Off The Duff

Granted, I was only allowed to wear them on the red carpet because I was attending a mid-day screening in the Grand Lumiere Theatre sans press and paparazzi. The nighttime premieres at 7:30pm & 10:30pm throughout the festival are more ritzy as those are the ones where cast, jury, etc. are in the theatre watching the screenings as well and there are hundreds of photographers yelling celebrities’ names and snapping photos throughout the long walks down the red carpet. These are the screenings in which we commoners must dress to the nines to fit in with the glamourous event. In other words, my TOMS would be out of the question – unless I was famous, in which case I could wear these shoes and a potato sack and still land on the cover of fashion mags.

I digress.

My daytime presence up the red carpet on this day is to catch an early screening of the highly anticipated in-competition film, “We Need To Talk About Kevin.” Walking the red carpet in my red shoes for this screening ended up being unexpectedly ‘on theme’ with the heavy movie as the color red is used symbolically throughout its 110 minutes. In it we follow a mother (Tilda Swinton) through her current life, the aftermath of a mass murder at a local high school carried out by her son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), amid flashbacks of her life leading up to this point. The storyline is intense enough, but coupled with the expert cinematography with smart uses of the color red – the annual tomato festival in Spain; the Andy Warhol-esque shot of Swinton in a grocery store against a backdrop of tomato soup cans; the paint splattered on Swinton’s small white house as an act of vandalism; and, of course, the blood from Kevin’s victims – is effective and evocative beyond belief.

Rarely has a film hit me as hard as ‘Kevin’ did. The first 40min of the movie, to me, can be compared with the first 20min of “Saving Private Ryan.” The immediate intensity of the situation into which you are introduced is jarring. It takes hold and won’t let go. The glimpses we see of Swinton’s current life (post-massacre) is empty, depressed, and desolate. I literally felt hollow inside just watching her. Her performance is award-worthy.

John C. Reilly plays Kevin’s father in the film and his role is exactly what you want it to be – lovable and light. He represents the half of the parental unit with which Kevin finds joy, be it genuine or not. Swinton, on the other hand, is blatantly and inexplicably hated by Kevin, seemingly since birth. The story portrays both a tug-of-war between mother and son as well as a tug-of-war between Swinton’s internal and emotional struggle. We, the audience, are the knot in the middle of the tug-of-war rope as we are pulled back and forth right along with the plot, giving reason to the exhaustion I felt when the credits finally rolled. I was drained – so much so that I literally had to separate myself from the group and avoid seeing or speaking to anyone for thirty full minutes in order to process what I had just endured.

At the end of it all – I LOVED IT. I was so affected mentally and emotionally, so for me that means the film and its performances were a success. As difficult as the subject matter is to tackle, I do hope that ‘Kevin’ finds its footing for distribution somehow, somewhere in the U.S. as Tilda’s and Ezra’s performances deserve to be seen.