NYFF Diary #4 - Carnage

Let's first get out the way the question everyone seems to be asking. Which of the principle actors wins the de facto four-way acting showdown in Roman Polanski’s Carnage?

The answer, if you’re curious to know, is that Christoph Waltz takes it in a walk, although it should be said that it was never a fair fight to begin with. In addition to having the best character and all the best lines, there is that spark that occurs when precisely the right actor is cast in a plum part, and for the second time in his career that is the case with Waltz. Of course, being an amazing performer isn’t hurting his odds any, but Winslet, Reilly, and Foster aren’t exactly minor leaguers themselves, and  none of them catches similar lightning in a bottle.

So manufactured competitions aside how was the movie? Well, the headline should rightfully read “Carnage a Success” but the truth is much more complicated. 

Carnage, for anyone who doesn’t know, is Roman Polanski's faithful adaptation of Yazmina Reza's award winning Broadway hit God of Carnage. The story opens with Waltz and Winslet’s son walloping Foster and Reilly’s son in the mouth with a stick but good. After that brief prelude the story is made up entirely of the two sets of parents meeting to hash out what consequences, if any, are to come of this violent incident. There is much mutual congratulation at the start at how reasonable and civilized everyone is being, so it doesn’t take a degree in literature to predict that things will descend into full on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style acrimony as the script progresses. Much of the fun of the material is watching how the quartet reconfigures itself into various alliances as the argument twists and spins out on tangents, piling up 3 to 1 against Reilly only to turn on a dime and split along gender lines.

(And may I quickly add that the title change is one of the most awful and counter-productive in recent memory. God of Carnage sounds like a prestigious theatrical property. Carnage sounds like a direct-to-DVD Jason Statham movie.) 

Even as a big fan of the play as I can acknowledge its weaknesses, most of which find their way, in tact, onto the screen. The truths uncovered by the material, that we’re all wildly hostile and selfish creatures under our civilized exteriors, aren’t exactly Earth-shattering, and no matter how well the whole filmmaking team sells every moment, one never really buys it on a gut level. They duke it out not because of any real dramatic urgency, but because it’s more entertaining that way and when the show is this much fun it’s ungrateful to dwell on the artifice at its core.

On stage the material made up for all this with the electricity of live performance. Polanski’s version attempts to make up for a lack of immediacy with his finely tuned visuals and crisply paced editing. He wisely avoids any silly attempts to “open up” the material for the big screen, opting instead to polish the material down to a smooth surface. It bears the fingerprints of the master in every finely captured composition and nuanced cut. It is, in fact, difficult to picture what a better adaptation would look like. It is only in the nagging empty feeling that follows in the movie’s wake that you notice that all the pieces aren’t quite in place.

6 out of 10