Movie Review: You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here ***** / *****

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.

Written by: Lynne Ramsay based on the book by Jonathan Ames.

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix (Joe), Ekaterina Samsonov (Nina Votto), Alex Manette (Senator Albert Votto), John Doman (John McCleary), Judith Roberts (Joe's Mother), Alessandro Nivola (Governor Williams), Frank Pando (Angel), Dante Pereira-Olson (Young Joe), Vinicius Damasceno (Moises).

 

As a director, Lynne Ramsay seems to like to tell complex stories that she basically strips to the bone, placing us inside her characters heads, without giving us all the information we require to piece everything together. There is Movern Callar, about a woman (Samantha Morton) who wakes up to find her boyfriend dead of a suicide. Instead of doing what he asked, she hides the body, takes his money – and his unfinished novel – and goes on some kind of hedonistic journey to Spain. In her next film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, she is in the mind of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son commits a high school massacre, who never realizes the connection that she shares with her son – which may well explain why she hates him so, and why does what he does. Now, in You Were Never Really Here, that mind is Joe’s (Joaquin Phoenix), a military veteran who now works for a detective as the muscle – his specialty is saving young girls from trafficking and prostitution. His mind if fractured – he is basically a throbbing open wound. All three movies are complex to say the least – and I cannot help but wonder if there is more material that Ramsay shot for all three, that would have, and could have, made them more traditionally narrative films. She’s not interested in that though – as much as she’s interested in these people, whose mind she places us inside, even as they remain unknowable.

 

You Were Never Really Here opens with the aftermath of some kind of violent event – Joe cleaning up, we see tools, and blood – a cheap necklace with a girl’s name on it. He “escapes” from the hotel he’s in, drives to the airport to make a phone call. “It’s done” he says to an answering machine, then hangs up. He lives in Brooklyn, with his aging mother, who he is kind to, and really does love. But his life is one of pain – we see the scares all over his body, his flashbacks to an abusive childhood, and the method he uses to cope with it being the same as it was then – nearly suffocating himself. He also flashes back to his time in the military – glimpses of random violence he saw there. These flashbacks may well be why he specializes in what he does.

 

Most of the movie is made up of one job – he is to find the daughter of a wealthy, powerful state Senator. He has an address, and he really doesn’t have to do much to find her. His preferred weapon in a hammer – and he will use it without mercy. But this job isn’t as simple as the others – there is a higher level conspiracy going on here – one that leads further up than Joe realizes.

 

Like last year’s Good Time, You Were Never Really Here is in many ways a throwback to the cinema of the 1970s. Obvious references here would be Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or Paul Schrader’s Hardcore – both films, in their way, are takes on John Ford’s The Searchers and are about men trying to save young women who do not want to be saved. The last act of You Were Never Really Here complicates that even more though – with implications I’m still working out.

 

As with all of Ramsay’s film, this is a technical marvel – really, she know belongs in the same category as Scorsese, Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc. The sound design, highlighted by Jonny Greenwood’s pulsating score, pummels you from beginning to end – putting us inside right alongside Joe and his brain. Phoenix is brilliant here – if Day-Lewis really is retired, is he our greatest working actor now? Films like The Master, Inherent Vice and this suggest he is – and what a different trio of masterful performances this is. He has never used his eyes better than he does here – and that’s saying something.

 

Ramsay has become one of the best directors working today – and it’s a shame that we’re nearly 20 years into her career, and only have four features from her. She takes her time between movies – the false start of Jane Got Her Gun (and the sexist drivel that resulted when she left the film) didn’t help. She is one of the most distinctive filmmakers around – and You Were Never Really Here is a masterpiece.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: Conclusion

Lynne Ramsay is one of the most fascinating voices in contemporary cinema currently working. She has a background in photography and cinematography, and it’s a background you can see in all of her films – which are primary visual exercises. She is the personification of the old filmmaking edict of “Show, don’t tell”. Her films are all fascinating, and all leave it to the viewer to draw their own conclusions. She trusts the audience enough that she isn’t going to hold their hands and walk them to a pre-determined conclusion.

