CARNAGE (2011): A Children's Spat and Four Parents' Curse

Roman Polanski's Carnage, adapted from Yasmina Reza's uproarious play "God of Carnage," makes a remarkable transition from stage to screen, given its restriction mostly to one room.  Polanski has a knack for giving a cinematic touch to chamber pieces; just look at his magnificent Death and the Maiden.  He applies the same approach here, in taking a one-set play and translating its staginess into claustrophobia.  While the play was a hilariously chaotic farce, Polanski's film--no less hilarious--stakes darker territory and turns it into a Sartrean fable in which four tunnel-visioned characters are beholden to each other and eerily forbidden from leaving.



An ambiguous prologue sets up the premise: 11-year-old Zachary gets into a tussle with 11-year-old Ethan on the playground.  Zachary takes a tree branch and smacks Ethan in the face.  Cut to the apartment of Ethan's parents (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), who are discussing with Zachary's parents (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) what needs to be done about the fight.

I won't reveal any more about what happens, except to say that the tumult between the two sets of parents builds so gradually that we hardly realize--until it's too late--that any relevance to the children's fight has been long left behind.  Though all four parents enter into this meeting with the pretense of giving the others' child the benefit of the doubt, their civility is soon stripped away and all that remains is their own selfishness.

Each of the four characters is perfectly oafish in his or her individual way: Foster as a pretentious housewife who dedicates herself to lofty but distant causes; Reilly as a hulking Tom Buchanan-esque man's man who is nonetheless fairly phobic; Waltz as a minute attorney who cannot be separated from his work; and Winslet as a mom whose polite smile masks her complete disgust at all times.  It soon becomes clear that their motives have nothing to do with setting right what their children have done, but with making sure the other parents are put in their place.

The acting is all superb.  Foster in particular captures the slow deterioration of confidence within her character, who begins the film with the upper hand and nearly destroys herself trying to keep it.  Waltz perfectly portrays the glib self-importance of a man whose ringing cell phone is always more important than you are.

Polanski stages the film cleverly, usually sure to include all four characters in each shot, to maintain a certain level of crowdedness all the way through.  As the film progresses, the apartment living room seems to move in on its characters and suffocate them.  Having seen the play, what I noticed more prominently in the film is the characters' repeated attempts to leave, and their inevitable retreat back into the apartment.  The more they try to escape, the more they realize that they cannot, as the two couples are held prisoner by each's inability to cede control to the other.

The movie by its nature is not as farcical and thus doesn't have as many big laughs as the play, but Polanski sees the underlying nastiness at the center of Reza's play and in these four characters.  They seem like normal upper-class people, and you wouldn't want to know any of them.  This is a very angry film, and a very, very funny one.

*** 1/2 out of ****