Still-born

But first we need to talk about Lynne Ramsay, or at least take a moment to emphasize just how promising the Scottish writer/director’s career has been. With Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), not to mention the award-winning shorts, Ramsay quickly established herself as an ambitious young filmmaker with a strangely seductive if whispery-hermetic way with atmospheres, as well as an ability to convey female identity through existentialist channels the movies typically reserve for men. Most of us who saw Morvern Callar and its stunning breakthrough performance from Samantha Morton had been waiting a long time to see what Ramsay would do next. That what she was doing next involved Tilda Swinton only whetted the appetite more.

But We Need to Talk About Kevin, her adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bad seed novel of the same name, is the most frustrating sort of follow-up. Because from start to finish it exudes so much of what’s made Ramsay’s work intriguing, yet the net result feels so divested of urgency, almost hollow. It begins with moments that ooze portent: billowing curtains, memories of Swinton body-surfing amidst tomato-people, a dysfunctional doorknob and paint-splattered house. The narrative is delivered in puzzle-like pieces, there are eerie links between photocopiers and ultrasounds, and the audacious deployment of a Japanese music score. But soon this tale of 100% justifiable maternal anxiety, set in the US, starts to creak with facile choices, such as Ramsay’s hokey Americana: the strip-mall travel agency with zombified employees and crumpled destination posters from 40 years ago, the supermarket where they play the muzak version of ‘Greensleeves.’

Everything about Kevin feels numbingly overdetermined, most especially the relationship between its protagonist—Swinton’s doomed mommy—and antagonist—Ezra Miller’s titular kid from hell, seemingly born to torment mother and finally become a mass murderer who’s into collecting fingernails orally but is otherwise bereft of personality. Its portrait of marital entropy is equally flat, with Swinton’s woozy motel sex with John C. Reilly all-too-glumly reduced to bland bourgeois suburban boredom. (Curiously, following Carnage, this makes two in a row where Reilly has a rotten kid and is completely insensitive to guinea pigs.) At times it’s tempting to describe it as a Todd Solondz movie but not funny. But the truth is that for all its problems it is unmistakably Ramsay, and thus excellent proof that auteurism is not in itself any guarantee of cinematic rewards.

Terri: You're a big boy now

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.