Roman Polanski might have well have said, “[Screw 'em] if they can’t take a joke,” about his film adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play “Carnage” because joke, after all, is what the film is — a short (not even 80 minutes long) little joke on upper middle-class civility that purports to show us what happens when four parents get together in a New York apartment to thrash out an incident between their kids in the park.
One kid hit another kid with a branch and knocked out some teeth.
Not trivial, to be sure. No parent wants a kid risking life, limb and dentition every time he plays with his friends. Clearly apologies are called for at least; and a pledge of future peace.
So there they are — Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as the parents of the aggressor come to make peace in the apartment of the victim’s parents, played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly.
And then the fun begins. Put four self-absorbed adults in an upper middle-class living room with a grievance to thrash out and you’ve got a good chance of civilization’s veneer falling to the carpet and rip-roaring incivility rearing its smug, self-congratulatory head.
And so it goes. “Carnage” is a pretty funny little movie. That’s especially true when the offending kid’s parents–Waltz and Winslet — keep failing to do the obvious thing (leave, after speaking their peaceful piece) and continue sticking around for another escalating go-round.
After they’ve threatened to leave — and don’t — a sufficient number of times, their host, aggrieved father Reilly, breaks out a really great old Scotch and you know this confrontation is going south in a hurry.
Polanski has never exactly been much of a believer in bourgeois civility. What his own horrendous childhood didn’t teach him, the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family did. And if that somehow wasn’t enough, the legal pageant surrounding his own sexual abuse of an underage California victim made him just about the last man in movies to take bourgeois pseudo-civilities on their face. If, for instance, you imagine someone like Mike Nichols directing this adaptation of a stage drama, I think it would have been far more theatrical but probably less funny. You need Polanski’s elaborately restrained disgust to make it as funny as it is.
Our four parents, of course, reveal themselves before all is done. That’s what dutiful characters in plays do, after all — they stand on stage, peel off layers, and earn the tears or revulsion and/or enlightened applause of the audience. In this case, Polanski asks only for your laughs and sneering chortles.
That flawless actress Foster plays the politically committed mother of the victim. Somehow, the incident feeds her political indignations and as her passion turns full-throat, her veins stick out and her voice becomes more annoying. You hate yourself for dismissing her so cavalierly but you understand why her husband is in such a hurry to break out the good Scotch and reveal his disgust at just about everything.
Waltz, as the aggressor’s father, is a wealthy lawyer who continually takes cellphone calls and meetings during the discussion. What his incomparable rudeness reveals of his contempt for everything, is actually said when he begins to declare himself. He believes, he says, in the god of carnage and malice. (“Women drink too much,” he observes in an aside guaranteed to frost that part of the audience that somehow didn’t register his rudeness and insufferability before.)
Most eloquent of all here is Winslet, as the aggressor’s mother, who, after enough tension and Scotch and an empty stomach have had their way, takes the occasion to vomit right in the living room (a waste basket proves handy). There’s nothing like living room upchucking to transform any social event completely. Everything afterward is a comedy of manners at its most pointlessly mannered.
None of the serious talk here should be taken for much. It’s just the director’s little joke on polite society with the superb collaboration of four hugely able movie actors clearly delighted to work with him.
A small joke, really, at heart but a pretty good one.
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CARNAGE
3 stars
STARRING: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
DIRECTOR: Roman Polanski
RUNNING TIME: 79 minutes
RATING: R for language.
THE LOWDOWN: Four parents discuss misbehaving children and wind up misbehaving in their own ways.
jsimon@buffnews.comnull