Carnage

Roman Polanski – 2011 – France

Carnage was a strange movie for me to experience.  I was thoroughly unimpressed with almost everything about it, and yet the anticipation of some cinematic flourishes from Roman Polanski – one of a tiny handful of directors I’d consider the greatest still alive – kept me in rapt attention.  Granted, those moments came but once or twice, but I wonder if this was Polanski’s plan all along; to use his very name and reputation as a source of suspense.  I felt the same way during his conservative interpretation of Oliver Twist (2005); the feeling that this material done by Polanski surely will have a dark and surreal twist.  But both films ultimately disappoint, not from a dramatic but from a cinematic perspective.  In Carnage, specifically, I sort of felt that Polanski was doing his Woody Allen impression; something I can’t say I’d always longed for.  (I suppose now that fellow cradle-robber Allen has left New York for the time being, Polanski felt free to make his own film about neurotic, self-absorbed, upper-middle-class Manhattanites.)  As a filmed play, it is fairly non-ambitious, with Polanski making almost no effort to “open it up” save for a brief prologue and epilogue, a move that no doubt pleases theatre-buffs.  Since Polanski left Yasmina Reza’s play so dutifully intact, we have little choice but to treat the film as a play, and as such it merely reminded me how much I can’t stand the theatre, what with constant overacted wit and endless irrational excuses to keep everyone in a confined space for precisely as long, coincidentally, as it takes for one’s patience to run out.  I’m no expert, but it seems like the whole two-couples-playing-emotional-cat-and-mouse-games thing has been done frequently before – (including in Polanski’s own, far superior Bitter Moon, 1992) – but since the greatest of all stage-to-screen adaptations, Mike Nichols’ film of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) was so perfect, I wonder why anyone would bother doing the same thing and invite comparisons.  Lastly, while Carnage is still a good movie, while watching it I could never shake from my mind the item I’d read about it’s budget being something like $25,000,000.00, which – given it’s single location and mere four characters – seems inexcusably obscene; only forgivable if the result was a masterpiece, which it isn’t.