Cinema review: Carnage
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage imparts the black comedy with his own paradoxical concerns with physical confinement and temperamental outlandishness.
It may take place almost entirely in a snazzy Brooklyn apartment, but the bulk of Carnage is never tamer than its opening credit sequence, in which two kids squabble in a park.
After their son gets two of his teeth knocked out, Michael and Penelope Longstreet invite over the attacker’s yuppie parents, Alan and Nancy Cowan, to cordially resolve the dispute over a home-made snack.
But business suits, art catalogues, and other cultural signifiers on display cannot conceal the simmering tension; it’s not long till the couples’ differences unleash verbal warfare, inflicted both at each other and later each at their own partners.
Words, words, words fuel the conflict, but its Polanski’s compositional dynamism and the quintet’s physical dexterity that outshines the screenplay. Jodie Foster’s Penelope is initially prim as to be nailed to the floor, but as the camera closes in on her and after she undergoes a dissection of her words and manners, she breaks into terrifically paroxysmal postures; her persona has been brutally carved away.
It is less a family square-off than a power struggle, wherein saving face involves scissoring the personal cords of civility – class, gender, ethics – until the bare opponent is unable to sputter the final word.
Advertisement
For some, the crumbling veneer of civility may be too quick, or the entrapment too contrived – a shared whisky notably results in tipsy staggers too early for a story set no later than teatime. The brutality of human nature may be explored more intricately elsewhere (including in Polanski’s earlier work) but too few can boast Carnage’s grotesque hilarity or knockout ensemble cast.
Kate Winslet is refreshingly zany as Nancy, and John C. Reilly does wonders with his down-to-earth anecdotes - where his bearish warmth slides seamlessly into sociopathic optimism - but it’s an ice-cold Christoph Waltz who most embodies Carnage’s delightful, distressing philosophy.
Post new comment