It’s somewhat sad then that a filmmaker who has been making shorts since 1996 only has four shorts, three features and one heavily re-edited music video (not reviewed as part of the series, because frankly, I didn’t find it that interesting, so I didn’t know what to say about it other than it looks good, but also like a typical music video) to her credit after 18 years – only two of which have happened in the last decade. I don’t know why this is – I still don’t know what she did between 2002’s Movern Callar and 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin – or what if anything she is working on now. The furor that enveloped her after she walked out of Jane Got a Gun last year was mystifying. Many directors have either left or been fired from a movie during production (Stanley Kubrick – One Eyed Jacks - and Martin Scorsese – The Honeymoon Killers - spring to mind, but are hardly alone) but the media treated Ramsay horribly. Apparently, all the legal issues around that have now resolved, so hopefully, Ramsay can move onto to something else. She is a great filmmaker, and one I cannot wait to see more of – hopefully in the near future.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: Swimmer (2012)

Swimmer (2012)
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.
Starring: Tom Litten (The Swimmer).

Swimmer is a very odd short film by Lynne Ramsay – and it’s even odder considering it was commissioned by the BBC and London Olympic Committee to celebrate the 2012 summer games in London. It is a film about a lone swimmer going across the rivers and lakes in Britain, as some patriotic British music plays in the background. We also get snippets of dialogue and music from British films – like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and the theme from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies. The film is shot in stark, beautiful black and white – as the young man cuts through the water. But the film becomes darker as it goes along – children appear on the banks – they very well could have stepped out Lord of the Flies –and while the swimmer eventually gets out of the water, he also returns to it, and sinks underneath – not unlike the protagonist of Ramsay’s first feature Ratcatcher – who dies either a literal or metaphorical death at the end.

The film appears to be a dream that turns into a nightmare – and like all of Ramsay’s films, it remains ambiguous as to its meanings. This is perhaps the only film of Ramsay’s that I don’t really know what to make of it. It’s a haunting a beautiful film – you can see why it was acclaimed (it won the BAFTA for best short film in 2012) and yet its point remains shrouded in mystery. For a promotion film for the Olympics, the film seems almost impossibly dark. While it starts out somewhat romanticizing the dedication of the athlete, who puts everyone and everything outside himself when he’s swimming, it ends in a very dark place about what that actually means. I cannot help but wonder what the London Olympic Committee made of the film they helped pay for.

Whatever Swimmer ultimately means – and even more than Ramsay’s other films, all of which leave it up to the viewer to decide this one remains ambiguous. But damn it if it isn’t haunting and beautiful jus the same. I may not be able to describe the film adequately – but I won’t soon forget it either.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

We Need to Talk Above Kevin (2011)
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.
Written by: Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear based on the novel by Lionel Shriver.
Starring: Tilda Swinton (Eva Khatchadourian), John C. Reilly (Franklin), Ezra Miller (Kevin, Teenager), Jasper Newell (Kevin, 6-8 Years), Rock Duer (Kevin, Toddler), Ashley Gerasimovich (Celia), Siobhan Fallon (Wanda), Alex Manette (Colin), Kenneth Franklin (Soweto).

Some people were just never meant to be parents. That’s the uncomfortable reality that Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin confronts in what could be described as a horror film. The film takes place entirely within the mind of its central character, Eva (Tilda Swinton) who is looking back over her life with her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and her son Kevin (played at various ages by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and most memorably Ezra Miller). Kevin becomes a monster – someone who commits one of those all too frequent mass killings at his high school – but what made him that way? In Eva’s mind, he was simply born an awful little kid – one who screamed constantly as a baby, wouldn’t talk for longer than normal, ignored her, bullied her, deliberately refused to potty train, and who exists simply to destroy her. Some people have complained that Kevin in this movie is basically a devil spawn – like Damien from The Omen – but it’s important to remember that the movie locks us into Eva’s perception of the events from the beginning. Every kid cries and throws tantrums (I say this as someone who has a nightly battle with a two and half year old, who at first refuses to get in the bath, and then refuses to get out), every kid seems to can be disobedient and frustrating, and every kid can look at their parents with the same look of anger or disgust (normally my daughter looks at me with nothing but love – but she does have what me and my wife have dubbed her “Jack Nicholson in The Shining look”). Kevin becomes a monster during the course of We Need to Talk About Kevin – but how much is because he was born that way, and how much is because he had a mother who quite clearly from the beginning of his life doesn’t bond with him, doesn’t like him and wishes she could go back to her old life before he came along. I’ve read Lionel Shriver’s brilliant novel twice now – once before I became a parent, once after – and seen Ramsay’s equally brilliant movie more times than that – and I still don’t know the answer. That’s because neither the book nor the movie really seek to answer it – they’re just asking the question.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the best book to screen adaptations I have ever seen – and what makes that all the more impressive is how Ramsay captures the themes of the movie without resorting to the voice over narration that was implied in Shriver’s novel. Both the novel and the book are locked into Eva’s perception of events, not the events themselves, but how she remembers them – but Ramsay achieves this in a cinematic, rather than a literary, way – which is a more difficult trick to pull off. The movie is awash in red – fitting for a movie with so much violence – but very little of it is actually blood. One of the first scenes we see is Eva in what looks like a blood orgy – but is really a tomato festival in Italy, where the participants throw tomatoes at each other, and become drenched in them. Later, after the events in the high school, Eva will run away from someone she recognizes in the supermarket – and hide down an aisle in front of a shelf full of tomato soup. The freedom that the tomatoes festival represented is now gone – canned and shelved. Another recurring scene in the movie is Eva scrubbing down her house from the blood red paint that has been thrown on it – soaking her in more red. Eva is a character who went from free to a hollow, husk of person – someone who is punishing herself for her own failings.

