“Brevity is the soul of wit,” said some really famous guy. There is ample (or is it just the right amount?) of evidence to prove this theory in Roman Polanski's droll, 79-minute new film Carnage.
Based on Yasmina Reza's celebrated play God of Carnage, the action, such as it is, takes place almost entirely in the gentrified Brooklyn living room of Michael and Penelope Longstreet.
Penelope (played by Jodie Foster) might no doubt raise an eyebrow that I list Michael (John C. Reilly's) name first, as this certainly perpetuates patriarchal conventions of ownership. But then she'd instantly catch herself, knowing that she shouldn't rush to judgement without a full exploration of the facts (I mean, M does come before P in the alphabet!)
Penelope's hyperactive sensitivity to high principles is what gets Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet) to the Longstreet apartment. You see, the Cowan boy hit the Longstreet boy in the mouth with a stick at a playground. We're witness to the event over the opening titles, with Alexandre Desplat's half-jaunty/half-bombastic sixty second orchestral theme (which you can, and should, hear here) as the only commentary.
Sony Pictures Classics
Carnage is a show piece for these four fine actors, and for Polanski as well. Just when you think you will lose your mind if you don't get out of this damned living room, the action mercifully moves to the hall leading to the elevator. It's a tease, though, 'cause just when you think the Cowans are going to leave and put an end to the awkwardness. . .something reels them back in.
Over the course of the film (shot in real time) and as the liquor flows, alliances between the couples break down. A shift in dynamics puts the boys against the girls, then a spousal swap, until, finally, it's everyone for himself. (Or herself. Sorry, Penelope, it's just a figure of speech.)
Winslet, perhaps the most human of the bunch, knows very well that she is perceived as a trophy wife, and it breaks your heart to see her try and rise above that station. John C. Reilly is the tamed blue collar everyman, reduced to smoking his cigars outside and pretending to care about art. He ought to remind you of an awkward family member you see at gatherings that you know would much rather be watching sports that having a civilized conversation.
And Foster, well, even if Waltz upstages her, her character Penelope is refreshingly three-dimensional. She is, I would argue, the protagonist of the film, despite being held up for a certain degree of ridicule. She is typical petite-bourgeois, scratching away at a book on Darfur that will likely never see completion, concerned about exposing her children to an “enriched milieu” of classical music and art and, perhaps most heartbreaking, moving through life with the assumption that everyone else has the same utopian goals as she does. Her downfall is the inability to accept that, hey, some people, even the ones whose kids attend the same school as her kids, might be assholes. Or, worse, she may even be married to one. (Or, even worse, deep down, she may even be one herself.)
