Carnage
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, January 25, 2012
Movie #5 for 2012
Just like The Artist, the hook for this film is also its major constraint.
Two couples meet in a New York apartment to discuss a playground incident where one couple’s son hit the other couple’s son with a stick, breaking some teeth. The couples politely skirt around blame and then, eventually, inevitably, lay it on thick.
The film runs in real time and the action - and the actors - never leave the apartment. Adapted from a stage play where this sense of anchoring in a space had a kind of Sartre “hell is other people” claustrophobia and the dialogue had a biting theatricality to it, the film loses everything engaging about the play by trying to hold onto it too tight. Roman Polanski is unable to recreate the trapped feeling, the setting just feels forced, the dialogue is labored and unnatural. The artificialness of the situation is further highlighted by some serious arch camera-work and by the films bookends - two scenes of the two boys out in the playground (which makes the 90 minutes we spend inside the apartment seem absurd, and not in a good way).
Actors of this caliber (JODIE FOSTER, JOHN C. REILLY, KATE WINSLET and CHRISTOPH WALTZ, all pictured) do alright with what they've got, but Polanski'd direction seems to actively avoid the empathy of the play or any sense of journey for the characters (they rarely surprise). The kick seems to be overwrought actors playing ugly characters devouring themselves and each other.