Swinton is the perfect actress to play Eva. Her look is more exotic, almost otherworldly, so right from the beginning, she doesn’t quite fit into our idea of a suburban mother. She doesn’t belong there – and she knows it. Their perfect suburban house is too perfect – so neat and tidy it looks like a model home instead of one where people actually live. Her husband, Franklin (Reilly), wants to believe that his is a picture perfect family – while Eva sees everything Kevin does as a sign of his evil, Franklin refuses to see anything wrong with his son at all. His is what Swinton in an interview called “Hey buddy” parenting style – never addressing the real concern, and almost willfully ignoring it. The title of the movie is apt because this couple really does need to talk about Kevin – which is something they never really do. They ignore him, offer him superficial parenting that differs radically from each other in every way except that in both cases it’s fake – and Kevin senses this. It’s possible to watch the movie, where Kevin seems to be an evil little shit for almost its entire runtime, and still feel sympathy for him. Growing up in this house couldn’t have been easy.

Swinton is remarkable in this role – its perhaps the greatest performance of a career full of them. Like Samantha Morton in Movern Callar, it’s a performance that is largely wordless – or at least the best parts of it are. The film lets us inside of her head, to see through her eyes. She has an idealized vision of her life with Franklin before Kevin – represented by repeatedly returning to a rain soaked New York street that is impossibly romantic. There are other idealized visions in the film – the way she looks at Franklin and their daughter Celie dancing for example. She film is about her journey from that place, to the broken women we see after Kevin does what he does – a woman alone, in her dilapidated house, working for a low rent travel agency, and seemingly barely existing at all. Kevin forces her to confront her own failings – and she begins to see herself in him. Ramsay draws these parallels visually – the casting of Ezra Miller is great, not just because of who great he is, but because she shares the same androgynous features that Swinton has. In a scene where the pair go mini-golfing and Swinton complains about “fat people” Kevin tells her she can be “kinda harsh sometimes” to which she says “You’re one to talk”. “Yeah, I am. Where do you think I get it from”. Kevin is not much like Franklin – he’s able to put on an act to fool him – but his view of humanity is miserable, and so is Eva’s. I’m not sure Eva realizes that until Kevin forces her to.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a remarkable film by Ramsay – that grows the more times I see it. Unfortunately, the film was underrated when it came out just a few years ago, but I think it’s one that is eventually going to recognized as the masterwork it is. It’s Ramsay’s best film to date. I just hope she gets to make more like it soon.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: Movern Callar (2002)

Movern Callar (2002)
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.
Written by: Liana Dognini & Lynne Ramsay based on a novel by Alan Warner.
Starring: Samantha Morton (Morvern Callar), Kathleen McDermott (Lanna).

