Review: Carnage

A hilariously mean treacle-cutter for folks turned off by optimistic, saccharine holiday fare like, say, the determinedly happy We Bought A Zoo, Roman Polanski’s Carnage is a tidy, funny, perfectly nasty rebuff for people determined not to have a Holly Jolly Christmas. Adapted from Yasmina Reza’s hit play God of Carnage, the film stars Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as the Cowans and Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly as the Longstreets, opposing sets of parents meeting to settle, if they can, a dispute between sons that left one bloody and missing two teeth.

Foster and Reilly host the meeting in their Manhattan apartment. They begin by drafting a letter describing their sons' violent encounter, and soon begin politely squabbling about language. The meeting, then over cobbler and coffee devolves from tense-but-productive to pure drunken savagery.

Mrs. Longstreet is a writer, working on a book about African genocides and he’s an affable wholesaler, content at first to let his wife compel the other couple to attend a meeting filled with adult reasonableness and coming-togethering, a Good Liberal veneer of forgiveness and understanding that she’s hauled over her barely contained sense of ecstatic victimhood. Waltz as Mr Cowan, the father of the son he wryly describes as “a maniac”, is a lawyer who can’t and won’t stop interrupting everyone else to deal via cellphone with a pharmaceutical exec client in the midst of a P.R. disaster. Winslet as his wife is accommodating and distant, but Waltz is pure snarking cruelty, the only one of the three who sees immediately the futility of any attempt to paper over violence perpetrated by kids with politesse.

The question of the film is: Is he proven right, as a poorly aimed arc of puke and an uncorked bottle of scotch send the couples’ flinty interaction spinning into boozy cruelty? Or could it have worked, could the artifice of politeness have been hauled sufficiently over, like a bad rug covering a worse floor, had the Cowans been more able to conceal their contempt, less prone to lawyerly semantic specificity and the Longstreets more willing to back up their mouthed words of forgiveness with actual generosity of spirit?

And furthermore, should it have worked? All four characters in Polanski’s film are victimized, barfed on, assaulted and insulted, all are having “the worst day” of their lives, but no one leaves. They’re all trapped by the forbidden and suddenly revealed pleasure of telling someone – a husband or a stranger – that you honestly think that they’re a miserable shit, a horrible parent and person. They're pinned by the joy they take in sudden, uncontrolled carnage.

Carnage is a fantastic film, especially for those looking for a sardonic counterpoint to the rest of what’s available this year. It’s perfectly well acted and cleverly staged, a smart and mean and glass-sharp observation of the cruelty we all – for the most part and excepting lawyers – keep hidden just beneath the surface of ourselves.  

Mike's the Editor here at thesubstream, mostly he does Film Lab stuff but occasionally he reviews movies and hosts our weekly WTI segment. For more on what's out this week, check out Mike's video reviews of Carnage and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Matt Brown's excellent review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.