There are many reasons to love Tilda Swinton. She’s a supremely talented actress who has always made bold and thrilling choices, and taken on a diverse range of roles with some of the boldest and most talented filmmakers in our times (Derek Jarman, Spike Jone, Jim Jarmusch). And even when she takes on mainstream roles, she does so with great taste and finds a way to inject her unique personality into the proceedings (The Chronicles of Narnia films, and the upcoming Trainwreck with Amy Schumer). She recently joined the Wes Anderson repertory, to my great delight. And she also has successfully lived a polyamorous lifestyle, at one time sharing a home with a devoted husband and beautiful young male partner, and her twin children. How can you not love this woman??
As proof of my love, I submit to you this #WCW a film like no other. For Woman Crush Wednesday, I give you the incomparable We Need To Talk About Kevin (available for rent and purchase on Amazon Instant, Google Play and iTunes). The film, by the brilliant Lynne Ramsey, takes us on a journey through the tormented psyche of Eva Katchadourian, a mother whose eldest child has committed a shocking crime that has made her a reviled member of the community, and a woman living a literal hell on earth. The film (one of the rare cases where the film is superior to the original book) imagines the headspace of a parent of such a criminal, and is told not chronologically, but through a synaptic quiltwork of triggered memories and present day contemplation. Through these synesthetic snapshots, we reconstruct the crime itself and the life leading up to it, as Eva does what we imagine any parent in this position to do- try to figure out where they went wrong.
The role requires some brave soul-searching as a mother, which Swinton dove into head-first without any self-consciousness. Was it Eva’s fear and resentment of how motherhood changed her life that created a monster? Even more frighteningly, how much of her self is in her child? Could she have prevented this in any way? The film offers tantalizing hints at answers but never does the stupid thing by trying to definitively claim just one is correct in determining why the child was born a psychopath or how the ultimate crime came to be. The film is so perfectly constructed that there are clues staring us in the face in the most unassuming places to the atrocities that “Kevin” commits throughout his life, and cruel reminders of where Eva is now emotionally (like the Eva doused in crushed tomatoes at La Tomatina in the film’s opening, compared to the woman later standing lifeless in front of a display of tomato soup at the supermarket-the tomatoes, like her old life, run through the boiler and blender, and sealed away in a small prison). Swinton was never better as Eva, in what I really believe was the role of a lifetime. You feel everything Eva feels through Swinton’s physicalization of her, like the hollow eyes and stiff posture post-crime, compared to the free and loose countenance she had before that makes it easy to tell the difference between recollection and present day. Also, her sheer terror driving home on Halloween in one scene to the once-wistful tune of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” will make that song utterly chilling forever after.
To Tilda, I bow to you my queen!
About Author
