Short Take: "We Need to Talk About Kevin", "Carnage" and "Higher Ground".

Evil doings always bring up questions about origins: where do people learn to be evil? Is it something you're born with? Is it something the world teaches you? Art has always been fascinated with the subject and artists have tried to tackle it from psychological, spiritual and sociological points of view. The fascination with the subject and the subject itself have become a "chicken or egg" situation. Cinema in particular has a shown a fetish for showing evil children who wreak havoc on their parents or the world (if they happen to be the Antichrist). Movies like The Omen for example deal with how people react around these demonic infants and more often than not give them a protector, someone who believes in the good within them or someone who wants to encourage their evil. We Need to Talk About Kevin isn't precisely that kind of movie but it doesn't steer too far from it either. Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel gives us the title child, who goes from being a rebellious baby to committing a massacre as a teenager. The movie seems to have decided that there is something very wrong with Kevin from the start, giving the audience no choice but to observe how Ramsay captures his behavior through offbeat framing and artsy sequences. Kevin is shown as a cute but creepy child, who grows into a cute but creepier teenager (played by Ezra Miller) who likes to frown all day long. Ramsay seems to have a ball displaying Kevin's darkness and the film relies too much on the facile horror conventions it's also trying to escape. Since the film has already settled his evil for us, it's up to Tilda Swinton as his mom to try and convey some humanity within the movie. As always, Swinton creates a precise portrait of someone whose humanity overflows the screen. How is it that she results such an otherworldy, almost extraterrestrial public figure, yet she always embodies imperfectly perfect humanity when she acts? As Kevin's mom, Swinton delivers yet another masterful performance that lingers between Mia Farrow's delicious work in Rosemary's Baby and Swinton's own in the remarkable The Deep End: she makes us understand that she would go to the confines of the world to rescue her child's soul, even if she has to lose hers in the process.

Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play a liberal couple whose kid was beaten up by another kid whose parents are A types played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. Over the course of an afternoon (the film happens in real time) both couples try to come up with a civilized solution to their problem. The problem is, nobody really knows what the problem is. For the parents of the victim, it's something about having their child's integrity restored, for the parents of the abuser, the issue has to do with how many time they're losing trying to understand "child's play". Before soon, the couples are going at each other like their kids did. Roman Polanski, who's always been a fan of confinement, takes the concept to a whole new level in his adaptation of Yasmina Reza's play about the Russian doll-ness of our society. The film is superbly acted (Foster is phenomenal!) but more often than not its purpose seems to be rather vacuous. Is it an exercise for its thespians? A playground diversion for its director? Or can it be simply that the source material never had that much to say?

Few actresses are as magnetic and fascinating as Vera Farmiga. She always conveys a sense of mystery and parallel earthiness that make her seem like a pre-Raphaelite goddess who's come to life out of a painting to say something about our world. In Higher Ground, her directorial debut, she does just that by teaching us a lesson about newborn evangelical Christians. While the movies often have conversion as the twist and usually the enemy of liberal purposes, Farmiga takes her time to observe these people and show us that - gasp - they too are human! Despite their narrow minded world views, despite their beliefs that rely on an unseen force and despite their constant bible quoting, they are not "the enemy". That Farmiga manages to do this without being preachy and instead injecting the film with a languorous sensuality might be the real miracle in store.

Grades:

We Need to Talk About Kevin **½

Carnage **

Higher Ground **½

Humpday **1/2

Director: Lynn Shelton
Cast: Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore

Andrew (Leonard) and Ben (Duplass) were best friends during college but drifted apart as the years went by. Andrew ended up getting married and lives with his wife Anna (Delmore) in Seattle where Ben, who's coming back from a long term stay in Chiapas-where he did art with natives- irrupts one early morning unannounced.
Suddenly Ben finds himself in a strange party with Andrew's new friends; a group of hippies, artists and swingers.
While Anna sits at home waiting with a cold dinner, Ben gets drunk, high and agrees to do an art project with Andrew.
Said project, a movie which they will submit to the local Humpfest, will feature them having sex. The following morning trying to hide behind and accuse the hangover they rekindle their talk and realize this is something they actually want to do to prove how one of them isn't as "Kerouac" as he thinks and the other isn't completely "white picket fences".
Writer/director Shelton has some interesting points of view about how heterosexual males choose to bond and the movie has some really funny moments, that don't necessarily involve sexual orientation stereotypes.
As the movie builds up to the imminent encounter, to take place at the "Bonin' Motel", it's not so much the characters who begin to falter and doubt, but the filmmaker herself.
"What exactly about two straight dudes having sex on camera is a great piece of art?" asks Ben as he sits next to his buddy half naked.
The question isn't directed to them as much as it is to Shelton, who came up with a cute idea and later had nothing to say with it (as happens a lot lately in "art").
She then has them involve in a conversation that's half profound questioning of our sexual perceptions, half silly conversation- a keg away- from a frat party.
Her postmodernist attempt to question the existence of her own movie feels more like a happy accident than an intention; and in her search for a door into the heterosexual male's mind she only came up with clichés.
Her idea of what it's like to be heterosexual can't help but be stained by very feminist ways of thinking. Even when she might swear she's trying to make the guys seem reasonable, she ends up being condescending to them and towards homosexuality.
When Andrew reminds himself that he's about to star in a movie about "two straight guys boning", Ben instantly asks "how are they going to know that we're straight?".
It's sweet of Shelton to want to explore the fears that lie behind society's take on homosexuality, but when she makes Ben reveal that he had "a moment" with a guy during his teenage years (kudos to Duplass for making this scene seem much deeper than it has any right to be) the whole thing feels reduced to a movie about the incomplete bonding of two college buddies afraid of middle age.
Shelton may not get men in the way she wants, but with Anna she saves the movie from becoming insulting.
She isn't only the most grounded character in the film (a lot is owed to Delmore's bittersweet, mature performance) but she's also the only one who seems to have a life outside the screenplay.
Her dialogues are more planned and thought out than anything the boys have to say and even when she suggest to her husband that he should get "that thing" out of his system, she seems to be talking from a place of pure empathy and even love.
She also has a confession of her own and even if it's not a mindfuck of a revelation it feels more human and real than anything else featured here.
Sadly, "Humpday", like its characters, is never as open minded as it wants to be.