Roman Polanski (2011)

In the theatre, when the action throughout is in a single location, you may not be convinced by the plotting that keeps it there but you still at one level accept the premise:  if the characters leave the stage there’s no play.  Of course it’s not the same on screen and Carnage is an example of how silly a film-of-a-play can be when the situation is basically implausible.  When, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, ten-year-old Zachary Cowan whacks Ethan Longstreet in the face with a stick and damages his teeth, Zachary’s parents Nancy (Kate Winslet), an investment broker, and Alan (Christoph Waltz), an attorney, are invited, or summoned, to the other couple’s apartment – to sort things out in a civilised way.  The summoner is Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), who once co-authored a published book and now works part-time in a bookshop (though she says she’s writing again).  Her husband Mike (John C Reilly) is a household goods salesman (pots, pans, toilet flushes).  At the start of the film, the Cowans seem anxious to get out as quickly as possible.  Yasmina Reza, who, with Roman Polanski, did this adaptation of her stage play God of Carnage, supplies no good reason for their being detained:  the Longstreets offer coffee as the Cowans are on their way out of the door and the offer is inexplicably accepted.

The supposedly reluctant guests also have more than one helping of Penelope’s refrigerated apple and pear cobbler, which Nancy eventually throws up.  She says she feels nauseous a good few screen minutes before she’s actually sick, during which time she drinks from a can of Coke that Penelope offers as a surefire anti-emetic and Nancy’s queasiness is a continuing topic of conversation.  It’s an age before anyone suggests Nancy go to the bathroom; even then she doesn’t and, in what must be the most forcefully wide-ranging projectile vomiting seen in cinemas since The Exorcist, manages to spew over Penelope’s cherished art books on the coffee table and over Alan’s trousers.   Things have already got fractious between the two couples by this point, as they debate what Zachary did to Ethan, and, of course, they go from bad to worse.  The Longstreets and the Cowans trade increasingly nasty insults, exposing not only the thinness of their polite veneer but also, once the Scotch is flowing and their tongues really cut loose, how corroded their marriages are too.  Yet Nancy and Alan never get angry enough just to storm out.  ‘Why are we still in this house?’ yells Nancy at one point.  As all four remain there when the curtain falls – sorry, when the film ends – there’s an implication that the Longstreets’ place may be hell nor are the Cowans out of it.

I hated Carnage but I came out trying to do no more than dislike it.  It seemed to me that, if I felt more strongly than that, Polanski and Reza would somehow have won.  These feelings were irrational but I couldn’t help suspecting the filmmakers would be smiling at my antipathy, satisfied that I was unable to take the misanthropic truth they were laying bare and that made me react so negatively.  It’s the shallowness of the misanthropy that I can’t take – that and the unwarranted (if we’re all shits) self-satisfaction in the film’s contempt for the people in it.  Carnage seems to be designed for those who think that women are fools because they’re worriers and try futilely to make peace and that men are selfish, callous bastards, and that everyone’s just about the same once they’re pissed enough.  The audience in the Curzon Richmond was small but these views seemed to be well represented within it, judging from the regular titters (which turned into more full-bodied laughter when Kate Winslet spewed up).  I also loathe Carnage because it’s so badly written – this is farce of a remarkably uninventive kind.  The characterisation of the cynical lawyer Alan, the strenuously politically correct Penelope and the bluff regular guy Mike is as lazily clichéd as the repeated perfunctoriness of getting Nancy and Alan towards the exit then making them turn back into the living room (!) for more mayhem.  Nancy stands out from the others only because she doesn’t seem to be a character at all, not even a cartoon.

The tensions in Carnage are so obvious so immediately that the exposure of what lies beneath the foursome’s practised exteriors isn’t much of a striptease and the largely disappointing acting makes matters worse.  This is the first uninteresting performance I’ve seen from Kate Winslet:  she looks the part but she telegraphs unease at the start (this may be her own unease).  Nancy’s mortified feelings about throwing up in public don’t persist long enough – but then nothing much does in the first half of the film.  One character will say something caustic to another and then they carry on as if nothing had happened.  (If the idea of this is to suggest the essential dissimulation of middle-class social discourse, why can’t the characters keep it up indefinitely – or part company when the pressure to do so gets too much?)  I think Kate Winslet came unstuck here because Nancy is a hollow role and Winslet is an actress with a nose for the truth of the character she’s playing.  She’s still preferable to hypertense Jodie Foster as Penelope, who gives a more characteristic performance.  Foster was an exceptional, eccentric child actress – in Taxi Driver especially but also in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, and incomparably more accomplished than the other kids in Bugsy Malone.  I’ve found her a little monotonous in most of her adult roles, including The Silence of the Lambs, and she certainly doesn’t have the variety to make Penelope Longstreet even slightly surprising.

As Alan, glued to his cell phone and alive only when he’s delivering unscrupulous lawyerly instructions down it, Christoph Waltz is such a malignant presence that you don’t believe this man could ever take part in a polite conversation.  (You certainly don’t believe he would call his wife ‘Doodle’, with reference to a phrase in a Guys and Dolls number, except in a spirit of sarcasm.  But then both these couples are incredible pairings – so the exposure of their hostile incompatibility means very little.)  It’s baffling, given the perverted charm Waltz gave to his Nazi character in Inglourious Basterds, that he doesn’t summon a glimmer of false amiability here – we see what Alan is like from the word go.  He’s also uncomfortable not only with the American accent but in his occasional attempts at broader comedy, either vocal (a vile snigger during a phone conversation) or physical (frozen horror when the wretched phone is drowned in a vase of tulips).  It’s perhaps because he’s the only person who seems both relaxed and affable at the start that John C Reilly as Mike comes off best – at least he has somewhere to go on the journey down to revealing he’s as bad as everyone else.  In fact, we’re clued into that very soon, when we hear Mike threw his daughter’s pet hamster out into the street earlier in the day, but Reilly makes that cruelty more troubling because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the personality we’re seeing and hearing at the time.  Unlike the other three, he also suggests a person who existed before he arrived on the film set.

4 February 2012