Reilly) says to his wife and their two new friends in Roman Polanski’s Carnage. The New York Film Festival runs from September 30-October 16.Follow all decent people, all four of us.” Michael Longstreet (John C. And in the world according to Polanski, that’s very funny. Instead, they are, without exception, trapped by their petty individual concerns. This confrontational and compartmentalized view of Reza and Polanski’s characters shows us that this group is no longer united by a sense of love, family or friendship. We’re precariously perched right up against Polanski’s subjects’ faces as they declaim about how little respect they have for anyone or anything but themselves.
By this point, cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s camera, which employs a number of mid-range to super close-ups, affects the stance of a drunken, leering spectator. And that’s when everyone, especially Penelope, really starts to lose it. As Alan puts it, the only one that’s really concerned about this event is Penelope, who insists that they meet in order to prove that they have “a sense of community.” Foster’s performance-long meltdown is astounding because she’s the only one that’s actively distressed by the way that the Cowans’ and Michael’s collective façade of communal niceness has almost instantly disintegrated.Īfter a comically cataclysmic event occurs, the gloves really come off, the alcohol gets broken out and the bad manners really come out. That’s basically the crux of Carnage’s conflict: two groups of parents politely try to take their roles as parents seriously after one boy thoughtlessly lashes out at another. But it can be seen that way through the eyes of frantic Penelope or anyone else paranoiac enough to look for hidden truth in mundane activities. It’s not a decision fraught with meaning with a capital M. He’s not thinking of anything beyond whether or not he should waste his good Scotch or not. But Reilly’s comically reluctant look disproves that. The fact that we have to have a seconds-long shot of him hesitantly eyeing the bottle suggests that, as Penelope insists, every action means something and no gesture is superficial.
For example, he goes out of his way to show Michael ogling a bottle of 18-year-old Scotch. In this way, Polanski is even more meticulous than Reza originally was at mercilessly disarming his characters. Eventually, the apartment seems like an apartment-shaped Tardis. Each new piece of furniture that he shows us is compartmentalized and separated from the rest of the room. Polanski presents the Longstreets’ living room as a Russian doll. Once we reach the hallway and look back in, Michael and Penelope’s apartment looks tiny. Carnage is almost like a Buñuelian sitcom: The door to the outside world is always open, but nobody is capable of leaving. God of Carnage is a chamber drama and hence doesn’t show us a world outside of the Longstreets’ flat. Watching the Cowans try and fail to get into the elevator and away from the Longstreets’ apartment is not only a great running gag, it’s also a significant departure from Reza’s play. But every time Nancy and Alan try to leave the Longstreets’ lavish apartment, Penelope, a bleeding-heart ultra-liberal, butts heads with Alan, a neo-con yuppie, over semantics and the group goes back to making passive-aggressive small talk. The two couples seem capable of resolving their difference amicably. And these are the film’s only protagonists!Īfter the Cowans’ son beats up the Longstreets’ boy, concerned parents Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Jodie Foster) try to shame Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Chistoph Waltz) into feeling sorry. Except instead of sitcom-style humor you get jokes indiscriminately lobbed at the expense of four ethically bankrupt petit bourgeois know-nothings.
Quiz carnage roman polanski update#
In Polanski’s hands, what was once a brooding Pinter-esque update of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is now more like a broad comedy. Reilly in the role of Michael, one of God of Carnage’s four main characters. His leavening of God of Carnage’s bleak sense of humor is apparent just from the way that he replaced loutish but menacing James Gandolfini with patently non-threatening John C. Polanski, who co-adapted the film’s screenplay with Reza, emphasizes the absurd nature of Reza’s blackly comic moral play. The most striking thing about Carnage, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yazmin Reza’s stiff but satisfying stage play God of Carnage, is how much funnier it is than its source material.