrence Malick's latest is the ultimate double-bill this year?  Come on!  Is this not a match made in heaven (or hell, however you want to conceive of it), a fight to the death (or the after-life), a contest between the eternal light of God's grace and the black hole of nothingness?

Both films deliver outstandingly arresting visuals that establish inescapably affecting atmospheres that speak to the human condition.  And the two films are (almost) equally pretentious.  They find it in every way legitimate to fill up a massive metaphysical frame with the paint of personal psychology.  In the shoot-out between The Tree of Life and Melancholia, however, I am inclined to cheer for the latter.  My reasons are three.

In the first philosophic place, my supposedly supernatural soul about which believers are so optimistic is just too supposed for me to take optimistically.  You know.  Death and taxes.  In that order.  Couple things you can count on.  Death of me, death of you, death of the planet...eventually.  Can't avoid the void.  The first rule of the realist.

Secondly, I respectfully request a splash of irony from all painters on the cosmic canvas. Von Trier's picture is somewhat ironic, whereas Malick's painting is dead serious (not-dead serious, that is, angels-forever serious).  This is not to suggest that Melancholia has a sense of humour.  It is just as un-funny as The Tree of Life.  My point is that von Trier's film is somewhat less pretentious because the depiction of the end of the world is less literal event and more metaphoric device than the opening of the pearly gates in Malick's movie.

(On the other hand, maybe von Trier does crack what he considers to be a joke.  Many scenes in Melancholia are precisely paced, choreographed, to the Prelude of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  This is THE Romantic work of art that functioned as the point of mediation between Schopenhauer and [yes, I'm reading him right now, having just finished my course in] Nietzsche.  The emotional power of the music is repetitively borrowed by the film almost to the point of being camp.  Yet, the parallels that may be drawn between the so-opposite sisters in the film and the antithetical conceptions in  Wagner's tragic opera of day/life/illusion and night/death/actuality are there for the drawing.  About this, I believe von Trier is sincere.  And, duh, he sides with night/death/actuality unto nihilistic despair.  [Unlike Wagner who also sides with this but on behalf of erotic pathos.] )

My final reason for my preference is positively prosaic, which is to say that I am positive about prose that makes some goddamn sense.  The narrative in The Tree of Life is incoherent.  I suspect that it is intended to be poetic and I am confident that it is meant to be profound, but it's an ineffectual parable as far as I can make out that attempts to pass off inept drama as a glorious aesthetic experience.  Melancholia, conversely, is one hell of a two act play.  Not only did it make perfect sense as a story, the formal construction of the narrative is remarkably powerful.

Much of this resides in the control of our cognition von Trier achieves by telling us the ending at the beginning.  But the radical stylistic juxtaposition of the two acts is equally important.  It facilitates the inversion of the binary represented by the sisters.  They effectively switch places with respect to our sympathies and in so doing validate von Trier's attitude that existence is just so much non-existence.  Correction.  His take is more explicitly negative.  The sister that is his stand-in says not just that life on earth is the only life in the universe.  She declares further that life on earth is evil.

According to what moral compass this orientation is charted, I notice von Trier declines to disclose.  What is plain is that this is no "disaster movie" since the end of the world can hardly be considered a disaster if life on earth is evil.  Guess we just have to accept the opinion of a clinically depressive film-maker as reliable testimony on this topic.  Or not.  Personally, I have put meatloaf in my mouth many, many times and not once has it tasted to me like ashes.  But I would be a liar if I failed to confess that Melancholia made me wake up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep.  It's a very intense trip, the artistic authority of which cannot be denied.  I think it is an excellent film.

I propose we adopt the notion that von Trier has become - if he wasn't already - a master of horror.  In support of this campaign, I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length from my review of his Antichrist:

It's title notwithstanding, there is no moral reference point - period.  Call me a prude but I have to side with the Sunday school types who would no doubt label it degenerate.  I prefer the term decadent because for me it suggests a less individualistic, more general sociological decay.  At some point, it behooves us to wonder what a work of art is reflecting about the culture at large, and this film is universal nihilism posing as a piece of personal psychosis.  The nasty supernatural trappings are just that; pretentious window dressing, just the stuff to fool lots of reviewers into thinking the film is philosophically assertive.  But given all the rest of the uber-grizzly fare, some of the supposedly occult implications about the natural world were sorta goofy; not full-out funny, but dorky nonetheless and therefore laughable.  The ending is a head-scratcher, to be sure. But so what?  We've been too badly brutalized to care.  In short, it's just another horror movie folks.

I stand by that review and I maintain now that Melancholia is another horror movie.  But I do not think it is "just" another one.  Again, I think it is excellent.  This time out the ending ain't no head-scratcher, that's for sure.  And this time out, the individual mental illness does not "pose" as the apocalypse.  This is because the occult implications in Melancholia are in no way conceptually shabby.  Tracing the etymology of the word "melancholia," Wiki arrives at Old English terms including "saturine," as in, under the influence of Saturn.  The depressive sister is a kind of witch, an intuitive astrological seer, Nostradamus in a dress.  She looks at the sky and knows - just knows - it's over.  In keeping with a Stephen King protagonist, this character is made sick by her own power.

Until she isn't.

Never mind religion.  We are long past spiritualist hope.  Turns out the man of science can't face the fact.  The lord of the manor with his telescope hedges his bet with a full grocery cart of survivalist supplies.  But his devolution from advanced technologist to hoarder of basic necessities is secondary to him living with a false faith from the get-go, the belief that practical rationality will render him invincible.  Hence, going over to manic panic, he kills himself in supreme selfishness.

And forget about the noble bearing of true love, a mother's love, a sister's love.  The earthy woman of social bonds who honestly cares for her family and thinks it only proper to seek the company of others in town when confronted by crisis, turns out to be yet another who can't face the fact.  Her personality as the reliable nurturer decomposes to reveal that her essence is anxiety which manifests as incapacity.  She too is subject to manic panic, just happens in fits and starts.  Hence, it is only due to her crazy sister that she does not loose her own mind completely.

So it turns out that the depressive, the previously incapacitated, is finally calm, cool and collected.  She is the truly brave person, the sane one in the end, because she has been facing the fact all along.  Only fools and cowards live life to the fullest, feel any sort of purpose that might bring about some sort of immortality.  These foolish cowards, these cowardly fools, want to leave a legacy.  But even if they do write their own epitaph, it is no more meaningful than a commercial copywriter's tag-line.  It is the girl who can't get out of bed in the morning, the gal who is forever mourning, she is the one who is able to shake off the covers come Judgment-less Day.  For she is under the sign of Planet Melancholia.  She has always known that this ain't the age of the dawning of Aquarius.  Hence, she strips naked to bask in the glow of death. 

Dan Jardine:

I have nothing much to add to this excellent review. Melancholia is not only a far superior film to Tree of Life, it is a superior film, period. Not quite in the same league as von Trier's best, such as Dogville, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, but it is also a welcome return to form after the heinous Antichrist.

The trailer