Beautiful Boy vs. We Need To Talk About Kevin

I recently ended up watching two movies about the aftermath of a school shooting through the eyes of the shooter’s parents.  Uh, grim.  And since the subject matter was roughly similar and I had strong feelings about both movies, I decided to do a slightly longer write-up of each, back to back.

Danger, Will Robinson!  Spoilers abound in these lengthier reviews.  So if you want just the yes/no, here you have it:  Definitely skip Beautiful Boy.  We Need to Talk About Kevin is really good but also soul-reaping, kinda like a Cormac McCarthy novel.  If you’re going to watch it, do so early on a sunny day when you can go outside afterwards and play with kittens and think about rainbows and magic instead of the futility of the human endeavor.

Beautiful Boy:  2010 drama directed by Shawn Ku and starring Michael Sheen and Maria Bello.  Bill (Sheen) and Kate (Bello) are a nice suburban couple on the verge of divorce.  They are planning a last-ditch-effort family vacation when their son Sam (Kyle Gallner) goes on a shooting spree at his university, killing 17 people and himself.  So the movie is ostensibly about how they deal with the aftermath of the tragedy.  

                  Everything was so predictable.  Their actions and reactions are so utterly, just, DUH.  First Bill is going to approach the situation like a Problem To Be Fixed, now Kate will call him on it, now Kate will hover over her nephew like he’s a weird son-substitute, now Kate’s sister-in-law will overreact about Kate hovering, now a total stranger will make a flippant comment not knowing that Bill is the shooter’s dad, now Bill and Kate will drink and have make-up sex, now some new information will cause them to fight and forget their brief reconciliation, now Bill will finally come to terms and Kate will rescue him.

                  There were so many opportunities to dig deeper.  The one area they really could have expanded on was the reactions of other people.  Honestly?  Everyone is super understanding?  They’re never personally confronted by the other parents or the media in a real way.  That, too, would have been expected, but also might have had the potential to be interesting.  

Example:  Kate befriends a young writer who you immediately know is a skeezball.  It would have been so much better for the story if he had turned out to be an agenda-less, platonic friend who actually cared about her, rather than a pseudo romantic interest pumping her for information so he can exploit her grief for fodder for his shitty novel.  But the second he just happens to run into her at the grocery store, you know exactly what’s coming.   There are no surprises, ever, from any character.

I give it credit for trying, but it’s one of the most rote, formulaic, emotionally stupid movies I have ever seen.  I am a devoted Michael Sheen fan.  I very much appreciate an actor who is willing to do a movie like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans directly on the heels of Frost/Nixon.  So he gets a pass.  But after this BS, I’m putting Maria Bello in the Shitty Movie Litmus Test category with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Malcolm McDowell.  Is one of them in it?  Then it’s probably terrible.

We Need To Talk About Kevin:  2011 drama directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller.  It’s based on a book of the same name by Lionel Shriver, which I haven’t read.  And don’t plan to.  ‘Cause damn. 

The story flips back and forth between the current life of Eva (Swinton) and flashbacks of the events leading up to the school shooting committed by her son, Kevin.  Present Eva is an ostracized, nervous loner who is shakily attempting to rebuild her life.  As she slowly makes progress in finding a job and fixing up her small new house, she is occasionally accosted by a rude stranger or supposedly friendly coworker and the wounds rip open freshly.

Interspersed with all the present pain are the flashbacks in chronological order, beginning when she first gets pregnant.  She and her husband, Franklin (Reilly), share a quiet evening, roaming the streets, carefree.  Then she’s a hesitant mother-to-be.  Then she’s an anxious mother of a toddler who doesn’t respond to her, and then of a churlish young boy who seems to inexplicably, spitefully act against her.  And you can see the wheels turning behind her eyes as the years advance:  is he autistic, or just developing slowly?  Why does he respond to my husband and not to me?  Does he hate me?  How could he hate me?  Am I a bad mother?  Am I a bad mother?  Is my son a monster?  Am I a bad mother?

I found this far more realistic than Beautiful Boy, even given the nearly garish, rich color schemes in her flashbacks and the almost comically over-the-top manner in which he kills his classmates.  It has a dreamy, Gregory Crewdson feel to it, but that somehow made more sense to me.  It captures the surrealistic qualities of grief that I think few movies do. 

I didn’t really understand the ending.  Is it a penance?  A strange act of contrition to please her son?  Because if she had just gone along with him, had not been his antagonist, maybe he wouldn’t have done this?  Perhaps the point is for the viewer to wonder.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as closure after death.  So maybe it’s just an example of how she’s coping, a bizarre attempt to exert some control over her life.

It’s a beautiful, crushing movie that I kind of recommend you see.