The appeal of a movie like Carnage is in its simplicity. The story is very basic, two boys have had a fight on a playground leading to one of them having some teeth knocked out, and now the children’s parents are having a meeting in a Brooklyn apartment to decide what is to be done about the matter, but that’s all you need. Just get four people with four different perspectives in a room, introduce a conflict, and suddenly you can explore human nature and make pretty much any bit of commentary about society you want. All you need is character and conflict. I imagine it’s exactly that beautiful simplicity that drew Roman Polanski to adapting this story, which was originally a play written by Yasmina Reza, to the screen. That being said, I’m still not sure that this particular story was one that needed to be translated to film at all.
The term “comedy of manners” get’s thrown around a lot when describing stories that satirize the ridiculous foibles of the different social classes, and I’m going to use it here one more time, because what Carnage does is comedy of manners to a T. This movie weaves an absolute tapestry of awkwardness. There isn’t a single second of it’s 79 minute runtime that isn’t spent sitting in a room with four characters that are having very tense, very pointed and phony interactions. All four of these characters, at least in the beginning, are steeped in ludicrous amounts of useless social politeness, to the point where their interactions take on a sort of horror element. The characters less resemble real people than they do horrific plastic mannequins trapped in a web of manners. Anger and resentment boils under the surface of all their polite coffee offering and cobbler eating, and watching them trade thinly veiled barbs is like watching a steaming pot ready to boil over. This meeting of the minds takes place largely in real time as well, so you never get a break, you’re never set free by a jump cut to something else. You’re stuck here in this moment, just like the characters. After a while it all becomes an exercise in how much abuse you can sit through, and whether you find humor in that or you just find it awful and off-putting will largely be a matter of preference.
The one thing everyone will find something to like about here is the acting. All four of the principle actors are talented and engaging, and just on a base level, it’s always entertaining watching them do their thing; this film being no exception. I couldn’t help but feel like there were very few risks being taken here though. Everyone is playing to their strengths, and that’s fine, but what you end up getting is what you expected, nothing more and nothing less. John C. Reilly is playing a loud mouthed philistine repressing his true nature under a burgundy sweater, and that’s pretty funny, but it’s what you would expect from Reilly. Kate Winslet is playing a prim, proper, and concerned mother who’s real feelings are buried down deep within so as to not become a social outcast. She’s good in the role, but we’ve seen Winslet do the repressed urges routine countless times before. Christoph Waltz is playing a bit of a self-obsessed hedonist, and while there’s always a certain glee to be found in watching him take pleasure in the bad, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been through this routine with him as well.
It’s only Jodie Foster that really goes anywhere unexpected. While all of these characters have their faults, and they’re each annoying in different ways, they all have their own endearing qualities as well. All of them except for Foster’s character. She is so self-important and passive aggressive and shrill and shrewd that she’s absolutely unbearable to be around for even a moment. Everything she says is undercut with a shitty, backhanded comment tacked on at the end. Every time she comes face to face with someone, she confronts them with a fake smile that is so forced and joyless it makes you shudder. At one point, when she’s really got herself worked up into a self-righteous lather, her screaming head and tense body take on the appearance of a dry, stringy piece of jerky that you would cut your gums on if you tried to eat. Talk about an insufferable person... every second that Foster was on screen I was cringing and wishing that she would go away. I’m not really sure if I see that as a positive or a negative though. Was that the intention of this character as she was written, or was this Foster’s interpretation taking her in a different direction? Was crafting such an uncompromising character a bold decision, or was not giving us any glimpse into other, softer aspects of her personality a mistake that made for a less nuanced than possible character? I’m not certain, but at least when I was watching Foster I felt like I was watching someone doing some work, someone trying to do something interesting rather than just coasting on what brought them to the game.
Performance issues aside, my main quibble with all of this awkward interacting is that it never builds to any crescendo of crazy, nobody comes to the point of catharsis, and there’s no denouement where we reflect on what we’ve learned; because I’m not sure there’s anything we learn at all. I hate to be such a strict structuralist, but this feels like the first two acts of an incomplete story. After it was all over I was still left wondering, what’s the point? Yeah, there were some chuckles to be had. My favorite moment was Foster’s character blurting out, “That’s all I’ve been thinking about for months!” when asked about the suffering in Africa. But are some surface level observations about the passive aggressive nature of the far left really all this movie has to offer? These are four actors who you could use the old, “I would listen to them read the phonebook,” cliché with, and I probably would listen to any of them read the phone book, but that’s pretty close to what we’re actually getting here. When listening to people bicker for an hour and a half doesn’t change any of the characters in any way or illuminate any new truths, it ends up just feeling like a pointless exercise in suffering.
Ultimately, my critique of this film is that I think it probably makes a really good play. The repetitious gags seem like they’re designed to work in front of a live audience, the single location feels designed to work really well as a stage show. Really this script feels like something that, at its core, was constructed to be performed live. There’s nothing Polanski adds to the mix to take advantage of the intimacy or scope that filming something can offer over performing it live. There are no pains taken to open the story up and make it more dynamic for the cinema. From the very beginning it feels like they’re fighting from the bottom trying to keep this very limited, stationary tale from becoming boring, and it’s a futile effort. Why not just make a movie about something else? The beauty of this story is in its simplicity, but it’s simplicity meant for the stage. Bottle episodes of TV shows can pull a one location talker like this off, because generally they only have 22 minutes to kill. And every once in a while a great film like 12 Angry Men can pull it off as well, through dynamic, masterful filmmaking. But Carnage is no 12 Angry Men. Instead it just feels like Polanski once again indulging in his obsessions with tension and isolation, audience be damned.
