John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet in Carnage.

Carnage, based on the successful play God of Carnage, tells the tale of one meeting between two sets of parents whose son's have been in a fight. It all begins politely enough, but as the afternoon wears on it degenerates into a drunken argument over a wide range of topics that extends far beyond their children. It's filled with witty moments and great acting, but it also feels very staged and you have to accept that the visiting couple remains in the apartment on the flimsiest of excuses.

Penelope (Foster) and Michael (Reilly) are a Brooklyn couple whose 11 year old son was hit in the mouth by Nancy (Winslet) and Alan's (Waltz) son who was either armed with or carrying (depending upon who you ask) a stick.

Michael is a wholesaler and Penelope is sort of a writer. Judging by their apartment, they're fairly well off, but not in the same league as Alan and Nancy who are a corporate lawyer and financial manager respectively.

Alan is representing a pharmaceutical company in a case and his cell phone conversations constantly interrupt the proceedings. He and Penelope clash immediately and the longest as she is a socially conscious liberal activist. She is the one most concerned with handling things in what she thinks of as a civilized manner, while he is the most willing to dismiss the incident as merely boys being boys.

The biggest problem with the film is that Alan and Nancy get up to leave several times, making it as far as the elevator on occasion, but always end up back in the apartment on the flimsiest of excuses and well beyond the reason of good manners. The film runs just an hour and fifteen minutes and that's about an hour more than Alan and Nancy would probably have remained in real life.

Some stage to film productions try to expand the story to take advantage of the freedom of not being on stage, but apart from brief long shots of the playground where the hitting incident takes place that bookend the movie, the entire film is set in a Brooklyn apartment (although it was filmed in Paris due to Polanski's legal troubles). This accentuates the play like feel the movie already has. The dialogue is stylized and just feels stagey.

All four of the leads do a good job in their parts. Foster and Reilly play it biggest and occasionally it feels as though they're trying to project to a theater audience, while Waltz and Winslet are more subdued and hence more effective on screen.

Carnage is funny, but never very incisive or truly cutting. It's an amusing enough 75 minutes but unlike Alan and Nancy, you won't have a hard time leaving that apartment.

Did you enjoy Scott's review? +4 -0

Kate Winslet, Jodi Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz in Carnage.

The structure of the movie borrows liberally from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Two couples meeting for the first time spend a drunken few hours together chewing up the scenery. The biggest difference though is in the quality of the dialogue. Yasmina Reza lacks Albee’s venomous wit and the conversations don’t have any real punch. Also Polanski’s direction never opens the play up cinematically like Mike Nichols was able to do with Woolf. Scott is absolutely correct that the physical movement of the characters around the apartment, and back and forth to the elevators, seems contrived. Proving what works for the stage doesn’t necessarily work for the screen.

The acting is good, which given the cast isn’t at all surprising. This definitely helps but the story is so slight that the entire success of the movie comes down to the dialogue, which just isn’t that memorable or profound. In fact the first 30 minutes is quite boring as it is filled with banal and superficial topics as the two couples get to know each other while editing their true personalities. Not until Kate Winslet tosses her cookies all over the other couple’s coffee table does the movie pick up any steam.

For the last 30 minutes or so the dialogue finally begins to crackle as these characters peel away the layers of superficiality and begin to reveal their true selves. The theme of the story is hypocrisy and how we often feign a social conscious or polite public persona that cares about our neighbors, when in fact we often don’t really give a shit.

All four of these people turn out to be not that likable. The men are both callous and just want to drink their whiskey and smoke cigars while the women are whiny and shrewish. Not exactly original is it? At least the story treats both the liberal and the conservative fairly (as represented by Foster and Waltz respectively). It dislikes them equally. All of them at one point refer to this as the worst day of their lives. Watching Carnage won’t make it the worst day of your life but it certainly won’t be the best either.
 

Did you enjoy Patrick's review? +5 -0