Carnage

• Director: Roman Polanski
• Screenwriter/Written By: Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski
• Based on the Novel By: Yasmina Reza (play)
• Producer: Said Ben Said
• Starring: Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet
• Running Time: 87 mins.
• Language: English
• Rating: R

In 2008, French playwright Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage was brought to Broadway for an acclaimed run resulting in strong ticket sales and critical applause. After years of reconstruction and development, Reza co-adapted her play to script form and worked with Oscar-winning director/co-screenwriter Roman Polanski to generate the feature. The result, Carnage, can only be described as a savage but hysterical verbal foodfight.

Penelope Longstreet (Foster, The Beaver) is a humanistic liberal whose fascination with the genocide in Darfur borders on egoistic obsession. Her husband, Michael (Reilly, We Need To Talk About Kevin), is an overly passive workingman dedicated to maintaining an artificially congenial atmosphere despite his wife’s short temper and the other couple’s animosity. Alan Cowan (Waltz, in his best role since Inglourious Basterds) is a sleezy pharmaceutical lawyer with barely-veiled disgust for his wife, Nancy (Winslet), whose low self-esteem stands in jarring contrast to her outspoken elitism.

Something of a hybrid between outright slapstick comedy and intellectual passive-aggressive character study, the film’s plot is bare: the two couples have chosen to meet to discuss one child’s brutalization of the other on a school playground. All four characters are daguerreotypes of real people, the two men spewing machismo and vitriol through their teeth while the women journey from shrill to melodramatic to snappy. But Reza and Polanski have effectively crafted the funniest film, if not the strongest or most realistic, of the year.

Polanski’s actively scours the domestic landscape for the black nooks and crannies the brightly colored décor attempts to cover. This is territory familiar to the film camera, which accesses the human home without bias, affection, aesthetic taste, or humanity. What makes the comic sensibility so crisp is not the actors, each of whom commits to their best roles in years, but the ferocity of white class degradation. Reza’s dialogue slices through sheets of veneer and spares no one their class, profession, gender, interests, or relationship. As typical of the Polish auteur’s films, everyone is victim and perpetrator of the surrounding carnage.

All four actors pack their performances with high-voltage skill that has won each innumerable industry honors beforehand, and audiences will battle as to whom in this quartet stands out. Foster’s role is the most active, and she displays an intensity that has been vacant from the screen for more than a decade in her career. Her best moments come between her and Christoph Waltz, a newly minted star in Hollywood who continues to prove himself a former diamond-in-the-rough of the acting world. Reilly and Winslet are extraordinarily reliable, never a moment short of Foster but perhaps a bit less inspired as far as casting. Reilly’s Michael is a slob, a Conservative, a blue-collar gentleman – his onscreen and offscreen personae are in perfect alignment, giving Foster, Waltz, and Winslet the edge. Yet he also embodies the satire set within the darkness of Carnage.  Fiona Weir, Polanski’s casting director, is to be congratulated for her ability to synthesize the grim and the funny.