Foster, Reilly, Waltz and Winslet stuff their pie-holes in Carnage
*** 1/2 (out of five stars) Carnage. Written by Yasmina Reza & Roman Polanski, based on a play by Yasmina Reza. Directed by Roman Polanski.
Two couples, strangers to each other, meet in a Brooklyn apartment. Broker Nancy (Kate Winslet) and corporate lawyer Alan (Christoph Waltz) are a New York power couple; writer Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly), a hardware supply salesman, are a pair with a working class/bohemian feel. The purpose of their meeting is to work out an amicable settlement of a schoolyard fight between their kids, wherein Penelope and Michael’s son lost a couple of teeth. The tone at first is cordial, as all think of themselves as “evolved” human beings, and are nothing if not reasonable people. And indeed, all goes well—until Penelope uses a few provocative terms to describe the beating (“intentional” and “disfigured”), and Alan the lawyer, who annoys everyone by not turning off his cell phone, turns to Penelope and asks—with threadbare civility—“Now why would you use a word like ‘disfigured’?”
Thus begins the descent into decidedly unevolved behavior that is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play, The God of Carnage. To call this film enjoyable is perhaps to stretch the meaning of “enjoyable” for some people. By turns appalling, outrageous, dispiriting, and yes, hilarious, the best comparison to it might be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—albeit in a polite urban setting instead of an academic one. The pleasure here, as in the Edward Albee play, lies in watching the complacent masks people wear in public slip, droop, and fall away. Not exactly a good date movie, this.
What it does offer is four terrific actors making the most of a script so sharp it may just make your ears bleed. Reza, a daughter of Iranian/Hungarian Jews working in Paris, has written material that is not only bitterly funny, but transcends our expectations in multiple ways. We naturally expect the conflict to unfold along the lines of the fight in the schoolyard, with each set of parents loyal to his/her kid. But as Reza works out the implications of her premise, the players constantly make and break other alliances with each other—alliances of class and sex—as well as break along the fault-lines of their troubled marriages. The cross-crossing patterns of recrimination and disappointment, as well as compassion, leave an impression that is bewildering in its complexity—Inception for grown-ups.
There are no weaknesses in the cast. As the chronically aggrieved Penelope, Jodie Foster digs beneath type here, uncovering the moral smugness that often lurks beneath the sort of political correctness exemplified by, yes, Jodie Foster. Winslet the wan broker and Reilly the doltish plumbing supply salesman are more alike than you’d expect, insofar as they’ve both given up on expecting fulfillment from their respective relationships. And Waltz, with his silky condescension, plays what might as well be the domesticated descendant of the cultured Nazi he played in Inglorious Basterds.
It comes as little surprise that this concentrated bit of misanthropy comes from Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist), still an international fugitive from a statutory rape charge in California. Indeed, it’s not hard to see what might have attracted him to this material, featuring as it does a basic transgression (an assault in a schoolyard…or a sex crime) that must be remedied by people who ultimately reveal themselves to be as flawed as those they purport to judge. Like the meeting between Reza’s characters, both the legal and the public trials of Polanski have become circuses. In Polanski’s defense, after a childhood spent fleeing the Nazis, an adolescence chaffing under Communism, the murder of his wife by the Manson gang, and the transnational bungling of his rape case, he at least comes by his jaundiced view of people honestly.
It would be fair to call Carnage misanthropic, but that description would not be complete. There are moments of unexpected sympathy here too, and a kind of eloquence amid the screeching. I didn’t come out of this movie hating humanity, but with the fondness that comes from looking at it from a wry and pleasant distance. Perhaps this is the way Roman Polanski lives with his memories.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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