Movern Callar was critically acclaimed on the festival circuit in 2002, and during its release the following year – and yet I think its reputation has grown even more in the last decade or so – it’s even made the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 250 acclaimed films of the 21^st Century. That makes sense, as Movern Callar is one of those movies that grows in your mind after seeing it. I remember walking out of the film in 2003 confused and a little frustrated by the film. Who was Movern Callar? Why does she never let the audience into her as she does what she does in the film? And yet, the film haunted me – so much so that even though I had not seen the film since until starting this series, it remained remarkably clear in my mind. It is stunning film in a lot of ways – not least because of Samantha Morton’s brilliant performance in the title role. The film gets deeper the more I think about it – I doubt I’ll go another decade before revisiting it again.

The first scene of Movern Callar has her waking up, and finding her boyfriend dead on the floor, his blood pooling, after a suicide. He leaves her a note on the computer – telling her he loves her, but she couldn’t understand why he did what he did. The note also includes instructions for submitting his just completed novel. Movern ignores the body, and the note, for a while and heads out into the night and rides the subway. Eventually, she’ll get together with her best friend – Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) and go out clubbing, eventually ending up at a party, and sex with some anonymous strangers, before Movern and Lanna walk home the next morning – and Movern confesses that her boyfriend is “gone”. She doesn’t say where or how – just that he’s gone. Eventually, she will change the name on her boyfriend’s novel and submits it under her own name. When she can no longer ignore the body on the floor, she takes a saw to it – while listening to the mix tape her boyfriend left for her as a Christmas present – and disposes of it. She uses the money in her boyfriend’s account that he left for his funeral to pay for a holiday to Spain for her and Lanna – which results in more clubbing, more partying, more anonymous sex – before the pair head out into the middle of nowhere and get lost. The publisher calls and offers Movern a generous deal for “her” novel.

That’s the plot of the movie in a nutshell – although the movie doesn’t seem all that interested in plot – certainly not in any sort of linear point a to point b way. Based on that description, you may well think Movern is a sociopath – someone who is unfeeling and doesn’t care for her boyfriend at all. That she is, above all, a selfish monster. Yet, that’s not how the movie plays at all. Much of this is due to Samantha Morton’s brilliant performance as Movern. Morton has one of the more expressive faces in movies – it served her well as the mute love interest in Woody Allen’s Sweet & Lowdown as well as one of the floating psychics in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Here you study her face for some sort of insight into why she does what she does – but it never really comes. Like Ramsay’s previous film, Ratcatcher, if you are expecting a scene where the main character breaks down and finally explains her actions, you’re going to be disappointed. No one ever finds out what Movern did – and the film never explains why she did it. In his review, Roger Ebert speculates that her motivations are based on class – the boyfriend is obviously fairly well off given the apartment they share, and yet Movern still works at the supermarket. The note he leaves her is rather condensing. In Ebert’s view, this was a fairly new relationship, and Movern does what she does to take care of herself. That’s as good of an explanation as any, but doesn’t fully explain everything. There does seem to be an element of class to Movern – she and Lanna seem used to having no money, and the trip to Spain floors Lanna with its extravagance even though the resort the go to is kind a dump. If her boyfriend killed himself, he doesn’t need the money he left behind – or the money his novel would bring. But Movern does. Still, though, I do think there is something deeper behind Movern’s motivations. Her slow break from Lanna – who is seemingly content to continue to revel in their hedonist lifestyle forever, whereas Movern seems to want to go and search for something “more” – starts when Lanna confesses that she once slept with Movern’s boyfriend. Their last scene together, where Movern tells Lanna she’s “going back” to Spain, and invites Lanna along again to which Lanna replies that she’s “happy here” and that Movern should be as well as stop looking for “something more” seals their breakup. Movern is in some bizarre sort of mourning – one that she lets no one else in on. Morton’s performance is mesmerizing simply because it never quite lets us inside. Her face has a haunted look to it though, one that suggests deep pain while at the same time appearing perfectly normal to someone not paying attention. I’m not quite sure how Morton did this, but it is a brilliant piece of screen acting.

