{"id":7767,"date":"2011-12-14T08:59:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T07:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.breigh.com\/wordpress\/?p=7767"},"modified":"2011-12-14T11:07:41","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T10:07:41","slug":"review-we-need-to-talk-about-kevin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/archives\/7767","title":{"rendered":"Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ages ago I read the book We Need to Talk About Kevin<\/a> and this is what I had to say about it:<\/p>\n

This book sucked hardcore for the first few chapters and I had to force myself through it. It was long winded and the author appears to go out of her way to use run-on sentences and difficult language. I hate giving up on a book though, and I tend to try to push through them in case there is something better to be found.
\nI\u2019m glad I did with this one, because it got very very good. Once I got used to the writing style and the content got more interesting, it turned out to be an extremely thought provoking novel which makes you question everything you\u2019ve ever heard or thought about being a parent and having children. It makes you wonder especially about the nature vs nurture topic, which I\u2019m still not sure about myself.
\nIt\u2019s almost hard to believe it\u2019s fiction, to be honest. It makes me wonder if these are the things the mothers of the kids from Columbine and other school shootings thought and experienced.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book is written through a series of letters from Eva, to her seemingly estranged husband, about their son Kevin.\u00a0 Eva\u2019s relationship with Kevin was strained from birth and as he grew older she was convinced that there was something wrong with him, always suspecting there was an evil side to him.\u00a0 His behavior with her was drastically different than with her husband, who appears to be blissfully unaware of this side of him, partially because Kevin puts on a much happier face with him but also because he refuses to accept that his family is anything other than the norm.\u00a0\u00a0 This leads to Eva feeling quite alone in her efforts to win Kevin\u2019s affection and deal with his abusive and sometimes cruel behavior.<\/p>\n

I found it to be quite a difficult read for a number of reasons, both because of how the book was written but also the content.\u00a0 As someone who has been trying to have children for a very long time, and had far too much time to question if we want to have one and why, this was an absolutely frightening read.\u00a0 The thought of having a child and not having a connection with him \/ her and having them react to me in the way Kevin reacts to his mother (or doesn\u2019t react) scared me.\u00a0 It also made me worry about the decisions I would make as a mother, how they would affect any future child and what the hell I\u2019d ever do if I had a child like this.<\/p>\n

When I said the book was thought provoking, that was putting it mildly. It\u2019s a book that you read and then it sticks with you\u2026 I have found myself mulling it over in my head while in bed, on the tram, while shopping and a lot of other times.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gone back and forth in my head about the nature vs nuture topic and how it applies in this movie.\u00a0 Granted, this is a work of fiction and without speaking to the parents of kids who have done such horrible things, there\u2019s no way to know if this is what it\u2019s really like.\u00a0 From what I gather, most parents are taken quite by surprise when their child does something so horrific, which wasn\u2019t really the case with Eva in the book.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve questioned again and again whether Kevin was born that way or if there was something in the way Eva acted towards him and if her depression and frustration with a difficult, constantly crying baby caused him to somehow detach from her, thus breaking the mother \/ child relationship and starting off what turned out to be quite evil behavior.<\/p>\n

What has brought this all back up recently was seeing the movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s been years since I read the book, which is usually a good thing when it comes time to watch a movie that is based on one.\u00a0 Otherwise I spend the entire time picking the movie apart and complaining about what is and isn\u2019t represented from the book.\u00a0 I was able to just watch this and enjoy it without remembering or recognizing what was missing, or what was added.<\/p>\n[youtube id=”ozm-hlPNGX4″ width=”600″ height=”350″]\n

My experience when watching the movie was quite the same as when I read the book. There were parts that were boring but it was intriguing at the same time.\u00a0 It probably helped that I had already read the book and knew what the outcome would be.\u00a0\u00a0 I did feel a heightened sense of anticipation and dread through the movie, which I know was the desired affect.<\/p>\n

The children in the film were brilliant and more than once I wondered how they got a child that was so young to give such looks and portray such emotion.\u00a0 All three of the boys that played Kevin did a remarkable job in creating a massive unease within me, the kind of feeling that makes me understand why some species eat their young.<\/p>\n

The entire cast was chosen perfectly really.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think anyone could play the tortured, anguished Eva the way Tilda Swinton<\/a> did.\u00a0 She WAS Eva in this film, and what I liked most was that she managed to create that perfect balance that we found in the book, where you wanted to empathize and sympathize with her but at the same time there was something about her that made you uneasy as well.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure a lot of actresses could bring that out in the character the way she did.\u00a0 It takes a lot of acting skill to make you pity a character at the same time as you sort of hate her.<\/p>\n

Her husband (Franklin), played by John C. Reilly<\/a>, was also done very well.\u00a0 His stubborn desire to have the perfect little nuclear family causes him to ignore and brush off all of Eva\u2019s attempts to get him to understand what she is going through.\u00a0\u00a0 Reilly is the perfect person to play a sort of happy go lucky, father who is happy to ignore what is going on around him.<\/p>\n

Both the book and the movie bring about so many questions.\u00a0 What causes Kevin to be the way he is?\u00a0 Is it Eva\u2019s inability to deal with him as a difficult baby that severed the bond between mother and son?\u00a0 Was there ever one there to begin with?\u00a0 Is Kevin just inherently evil or was that something that was somehow created by his environment?<\/p>\n

** Spoilers Ahead **<\/p>\n

Another big question I have is in regards to how he feels about his parents.\u00a0 Through the book and the movie I had the impression that he liked his father more than his mother, that there was more respect for\u00a0 him. \u00a0If that were true, why did he kill Franklin and not Eva?\u00a0 If all of his anger and hatred appeared to be aimed towards his mother, why did he not kill her?\u00a0 Was it because he wanted her to live miserable and alone, feeling responsible for all the death and destruction Kevin left in his path?<\/p>\n

I wonder if it wasn\u2019t quite the opposite.\u00a0 If in some strange way Kevin didn\u2019t have more respect for his mother because she saw through him, and she constantly challenged him.\u00a0 Did he not have less<\/em> respect for his father and almost see him as an idiot who could be easily fooled by putting on a smile and pretending to be an adoring son?\u00a0 Did he kill the father and sister because he had no use for them?<\/p>\n

So many questions!\u00a0 That is what makes a good book for me, something that leaves me thinking afterwards.\u00a0 There are things I didn\u2019t like about the book, and the movie, but none of it took away from the story and the endless questions that it left me with.\u00a0 Even though I will probably never read it again, or watch the movie, I still think this is an incredible story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ages ago I read the book We Need to Talk About Kevin and this is what I had to say about it: This book sucked hardcore for the first few chapters and I had to force myself through it. It was long winded and the author appears to go out of her way to use …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[23,335,302,384,13,886,108],"class_list":["post-7767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-celebrities","tag-confusion","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-scary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7767"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7776,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7767\/revisions\/7776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}