Outside of the first shot of the film, in which the audience peers voyeuristically in the distance to witness a possible act of violence, there is little in Carnage to indicate director Roman Polanski’s presence behind the camera. Modestly coming in at a slim 80-minute running time, the most disposable work of the master’s career is a real-time, single-location exercise about two contemporary Brooklyn bourgeois couples who meet for a mature discussion about a schoolyard altercation between their sons, and who end up turning into petty children themselves. Four solid performances — Jodie Foster & John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet & Christoph Waltz — keep Yasmina Reza’s satirical drama above the level of highbrow sitcom … but only just. The bombastically overstated title never delivers on its promise of emotional violence; the characters in ‘Carnage’ are ultimately too shallow to generate any great revelations or catastrophes. That might be Reza’s and Polanski’s point, but after such a forgettable effort, it reads more as their alibi.
The script, adapted by Polanski and Reza from her international hit stage play ‘God of Carnage,’ exhibits glaring theatrical elements whose contrivances become more exposed and distracting when transferred to the film medium. Dialogue is often stilted (it’s no surprise it was originally written in French), and the authorial machinations required to keep the two couples in the same apartment, despite their obvious personality conflicts and heated disagreements (about everything from child development strategies, to marriage, to politics, and so on), become increasingly forced.
Jodie Foster gives a standout performance as Penelope, snobby aesthete and self-righteous writer working on a book “about Darfur.†Foster’s escalating shrillness and desperate refusal to be wrong about anything exposes the deep well of Penelope’s insecurities. This woman would be tough to deal with in person, and Foster makes her no less tough to watch on screen; she doesn’t smooth the character’s edges just to make the entertainment experience less taxing on the audience. In so doing, Foster disrupts Reza’s insidious formula for audience flattery: she makes Penelope all too painfully real, instead of a safe caricature to be comfortably condescended to.
Christoph Waltz is also satisfying as Alan, a smirking realist with a cell phone security blanket and no qualms about doing spin control for an evil pharmaceutical company. Waltz makes the helpless boy at Alan’s core subtly apparent from the beginning, not just sprung out at the end, jack-in-the-box-like, for cheap comic effect. Incidentally, Waltz and his agent are doing a nice job of carving out a niche for him as Hollywood’s go-to actor for speeches delivered with a mouth full of dessert (see ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ strudel; here, he enunciates admirably through cobbler).
John C. Reilly has never been as good at playing the lug as his bulbous face and affectless gape have convinced many he must be. Just because he’s ugly, doesn’t mean he’s Gene Hackman. Reilly gives his standard one-dimensional performance as a politically incorrect house fixtures salesman. The role would be better suited to the bulky force of a James Gandolfini, who played the part on stage. Kate Winslet, meanwhile, shows an admirable lack of ego in taking on the movie’s most thinly drawn part.
Reza’s script is smart enough to avoid tidy third-act resolutions or to pretend to fully diagnose the problems of its characters. But in lieu of a traditional tragic climax, Reza has little to offer as a dramatic substitution. Whereas Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, for example, sets off an atom bomb explosion that turns characters into fallout casualties, Reza provides only a few sputtering fireworks. Nor is she able to match Harold Pinter’s ability (see, as one of many examples, ‘The Homecoming’) to conjure dense psychological tensions from the most minimal elements: a few people, a room, the pregnant pause.
A few people, a boat: Polanski’s movies, particularly the early ‘Knife in the Water’ and ‘Cul-de-sac,’ have always shared an overt kinship with Pinter, especially in the unarticulated atmosphere of menace and threat. With ‘Carnage,’ however, he is forced to settle for Reza’s patronizing light comedy of manners.
Reviewed on October 5th at the 2011 New York Film Festival
