Feb. 22, 2012 - Issue #853: Folkways

Carnage

Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is a four-hander in which the parents of an ostensible pubescent bully visit the parents of the ostensibly bullied pubescent. Everyone present initially makes nice, spouts their liberal bourgeois rhetoric and arrive at some sort of agreement regarding necessary repercussions. It's a non-event—until it becomes the main event. Like some less-imaginative variation on Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, the guests can't seem to leave, though their inertia is caused mainly by exceedingly artificial stalling devices, such as the mobile phone that always manages to ring just when it's time to split. There's also some vomit, which goes a long way when you need to kill time. The uncomfortable minutes tick away, the predictable revelations accumulate, the characters' inherent hypocrisies emerge. God of Carnage is exactly the sort of well-paced, reasonably witty, supposedly scathing but ultimately over-schematic social satire that Reza's brittle characters would probably go see and later pat themselves on the back for laughing at.


And yet Carnage, Roman Polanski's fleet but utterly faithful screen version of Reza's play, is pretty damned entertaining, even with its phony laughing fits, its strained performance from Jodie Foster, and its music from Alexandre Desplat, whose whimsy-whipped work here confirms his status as the new Bill Conti (if one imagines an alternate universe in which the Oscar ceremony conductor wound up scoring for the likes of Polanski, David Fincher and Terence Malick). The film's as solid as it is for a number of reasons: Polanski's very good with bringing stage work to the screen, never hiding his material's theatrical roots while imbuing it with a certain cinematic elegance; he's aided by Dean Tavoularis' subtle and precise production design, which works harmoniously with the characters' more or less overt pretensions; most especially, there's the cast, rounded out by Kate Winslet as a broker apparently unaccustomed to such confrontations (she's the author of the aforementioned vomit), John C Reilly as a plumbing supply salesman and enemy to hamsters everywhere (you'll see what I mean), and Christoph Waltz, channeling Jack Nicholson, as the alpha male big pharma lawyer whose mantra is "deny, deny, deny," while he's actually the first of the characters to admit that he thinks their whole arrangement regarding the kids is total bullshit. That doesn't make him any more likable than the others, but it does give him some of the better lines. 

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