The film is a bold, stylistic step forward for Ramsay as well. She has always made films from one characters point of view – from her shorts, to Ratcatcher and on to We Need to Talk About Kevin – and here she does the same basic thing for Movern, except her interior world remains closed off from us. A decade ago when I saw the film I was confused and frustrated – and I expect many viewers still would be. They want closure, they want an answer to all the questions Movern Callar raises, as a movie, and as a character, and Ramsay’s film and Morton’s performance don’t give us that. I found that frustrating 11 years ago, but find it oddly exhilarating now. Any answers Ramsay could give would seem disappointing compared to what we read into Movern as we watch the film. I didn’t think that much of Movern Callar 11 years ago. I love it now.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: Ratcatcher (1999)

Ratcatcher (1999)
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay   
Written by: Lynne Ramsay.
Starring: William Eadie (James), Tommy Flanagan (Da), Mandy Matthews (Ma), Michelle Stewart (Ellen), Lynne Ramsay Jr. (Anne Marie), Leanne Mullen (Margaret Anne), John Miller (Kenny), Jackie Quinn (Mrs. Quinn), James Ramsay (Mr. Quinn).

In Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay’s feature film debut, she continues the same themes that were in her trilogy of short films – Small Deaths, Kill the Day and Gasman. Like those films, Ratcatcher takes places in the lower income tenements of Glasgow, and is about the painful transition from childhood to adolescence into adulthood. The film locks onto the point of view of James, a young boy who lives with his family in 1973, where Glasgow was mired in a garbage strike that littered the lower income areas with black, plastic garbage bags – which of course, attracted rats. James seems like a fairly normal boy on the cusp of being a teenager – but the first time we see him playing in the canal that runs through his neighborhood, he does something that many children do – but with disastrous results. Playing with another boy in the canal, James gets angry and pushes the boy down, under the water. When he doesn’t come back up again, James runs off, leaving the other boy dead in the canal. No one suspects James of having anything to do with this death – he “gets away with it” – but in doing so becomes a shell of boy, raked with guilt, but unable to do anything about it. Again and again in the film, it will be what James’ inaction that haunts him, much more than his actions.

The film opens with its most haunting visual – a slow motion shot of the soon to be dead boy wrapping himself in his mother’s curtain – which as many people point out, looks like a funeral shroud. Gradually the shot’s speed quickens, and snaps to full motion when his mother slaps upside the head and says “Look at my curtain!” The people in Ratcatcher may live in a low income tenement, and spend the entirety of the movie literally surrounded by garbage, but they still try and make their homes look nice. James’ father brings home an unused can of paint he finds – high quality stuff – and he plans on repainting with it. His mother doesn’t see much of a point – because they’re moving soon (or so she hopes) in a more upscale complex. Everyone in the movie hopes to move there soon – they’re just waiting for their approval. In one of the films few moments outside the slate grey, depressing tenement, James heads out on a bus to the new apartments – surrounded by beautiful fields. It is a moment of beauty in an otherwise grey existence.

James is basically a good kid – one who made a bad mistake, and is stricken with guilt over it – but he’s nicer to the outsiders in his age group than the roaming gang of boys who terrorize everyone – at least when they are alone. He befriends Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), a gawky, awkward girl a few years older, with thick glasses, who is picked on and used by that pack of teenage boys for sex – something she doesn’t really want, but goes along with in the hopes that perhaps that will make them be nicer to her. When she and James are alone, they have a sweet relationship with each other – even when sleeping in the same bed, or bathing together, there is nothing sexual between them – the two simply bond over being outsiders, and need to say little to each other. Even this doesn’t make James fish her glasses out of the canal for her when the gang throws them in though – even though he can see them (he does go back later in the movie to try to retrieve them) or make him step up late in the film when the boys are “taking turns” with her – and she looks at him with look that quietly pleads for help. James wants to be a good – he simply cannot will himself into action. The same could be said for his friendship with Kenny (John Miller) who has development issues. James can be kind and patient when there’s no one else around, but when the gang shows up and picks on Kenny, he does nothing to intervene. When Kenny ties his pet rat to a balloon and sends him “to the moon” (in the films one fantastical sequence), James indulges Kenny’s delusion for a while – not wanting to tell him what really happened to the rat – but when he grows frustrated late in the film, he will cruelly tell Kenny what happened. James is like a lot of children – he desperately wants to fit in and he desperately wants to do the right thing – especially after his actions at the beginning of the film – but when they two conflict, he takes the cowardly way out.

