Carnage (2011)

My initial response to hearing that legendary director Roman Polanski would be helming a screen adaptation of the Yasmin Reza play, "God of Carnage," was that Polanski was the wrong man for the job. What, after all, does a play about four entitled, upper-class parents have to do with "Chinatown" or "The Pianist"?

Upon further consideration, it dawned on me that Polanski, more than perhaps any other director out there, understands clausterphobia because he lives it. The choices he's made in his life have confinded his travels. Maybe, I thought, he is the right guy for the job. After all, almost the entire play takes place in one living room. It doesn't get much more clausterphobic than that.

In the end, my opinion of "Carnage," (the title being one of only a very few changes Polanski made in this adaptation) is most closely alligned with my initial instincts, and I think the best way for me to put this is to say that if you have never read the original play or seen it staged live, you will probably be entertained by the film. Unfortunately for me, I have both read the play and seen it peformed (at the Goodman in Chicago a few months ago, in a fantastic production, I might add). I say "unfortunate" because, shockingly, Polanski does almost nothing to put his own spin on the original work. Consequently, I was sorely disappointed.

My disappointment over "Carnage" is amplified by the presense of one of the best casts Polanski could have assembled. The four-character piece puts Jodi Foster and John C. Reilly as parents of a boy who was poked with a stick on a playground up against the parents of the boy who performed that act, played by recent Oscar winners Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. It's practically a dream come true in terms of on-screen talent.

And, indeed, the acting in "Carnage" gives the film its fireworks, especially, I'd guess, for those unfamiliar with the story. This is one of those films that is purely conversation; there is no plot whatsoever. That fact might turn off a lot of potential viewers.

On stage, though, that talk crackled and sparked. The mother of the boy who was injured, Penelope Longstreet (Foster), wants to make more out of what happened than what did. Her henpecked husband, Michael (Reilly) is forced to acquiesce with each bend in the conversation until he reaches his breaking point. The couple are a curious combination already; she has high-class tastes in art and he sells plumbing fixtures.

Their lack of 100 percent agreement on how to approach their conversation with the Cowans leads to the undoing of their unified front, and when I saw the play, the shifting allegiances among the four were palpable to me. Throughout its brisk 80 minutes, it's husband and wife against husband and wife, men against women, and then spouses against each other in sudden shifts, revealing the silliness of the adults who devolve in to something more childish than their kids who fought on the playground in the first place.

Winslet's Nancy is probably the flashy role here, as that character ends up getting sick during the parenting summit and adding another level of chaos to the story and, one could argue, its only sense of physical movement. Her husband Alan (Waltz) carries with him what might be the story's fifth main character: his cellphone. He is, as they say, addicted to the Crackberry, and is constantly making calls and only half-assing his part in the "what should we do about our kids" discussion.

To me, the things that made "God of Carnage" exciting and funny on stage did not work in the film "Carnage." I was shocked that Polanski virtually translates every element of the play over to film. Only at the very beginning and end does he take advantage of some things that a movie camera can do with a story that can't happen on a stage. Yes, these few add-ins are clever. But they frustrated me because they reveal what someone with Polanski's talent is capable of, making me wonder why he adapted little else to his own design. Sure, there's some tight camera work and cool tracking shots. But big deal!

The performances are all intense, and I'd say that Waltz and Foster probably get the best parts here. But even this aspect of "Carnage" was lackluster to me. What I saw was four great actors delivering great lines of dialogue with authority, none of them really living in those lines. Over and over again, the Cowans talk about how they have to leave. But they never go. Why? Because the script says they stay. Winslet and Waltz are not able to convince us that some greater force than their scripts consider their characters to reconsider.

Becuase of its pedigree, "Carnage" is an early favorite for my year-end list of the biggest disappointment of 2011. Having said that, let me be clear again that it is a solidly entertaining film, and a refreshingly quick view at only 80 minutes. And I really think that if you've never been exposed to the material before, you will find "Carnage" to be witty, ironic and interesting: a true sign of the times in our age of entitlement.

My familiarity with the material, though, kept me from enjoying this as I'd hoped to.

2.0 out of 4