A Wing and a Prayer

It's been a while since I've be truly excited for a film adaptation of a book. When I was younger, books-to-movies used to make me crazy; I love books and movies in equal measure, so the chance to have both, one after the other, could send me into a tizzy. (It's only now, at age 25, that I've started to realize my emotional attachments to art and media might be a touch freakish.) Sometimes the book to movie transition is smooth; other times, not so much.

I crossed my fingers for the Owen Meany movie. I swallowed that book up when I was 12, in the sixth grade, while my peers were still reading the Babysitter's Club Little Sister series, and felt so adult. An Owen Meany movie couldn't fail, right? And then I met "Simon Birch".

I basically peed my pants over The Virgin Suicides. I'd read the book in the fall of my grade 10 year, knowing that Sofia Coppola's movie was already in the pipeline. The book made me cry. I watched the movie on a Christmas eve. They both hit me, in different ways, equally hard.

Which brings me to this year's model: Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. The movie is premiering at Cannes. The book I wasn't expecting to like nearly as much as I did.

I came away from Kevin's final page legitimately terrified of having kids. Granted, 'having kids' is a scary notion on its own, but this was different: what if my kid is horrible? What if they do something horrible? What if I don't love them.

Shriver's novel is oftentimes overwrought, repetitive and insincere. I've never read another book, though, that so thoroughly engrossed me in motherhood. I'm not a mother, won't be for a while, but I came away from this book thinking like a mother. Feeling like a mother, probably, too. I bought my mom a copy to read after I did. I expected her to feel as affected as I had been, but it didn't quite pan out that way. She found it more unsettling than affecting, which I suppose marks the difference between a real mom and a maybe-future-mom.

A few clips from the movie were released this week. It took me two days to finally watch them. I was hoping for Virgin Suicides but expecting another Simon Birch. I'm a fan of SWINTON, and I'd die for John C. Reilly, but I just wasn't buying them in the roles. When I finally bit down and watched the clips (what if I don't love them), I realized that my fears had been misplaced.

The movie, at least, looks good.

We Need to Talk About Kevin clip 3 by Flixgr

My future kids might still turn out to be mass murderers, though.