Only Serious Glamazons Need Apply

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Since I'd messed up and not realized that Young Adult was out this weekend here in New York and not next, it didn't occur to me until I was writing up this week's post on this weekend's movies for Celebrity Beehive - ahem, which you can read right here, ahem - that two of my very very favorite serious actresses slash glamazons were sharing December 9th as co-queens of limited release-dom. Such glories we do not deserve, y'all!

I've made it pretty clear how excited I am about Young Adult - what I haven't made so clear, and haven't been able to until just now because of the dreaded press embargo, is how I feel about Tilda's new movie We Need To Talk About Kevin, which I've seen twice now. Twice! I said a little of this - emphasis on little - at Celebrity Beehive, but here's the gist - Tilda's fantastic. Of course Tilda's always fantastic. But here she carves out all the right corners for this hard-to-carve character. She makes all the horrors of this woman and this woman's situation plain and horrible and clear. But the movie... well, it works in fits. There are sections that work and there are bits that decidedly do not work, and it never entirely gels the way I'd hoped it would when I read Lionel Shriver's wonderful, wonderful book.

Being familiar with director Lynne Ramsey's work I knew she'd probably be cutting out most or all of Shriver's sharp prose - the book is so well written I was forced to stop every half paragraph to quote something new to whoever was closest - and doing what you gotta do when you make a movie, turn the words into pictures. And sometimes this works and she finds wonderful visual terms to express the book's ideas with - Tilda standing next to a roaring jackhammer to drown out a crying baby is one of the year's best moments - and sometimes it doesn't... often it doesn't, more often than I'd like it hits the nail square on the head when it's begging for a little less center.

Like I said I've seen the film twice now and both of those times I was insanely lucky enough to have Q&As with Tilda herself present after the film, and each time she's spoken so eloquently about the film and about the book and her love for it and the ideas that it presents that she's almost convinced me to like the film more than where I ultimately end up at. Still it's a gorgeously shot film, and Tilda's terrific, and it has a lot of interesting things to say even if it muddles itself a bit. Read the book first, please. But once you've done that by all means, the movie's got things that are well worth seeing, and ideas well worth pondering too.

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