The films ending is deliberately left ambiguous – which is another hallmark of Ramsay’s work, as she doesn’t like to force-feed anything to the audience, but rather prefers to let them form their own opinion. No matter how you read the final scenes – whether metaphorical or literal – they do provide James with a sort of relief that the rest of the movie doesn’t. It’s ending that calls to mind two other great films about childhood – Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (Bresson is a director Ramsay has admitted is an influence on her). Ratcatcher is not the masterpiece those two films are, but is a remarkably assured directorial debut. The film never plays quite the way we expect it to – there are no scenes of James’ eventually breaking down and confessing his sins to be forgiven them – he doesn’t ask for or expect forgiveness. Ramsay locks into his perception early on, but allows the audience to read what they want to in James – and his facial expressions, which is all Ramsay gives us in the films most crucial moments. That shows a rare confidence in Ramsay that most experienced filmmakers do not have. Right from the start of her feature career, Ramsay showed a rare maturity in her work.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: Three Early Shorts

Small Deaths (1996)
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.
Written by: Lynne Ramsay

Kill the Day (1996)

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Written by: Lynne Ramsay

Gasman (1998)

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Written by: Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay went to film school – but because of her photography background went for the cinematography tract – but quickly realized she wanted more control than that – that she wanted to direct. Eventually she was able to move into the director’s program, and made her first short, Small Deaths, as her graduate project. The film went on to win a Jury Prize in the short film section of Cannes in 1996. Two other shorts followed in the next two years – including Gasman, which won her another Jury prize at Cannes, before she got the funding to make her debut feature – Ratcatcher in 1999. All three short films are worth watching, not just because they offer a glimpse into Ramsay’s early promise and her visual style, but because they work brilliantly as shorts as well.

Surprisingly, my favorite of the three is her first – the film she made as a student, Small Deaths. The film is only 11 minutes long, but tells three separate incidents in the life of Anne Marie (played by Lynne Ramsay Jr. in the first, Genna Gillan in the second and Anne Marie Kennedy in the third). The title refers to how each incident represents Anne Marie losing something – a part of her innocence – and how that is often done in small steps, not one huge one. In the first, Anne Marie watches as her mother helps her father to get ready to go down the pub. This is presented as a normal day for this family – the wife working hard, the father getting ready to go out, get drunk and return late that night, if at all. She watches the way her father treats her mother with casual cruelty, and then leaves. The second, taking place a few years later has Anne Marie playing with some friends in a field – and making a grisly discovery of a dying cow –once again showing the cruelty of the people around her, who do not see anything wrong with what they have done. The third takes place, again a few years later, as Anne Marie and her boyfriend are hanging out in the staircase of a rundown apartment building – when her boyfriend announces he has to go “upstairs” for a minute – and leaves her behind. Shortly after, he calls for her to come up – and plays a cruel joke on her, with the help of the many junkies living in that apartment upstairs.

Small Deaths is about the death of innocence, one drop at a time, as Anne Marie comes face to face with casual cruelty again and again – and seems to be the only one who registers it as such. The film conveys this almost entirely through images – there is not much dialogue and what there is, is rather perfunctory. The movie takes Anne Marie’s point of view – which Ramsay will do throughout her career – and allows us to see things as she sees them. It’s a dark little film – and different from most loss of innocence movies, as it doesn’t take one large moment at the reason for the loss, but rather the slow accumulation of small details.

My least favorite of the three shorts is her second one – Kill the Day – which isn’t a bad short by any means, just not quite as good as the other two. Once again, Ramsay mainly tells her story through images – very little is spoken in the 18 minute short – and is locked onto the main characters point of view. The film is about a junkie (James Ramsay), who in the films best sequence, steals a backpack out of a locker in order to get money for drugs – and hides in the bathroom stall of the Ladies room as he goes through it (the shot of him slowly raising his off the ground so he cannot be seen or heard is the film’s best image, in a short full of them). Like Small Deaths, the film also takes place over the span of years – we see him in prison, being taunted by the guards, we see him later, out of prison, trying hard to go straight. At times, we flash back to his younger days.

Kill the Day is a more ambitious film than Small Deaths – Ramsay is trying to play with time a little bit here, mixing the chronology up, instead of having three different set pieces like in Small Deaths. The film works as a portrait of a junkie, from his point of view, as he screws up his life, and tries to fix it – but perhaps Ramsay was a little too ambitious with this film – trying to do in 18 minutes what normally would require a feature. It is still a striking visual film, just not quite as good as her other two shorts.

