Carnage/2011/Sony Pictures Classics/80 min.
By Michael Wilmington
“Carnage” shows us once again what a master Roman Polanski is of the claustrophobia of anxiety – even though this time the fear he paints is more comic and light-hearted than the sheer grinding terror of say, “Repulsion” or “Rosemary’s Baby.” In his new movie, which was adopted by the Iranian-French writer Yasmina Reza from her hit play “God of Carnage,” director Polanski traps us, once again, in close quarters and, once again also, in a tense game and battle of social intercourse that is going to degenerate into absurdity and cruelty.
We are in the well-appointed Brooklyn apartment of the Longstreets: genial, rough-looking Michael (John C. Reilly), a salesman, and high-strung Penelope (Jodie Foster), a writer. Michael and Penelope have invited over a couple they don’t know – Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), a corporate lawyer and an investment broker – to discuss the playground fracas between their respective sons, Ethan and Zachary (played by Eliot Berger and Polanski’s own son Elvis). The Cowan boy attacked the Longstreet kid and broke some teeth.
Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz.
There’s tension right from the start, despite the atmosphere of good-natured civility and manners, and writer Reza and Polanski nurse it along expertly. Michael, whose eyes glower while his mouth grins, is a bit too friendly, and too loudly obliging. We sense that, though he’s talking the talk, he’s no liberal. Penelope, the real bleeding heart of the two, is wired tight, more and more uneasy and nervous.
Alan, slick, conniving and full of lightly veiled disdain for his social inferiors (almost everybody, but especially the Longstreets), keeps rudely interrupting the confab to bark orders over his cell phone. As for Nancy, she keeps her feelings tightly reined in, until the memorable moment when she suddenly projectile-vomits all over the Longstreet’s coffee table and Penelope’s treasured book of Kokoschka reproductions. From there it gets worse, and uglier, and funnier.
I’ve never seen the play, but I’m not surprised it’s an international critical and audience hit. The model, of course, is Edward Albee’s venom-laced, acidly funny chamber drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and the play that probably influenced Albee: Eugene O’Neill’s great tragic family drama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
As in those two 20th century theater classics, “God of Carnage” (I prefer that title) gives us a small group of people, all hiding something, all gradually losing their inhibitions and their secrets, as they consume more and more booze.
So, one could use “Carnage” as a springboard for little essays on class warfare or the discreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie or the beast that lies beneath all our skins or even on cell-phone etiquette. (What’s Alan like when he’s driving?) Or one could delve into the symbolism of the Longstreets’ lost hamster, a hapless creature who may be the equivalent for George and Martha’s “lost” child in “Virginia Woolf.” But, after 15 minutes of watching this filmed play, I knew why it had gotten all its awards, why Polanski wanted to do it and why he was the ideal director for the piece.
Director Roman Polanski and his supportive cast.
Throughout his career, Polanski, 78, made movies (from “Knife in the Water” to “Repulsion,” “Cul-de-Sac” and “The Pianist”) about people afraid, people trapped – by society, by evil, by their family, by their psyches. The protagonists here, like the upper-class partiers in Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” are bizarrely imprisoned in this apartment, unable somehow to leave no matter how many times they try to break it up. (It becomes the film’s running joke.)
Is it any wonder that Polanski, would still be the greatest of all modern neo-noir cineastes, even in a dark-and-light comic piece like “Carnage”? Polanski is a past master of nervous décor and subjective camerawork. And the cast of “Carnage” is terrific: four actors of consummate skill, attacking Reza’s dialogue (translated from the French by Reza and Polanski) with the virtuosity of four perfectly matched players in a string quartet. Waltz is the best of them: a well-dressed, well-educated, snide wolf of a man. But they’re all first-rate and it’s a pleasure to watch them act, react and interact, and then find another reason not to break up – Foster showing us how a woman of conscience and sensibility can fall apart, Reilly smilingly devolves from mediator to brute, Winslet literally losing it.
Yasmina Reza
Reza’s play is a crackerjack theater piece. Polanski brilliantly keeps up that anxious, frayed-nerve edge between civility and savagery, madness and normality throughout. It matters not a whit, I think, that the script may fudge details of Brooklyn bourgeois life, as some New York critics have complained. “God of Carnage” was originally written in French, and originally staged in Zurich, and it’s been staged all over the world. That’s what the piece is all about really: Life as theater. Theater as life. Civilization. And stage fright.
Yasmina Reza photo from LA Times/Pascal Victor, ArtcomArt
“Carnage” opens today in LA and New York.
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