Sticks and stones
Words do most of the damage in Polanski’s adaptation of dark comedy
We must be going now.
Two married couples meet in a nicely furnished apartment to confer on a recent incident involving their preteen sons. The son of Nancy and Alan has injured the son of Penelope and Michael by hitting him with a small tree branch.
Nancy and Alan are already present in the other couple’s comfy living room when the main action begins, and a tentative mood of sympathetic concern prevails as the visit approaches a quick and apparently amicable completion. But before the visitors can fully take their leave, the farewells morph into low-grade hostilities and all four return to the living room for more discussion.
There will be two more failed departures in the course of this brief (79-minute), four-person, single-setting drama. And the air of emotionally fraught stalemate is, of course, very much the point.
Adapted from God of Carnage, a prize-winning play by Yasmina Reza, this four-way chamber drama comes to darkly comic cinematic life chiefly through director Roman Polanski’s crafty orchestration of the undercurrents in the comic/ironic interplay of four moderately complicated individuals. And the attractive cast—Kate Winslet (Nancy), Christoph Waltz (Alan), Jodie Foster (Penelope), John C. Reilly (Michael)—ensures that each of the four will be sharply etched.
The screenplay adaptation (co-authored by Polanski and Reza) makes its rather obvious point—that various combinations of anger and animosity lurk just below the surface of polite sociability—with an almost frivolous regularity. The situation and the theme seem a little too patly tailor-made for a Polanski movie, but the director and his cast steer mostly clear of theatrical bombast. Instead, Carnage scales itself down to dark-humored comedy in a mostly minor key.
Treating such material as snarky, quasi-absurdist farce saves it, temporarily, as entertainment, but sacrifices any hope for genuine shocks of recognition in the audience. It comes on like a scathing moment-of-truth escapade—somewhere between No Exit and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—but the best it has to offer is an intermittent comedy of white-collar manners.
Despite the recurring notes of incipient rage in these ostensibly reasonable and intelligent people, the film’s strongest appeals reside in its quirky digressions—Alan’s obsessive attention to his cell phone, Michael’s telephone conversations with his ailing mother, Nancy’s escalating dismay over Michael’s disregard for his family’s pet hamster, Penelope’s overbearing sensitivity on matters of semantics.
Winslet’s performance, in the least voluble of the four roles, might be the best of the lot. Waltz and Reilly do nicely underplayed comic turns as contrasting versions of nonchalant arrogance. Foster’s Penelope is anything but nonchalant, and her shrill performance is almost completely lacking in nuance.