Ramsay’s best known short is probably her third – Gasman – made in 1998. Once again, Ramsay locks into one characters point of view. This time, it’s a young girl. The first few minutes of the movie have all the heads of the adults cut off – representing the way the girl sees everything at eye level. It’s Christmas time, and the girl is getting dressed up to go with her daddy to a Christmas party. She, her dad and her brother head off to the party – as they are walking, they stop and talk to a woman. Her dad gives her money, and she’s angry that it’s not enough. He then takes her kids with them as well to the party. There is singing and dancing – and everything seems to be going fine. But why is that other little girl sitting on her daddy’s lap? Why is she also calling him daddy?

This 15 minute short is masterful in many ways – most notably for how it adopts the point of view of a child who doesn’t fully understand what is happening, or what she sees. She just knows she doesn’t like it very much – and she behaves like many children would – by acting out towards the other little girl, around the same age as she is – who is trying to take her daddy from her.

The film is linked with Small Deaths in many ways – this easily could have been another sequence in that film – as it shows a small moment in the girls life that will mark her forever – a loss of innocence, where she realizes that things are not quite how she thought they were –even if she doesn’t fully understand what that means.

The individual shorts are all wonderful – especially Small Deaths and Gasman. Kill the Day is undoubtedly the most ambitious of the three films, but it’s also the least successful – Ramsay doesn’t quite pull off what she attempting in that film. She does in the other two. It’s easy to see why Ramsay went on to direct features after these three shorts – all of which are connected to what she would do later in her career. They are interesting as part of Ramsay’s career – but also as shorts unto themselves.

The Films of Lynne Ramsay: An Introduction

Considering the other directors I have done a retrospective series on – Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch – the choice of Lynne Ramsay as the next one may strike some as a little strange. She doesn’t have the profile of those other filmmakers – or the number of films on her resume, which at the moment is just three features and four shorts over the last 18 years. So why did I pick Ramsay? A few reasons really. Recently, when I wrote a piece about the Bechdel test, and how I would prefer that we spend more energy complaining about the lack of female writers and directors rather than obsessing over a film passes a simple test that doesn’t ensure representation, I mentioned that Ramsay is probably my favorite female filmmaker working right now. That’s true, but it even surprised me somewhat that I came to that conclusion – and not say Sofia Coppola, Sarah Polley, Kathryn Bigelow, Andrea Arnold or Claire Denis (to throw out five names that easily could lay claim to the same, admittedly meaningless, title). Ramsay’s mantle pretty much rested on only one film – 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin – which I loved more than most did. I had never seen her short work or even her 1999 feature debut Ratcatcher – and hadn’t revisited her 2002 film Movern Callar since I saw it in theaters more than a decade ago. Perhaps saying that Ramsay was my favorite female filmmaker working right now was a bit of an overstatement – when I really should have said that in We Need to Talk About Kevin – she had made my favorite film in recent years directed by a woman.

All of this led me to pick Ramsay when I made a conscious decision to pick a female filmmaker to do a brief retrospective on. Women still are grossly underrepresented behind the camera, and that needs to change. Ramsay, who hopefully will not have her career derailed because of a dispute that saw her leave her latest film right before shooting was to begin (and the media firestorm, which included some blatantly sexist remarks against Ramsay), because she strikes me as just the type of female filmmaker the cinema world needs right now.

I remember a few years ago, having a conversation with another (male) film buff, who complained that female filmmakers make films that aren’t very visually interesting. That they concentrate too much on writing and performance, and not enough on how a film looks and feels. This was a ridiculous claim at the time  – just think of the distinctive visual films of those five female filmmakers above for example, or look back through cinema history to the like of Chantal Ackerman, Jane Campion, Ida Lupino or hell, even Leni Riefenstahl for further proof. I know what he was talking about – it’s the same thing Nicole Holofcener is always hit with when she makes a film – like last year’s Enough Said, which some complained was “too sitcom-ish” – proving, if nothing else, that they don’t watch many sitcoms.

Even if it were true, than Ramsay wouldn’t fit into that narrowly defined role set out by this other guy. Ramsay is the very definition of a filmmaker who shows, not tells – even in something like We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was a very “literary” book, that Ramsay turned into a very “cinematic” movie.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough in this introduction. Let’s get to the first actual post – about Ramsay’s three short films made before her debut feature.

