Sony Unleashes Polanski’s ‘Carnage’ On North Americans

Now that Roman Polanski is a free man again, he can go anywhere and do anything – except in North America. That won’t stop Sony Pictures Classics from distributing Carnage there, though, as they eye an end-of-year bow for his follow-up to The Ghost Writer. Carnage is based off of a Gods of Carnage, a play written by Yasmina Reza that premiered in Zurich in 2006. The film was shot in Paris, but is set in Brooklyn (the possibility of imprisonment will do that to you), and features an all-star cast in Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, and John C. Reilly. Sony Pictures Classics will also be releasing Woody Allen and Pedro Almodóvar’s newest films later this year, while this is the first Polanski film that they have had the pleasure of bringing to theatres.

Gist: The play focuses on two sets of parents. When one of the couple’s children hurts the other in a park, the mothers and fathers meet to talk the matter over together. Over the course of the evening, the adults become increasingly childish, and the night dissolves into chaos. The plot definitely has some Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf undertones, though this seems more mannered toward comedy, and probably won’t be quite as overwhelmingly hellish as Nichols’ film was.

Worth Noting: God and Carnage fared very well when it was brought from Zurich stages to Broadway. It won the 2009 Tony awards for Best Play, Best Direction for Matthew Marchus, and Best Actress for Marcia Gay Harden. Warchus has directed one feature film, Simpatico (which premiered at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival), starring Sharon Stone, Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, and Catherine Keener. It was a critical and financial flop.

Do We Care?: Despite a distinct critical following who stood firmly by The Ghost Writer, it was an alarmingly generic and Hollywood-y picture, a description which can be attributed to his last couple of outings. The name cast and production standards will see Carnage with a similar glossiness to his recent output, but the script seems like it could be more in tune with classic Polanski motifs and themes like psychological deterioration and isolation.