We Need To Talk About Why I Can't See "Kevin"

Looking through the local papers trying to find a movie fit for a lazy Sunday afternoon, I’m stuck between choosing a shit sandwich and piss soup. The local AMC 10 is devoting no less than thirty percent of its screens to Underworld: Kate Beckinsdale Looks Awesome in Skin Tight LeatherDoesn’t She?, and my other choices are Liam Neeson Punches Out Wolves, George Clooney In Another Movie Where He Looks Smug and some musical that stars Cher’s corpse. Don’t get me wrong, I love Liam Neeson, but since he’s been known to star in dreck like this and this, he doesn’t get an automatic pass.

Meanwhile a quick theater locator search on both movietickets.com and fandango.com reveals that Lynne Ramsey’s We Need To Talk About Kevin isn’t playing within 250 miles of Boston.

I understand that Kevin is a challenging film that deals with sensitive subject matter. Starring Tilda Swinton as the mother of a boy who grows up to be a high school shooter, the film is based Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name. The book floored me. I remember plowing through the last half of it in one sitting, finishing it off at five am despite knowing I had a client meeting in three hours. Told through a series of reflective letters from a wife to her husband, it’s no secret what she means by “The Incident” she refers to throughout the novel. Yet it contains one of the biggest gut punches of a final reveal I’ve ever come across. From what I’ve read about the film, it stays close to the source material, and allows Swinton to deliver a devastating performance that should have garnered Oscar consideration. By most accounts it's the kind of horror film one could point to with pride when someone assails the genre we love as nothing but one stupid cliche after another that serves no purpose except to get women topless and power tools digging into soft flesh. 

While I’m not one to put too much stock in Awards, I’d love to at least weigh in on whether she earned a nomination. Unfortunately, despite housing some of the most prestigious halls of higher learning in the country and a handful of independent cinemas including Coolidge Corner, The Somerville Theater, The Brattle Cinema, The Kendall Square Cinema, The Embassy Theater and the West Newton Cinema, the film doesn’t warrant one screen among the nearly thirty those theaters alone offer.

As much as other sites have bemoaned the Video-On-Demand/limited theatrical release strategy some smaller distribution arms have adopted, I appreciate the fact I’ve been able to legally watch and pay for some fantastic smaller releases long before I could acquire them through the home market. While it’s still not the route I would take, it’s shit like this that allows me a small bit of sympathy for the asshats that steal work through torrent sites.