“What a gorgeous day for an ugly film,” could have been the smug salutation to the shellshocked group walking on Telluride’s main thoroughfare one bright afternoon during the Telluride Film Festival.
After all, Denver Film Society festival director Britta Erickson and a few of her cohorts had just come from seeing “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” a movie told from the perspective of a mother whose son has committed a heinous crime at his high school. Adapted by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay and co-writer Rory Stewart Kinnear, the film opened Friday at the Esquire.
In a world in need of answers — or a better set of questions — “Kevin” is less an illuminating look at being the parent of a child who commits a malevolent act than it is an indulgent dirge about sins of ambivalent mothering. Bad seed or bad mother? These would hardly seem to be new answers. They’re more often the staples of a horror flick than of a penetrating drama.
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” arrives at a time when the theme of kids killing kids is getting consideration from a number of cultural vantage points.
And while it may be a vexing piece of art, taken together with these other works — movies, books, plays — “We Need to Talk About Kevin” reframes an unhappy conundrum. If children can, through no fault of adults, become killers, then is murder an intractable part of our nature? Or, if a kid’s will to inflict harm is a response to sorry signals from an adult world, then what exactly are we — parents, teachers, et al. — telling them? Either quandary hints at human failure. “Shame” would have been an apt title for “We Need to Talk About Kevin” had it not already been taken.
It’s an ongoing cultural phenomenon, and it’s picking up speed.
The blockbuster opening of “The Hunger Games” was preceded by the social-media phenomenon of the viral video “Kony 2012.” One tells the fictional tale of youngsters forced to participate in a ritualized, televised slaughter. The other is a moving, agitprop short from the social activism organization Invisible Children. It too is about kids conscripted to kill — this time by Ugandan guerrilla leader and indicted war criminal Joseph Kony.
Of course, “The Hunger Games” is an entertainment. That it comes with heft to match its subject is a too-rare bonus. Based on the first in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, it is a potent stew of dystopian fretting, with dashes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and a number of others who have envisioned our dark future.
Novels — good ones — are posing questions at once familial and societal: “The Child Who,” by Simon Lelic, and “The Good Father,” by Noah Hawley, were published this month.
“The Good Father” begins with a third-person description of a young man who has just shot a political candidate.
“What made him ditch his comfortable life and embrace an act of barbarity?” the narrator asks before startling us. “I have read the reports. I have watched the footage, but the answer continues to elude me. More than anything, I want to know.” There is a pause. “I am his father, you see. He is my son.”
Yes, the air is heavy with questions.
Closer to home, The Hollywood Reporter announced in February that cable network Lifetime plans to turn “Columbine,” Dave Cullen’s nonfiction, media-critical 2009 best seller, into a miniseries. The news was met with trepidation in Colorado. Any work that takes on kids who kill gets a special scrutiny in this place made profoundly sensitive to the issue by the mass murders at the Jefferson County high school.
Last weekend, as part of its New Play Festival, the Local Theater Company performed a staged reading of “Small Prophecies” at the Chautauqua Community House. In David Myers’ play, 15-year-old Skeet retaliates in appalling fashion against a peer he feels wronged him. Skeet doesn’t kill but he reveals a gift for the cruel and felonious gesture. He holds a place on a continuum of fears about children committing violence.
In a culture quick to find answers — even if, as Cullen argued so well in “Columbine,” they turn out to be the wrong ones — blame tends to trump problem-solving.
The question “Small Prophesies” poses (but resists anwering), says director Megan Mathews: Is this act “a ‘gateway’ to more violent actions?”
Life after Columbine
Filmmaker Steve LuKanic is keenly aware that people crave answers about kids who kill — and, yes, the parents who raise them.
Along with Mark Katchur and Nicole Corbin, he directed the 2009 documentary “13 Families: Life After Columbine,” a film that had the cooperation of all the families of those killed April 20, 1999.
It is a compassionate film intended to tell the stories of how the grieving go forward, how they begin anew.
Still, he said one recent morning, he “hopes that more projects will continue to focus on other aspects of these events, focus on answering some of these questions that we weren’t able to explore.”
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” seemed promising in this regard.
“When I watch this kind of film, I wonder, ‘Would the Columbine families get anything from this? What would they take from this?’ I went into the film feeling very hopeful that this may give them some additional insight, as painful as it would be to watch,” he said.
Last fall, Britta Erickson included the drama in the Starz Denver Film Festival as a special presentation, and brought in director Ramsay and Kinnear.
It was the right move.
It is a vivid, if divisive, work saturated with reds and punctuated by a score rich with twang and lament. It has a fearless performance by Tilda Swinton as a mother doing penance for — more than reckoning with — the dark personality and darker deeds of her son.
Over the years the film society has screened nearly all of the so-called “Columbine movies”: Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” plus “Zero Day” and “Home Room.”
“For me, ‘Kevin’s’ not a Columbine movie,” Erickson said. “Lynn has set up the film to be effective with parents, to make them stop and think. Parents can be seriously judged by their kids.”
For the movie’s detractors, the trouble with “Kevin” is that from Kevin’s infancy he seems purely evil.
“We Need to Talk About Damien,” LuKanic cracked.
Community’s roleWrestling with the presumed sins of parents gets you only so far. Widening the investigation is essential, says British author Simon Lelic. If it takes a village to raise an upstanding citizen, might it take a community to shape a malevolent kid, too?
Lelic was inspired to write “The Child Who” after listening to an interview with the solicitor who defended Jon Venables. In 1993, Venables along with Robert Thompson abducted 2-year-old James Bulger outside a shopping center in Bootle, England. They tortured and killed him. The boys were 10 at the time of the crime.
Lelic’s novel focuses on the changes experienced — within his family and the community at large — by Leo Curtice once he’s called upon to defend a 12-year-old-boy accused of sexually torturing and killing an 11-year-old girl.
“The starting point for me in writing ‘The Child Who’ was the conviction that things in these cases are never as straightforward as we are usually encouraged to believe — by newspapers, by politicians,” wrote Lelic from his home in England.
“We rarely ask why, in any meaningful way,” Lelic said. “It is always easier, and somehow more reassuring, to dismiss children who kill as being evil, pure and simple.
“It is far harder to hold up a mirror and consider how we — as parents, as teachers, as a society — might also be culpable.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com
