Tilda Swinton is wonderful as Kevin's mother, Eva. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the movie is divided into two parts: before a catastrophic event and after a catastrophic event. Before the event, Eva is a travel writer who is married to Franklin (played by John C. Reilly) and whose two children are roughly ten years apart in age. Kevin, the older sibling, is played with unearthly horror by Ezra Miller. The film follows Kevin from infancy to toddlerhood to adolescence to high school and slightly beyond. Eva admits, to infant Kevin, that her life is worse with him than it was without him. She finds Kevin impossible to love because of his incessant screaming as a baby. As a toddler, he is defiant in the way that he plays - or doesn't play - with his toys. He throws things, he ruins things, he says hurtful things. Throughout the timeline of the story, he refuses to obey his mother in every way while showing his father unconditional love and affection.
One of the big questions that this movie left me with deals with the nature vs. nurture argument. There is concrete evidence that Eva has never really been able to love Kevin because of how badly he behaves towards her and how well he behaves for his father. The film suggests that Kevin was never really born with a clean slate at all, but rather was doomed before he drew his first breath. He has evil in his eyes and this is without question - but where did it come from? What, if anything, caused it? Who, if anyone, caused it?
Kevin seems to be paying his poor hand forward upon his younger sister by constantly telling her that she is stupid. In one gut-wrenching scene, she says to her mother, "Kevin always calls me stupid and that's what I am. I'm stupid." Are we supposed to believe that Kevin is only as good a person as the mother who has raised him?
Teaching on the front lines for eight years, I've always said that 99.9% of a child's behavior is a result of parenting. I stand by this, but I think I would like to slightly amend it to "99.9% of a child's capability to do truly good things or truly bad things is a result of parenting." The difference, I suppose, is in the severity of the behavior. Parents shape how intrinsically good or bad a child is - this is inarguable in my mind. As we know, kids - and adults, for that matter - make mistakes and do stupid things, which has very little to do with parenting. If the stupid things either repeat themselves or become more severe, it has almost everything to do with parenting. And no, I don't think I need to be a parent to say these things. Ask any teacher whose been in the classroom more than a year if they feel like they are qualified enough to make judgments on what it means to be responsible for children - they would all say that they feel like they have a perfectly sound understanding of the basics of how to develop a child. When you have hundreds of kids that you're responsible for, you quickly learn what techniques work and what techniques fail. I have a very firm understanding of how to do good things to a child's development and also how to do harm to a child's development. But what I struggle with is just how much a child can sense when he/she is very young. Can a newborn baby feel a lack of love from a parent? If so, can a baby remember that forever? If so, can a baby develop spiteful and/or vengeful emotions towards such a parent at a very young age? Can babies carry these feelings with them through childhood and into adolescence?
Eva asks 17-year old (I'm estimating his age) Kevin if he remembers how he got a particular scar on his arm. The injury, we find out, occurred when Kevin was around 6 or 7 years old. Eva accidentally broke his arm when she threw him to the ground during a moment of intense frustration. Kevin never forgave and he certainly never forgot. It wouldn't be a very interesting movie if the genesis of Kevin's bad behavior was when his mother broke his arm. He was a difficult baby from day one. Did he sense that he was unwanted even while still in the womb? We see a shot of Eva and Franklin at the hospital just after Kevin was born - the dad is ecstatic; the mom blankly stares into space, clearly unhappy with her new life. Can a baby sense this? I don't know the answer to that, but it sure makes for a fantastic film.
Since everyone responds to films differently, I rarely come right out and say that you should see a movie, but this is one that you should see. It is perhaps the most devastating story I've ever seen on film. The agony is almost palpable. It left me with difficult questions: What would I do if my son turned out to be a bad person? What would I do if my son was born a bad person? Is the latter even possible? Was Kevin a bad person solely because of his mother? To what extent, if at all, should kids use bad parenting as an excuse to be a bad person? Can someone consciously change the person that they've been molded into? Should we ever give up on a child? Can it ever be too late?
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