Movie Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin ****
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay.
Written by: Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear based on the novel by Lionel Shriver.
Starring: Tilda Swinton (Eva Khatchadourian), John C. Reilly (Franklin), Ezra Miller (Kevin, Teenager), Jasper Newell (Kevin, 6-8 Years), Rock Duer (Kevin, Toddler), Ashley Gerasimovich (Celia).

I have read Lionel Shriver’s brilliant novel We Need to Talk About Kevin twice now. Both times, I loved it, but I was amazed by how different my reaction was to the novel each time. Perhaps it shouldn’t be too big a surprise, since the first time I read the novel was about five years ago, and the second time was in preparation for the movie adaptation, and in between, I had my first child. I felt more sympathy for Kevin the second time through the novel. What is brilliant about the novel is that it is told entirely from Eva’s point of view – so that we can never be sure if what we are reading is the truth, or her perceptions. Was Kevin an evil little shit right from the beginning, destined to one day walk into the high school gym and massacre his fellow students, or was Kevin warped by the fact that he has a mother, who from the moment he is born, hates him? It is the central question that the novel never answers, because there is no definitive answer. What is amazing about Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of the novel is that it keeps that central question intact. I recently complained about the movie version of One Day, saying that the filmmakers never found a way to make what worked in the book work in a movie – they failed to turn the literary into the cinematic. That is not a problem Ramsay’s film has. It is a brilliant adaptation of a brilliant book, but it is also clearly a cinematic achievement. This is one of the best directed films of the year.

The movie flashes back and forth in time, as we see Eva (Tilda Swinton) trying to raise Kevin (played at various stages by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and most memorably by Ezra Miller), alongside her sweet, well-meaning but clueless husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and then scenes after Kevin has perpetrated his high school massacre, with Eva,  alone, trying to deal with her guilt, and visiting Kevin on a weekly basis.

Some critics have complained that the movie presents Kevin not unlike the movie The Omen presents its demon child Damien. But this misses the point entirely. First of all, the movie is clearly told from Eva’s point of view, meaning that we see Kevin as she sees him – as the child who came along and ruined her life. Before Kevin, she had a job where she travelled around the world, which essentially stopped when Kevin was born so she could stay at home with Kevin and raise him (despite the fact that they both have high paying jobs, and Franklin is the mother nurturing of the two, it is never even brought up that he should stay at home). Eva sees everything Kevin does as a calculated plot to annoy her – even though much of what he does could be construed as just being a kid. Ramsay also underlines the fact that Eva and Kevin are remarkably similar, even though they hate each other. The casting of Ezra Miller is particularly ingenious, as he has the same angular face and androgynous features as Swinton does. As well, she emphasizes how both hold themselves outside – and above – their peers, seeing themselves as better. In one particularly chilling exchange, Eva goes on about fat people, and how they’re fat because they eat all the time to which Kevin responds “You know, you can be kind of harsh”, Eva responds “You’re one to talk” to which Kevin says “Yeah. I wonder where I got it from.” Eva hates Kevin, and Kevin hates Eva because in each other they see themselves – and don’t like what they see. This is also why Eva is so easily able to love her second child – a daughter, because she is so different.

Swinton’s performance as Eva is quite simply remarkable. She has long established herself as an actress who has no fear, and will take on the riskiest projects. Her Oscar win for Michael Clayton is a great performance, but one of her safer choices. Think back to her remarkable work as an unsympathetic drunk in Julia or how she learned to speak Italian with a Russian accent in I Am Love for recent examples. But her work in We Need to Talk About Kevin is on a different level from even those great performances. She isn’t afraid to make Eva completely unsympathetic – she is, after all, a mother who hates her own child. It’s even better considering the way Ramsay shoots the movie – with little dialogue in long stretches, establishing mood with its haunting score (by Johnny Greenwood) and her visuals. Swinton does so much in her silences here. It is one of the very best performances of the year. It should also be mentioned that newcomer Ezra Miller is great as well as the teenage Kevin – with his cold, dead eyes and calculating stare and his calm chilling delivery.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the best films of the year – and one of the most difficult. This is a dark, depressing film that looks at a side of parenthood rarely seen in the movies. It was a brave film for Swinton and Ramsay to make – and the fact that they pulled it off so brilliantly is a testament to their skill.