A wide-angle lens looks on from a distance at a high school exterior while teenagers mill about, in an opening scene that immediately reminded me of Cache, a brilliant meditation on perception and the act of seeing from ten years ago. No conversations can be heard, only ambient sounds and faint chatter, and soon enough one child strikes another child with a stick. What did I actually see? Did I see what I thought I saw? How coded was that single long take? Such was the dramatic set-up in my mind, and I immediately began applauding director Roman Polanski for establishing quite visually any preconceived notions I had about the material. Adapted from the Tony Award winning play God Of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, with a story concerning four people, two sets of parents together in a room discussing the incident, one of the boy wielding the stick, and one of the boy who was struck, the restrictions in blowing it up theatre-size were quite obvious, and required a director able to overcome them. Unfortunately, the parallels with Michael Haneke and Cache ended soon after they began, and any initial interest and audience good will becomes cashed in very early as Polanski succumbs to every one of those restrictions, and Carnage degenerates into four people screaming at each other in an extremely flat two dimensions.
Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play the assailant’s parents, an investment banker and a corporate lawyer respectively. She mostly wants to keep the peace, but becomes increasingly, physically ill depending on the tenor of their arguments, and he, quick to dismiss the incident as boys being boys, is continuously interrupted by his cell phone, the caller updating him by the minute of the progress of a lawsuit. Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play the victim’s parents, an insecure bohemian who is currently writing a book about tragedies in Darfur , and a metal hardware salesman concealing a seething nihilism respectively. She wants their son to apologize to her son, and he subconsciously does everything he can to keep the meeting going, as a reprieve from the monotony of his life. Set inside Foster and Reilly’s apartment, the film’s rather long seventy-five minutes progress, and each character’s primary flaws are revealed and derided by everyone else, alliances form among all combinations of two, and each person gets his/her turn name calling and making everyone else feel miserable, as thematically, brace yourself now, the parents reduce themselves to mere children at a school playground.
But isn’t that what happens in the play, one might ask? It takes about an hour to read the play to find out for oneself, but yes, I submit that it does, and also that theatre and film are such completely different mediums that what works in one will most certainly not work in another, that is to say without some actual thought put into the adaptation. Film is a much more patent art form than theatre. Audiences are guided to exactly what the director wants them to see, and emotions play out mostly on faces, which is why faces for radio are rarely seen on the big screen. Theatre is more tolerant, as 99% of the audience cannot even see faces, so body language and stage choreography, not to mention booming voices, the dynamic of which becomes muted with film's volume control knob, are relied upon to convey meaning and connect emotionally with the crowd. Film is a constant manipulation of spatial relations, from wide-angle to close-up, and when a character says something provocative, we expect to be told which character’s reaction is most important, while with theatre it is much easier to react ourselves, and as a logical extension, become more invested in what is going on. Polanski robs us of that investment repeatedly. This is material that places four people in one room for the duration, constantly talking over one another. We are meant to see them all, all the time. Usually arguments are between two people, so close-ups and shot/reverse shot are adequate conveyors of meaning for these situations. The cinematic equivalent of God Of Carnage, however, to capture everything, would require a fixed perspective from one of the four walls, perfectly fine for a film like Paranormal Activity, but incredibly dull for Carnage. The nature of film demands that editing take place, and the nature of film actors demands close-ups, and so Polanski needed to find other ways to make up for the film’s deficiency, like for example toning down the rather broad and theatrical strokes of hysteria the characters are prone to, which he also fails at. In a film adaptation, it isn’t just the image that is blown up, but meaning as well, which means the projectile vomiting, the flower throwing, and the fits of seizure-level whining telegraphs the film’s subtext almost immediately, leaving the audience thoroughly irritated by the time the film ends when they realize it has gone nowhere else. With everything superficial, and nothing more to grab hold of, no visual codes to decipher, my mind was free to pick apart everything I was seeing, and Carnage is full of moments that took me out of the story, until I no longer cared for any of the characters, bad news for a film, even worse news for a play adaptation.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first few minutes of the film when Winslet and Waltz are attempting to leave the apartment. A mutual agreement had been reached regarding their child coming over later to apologize to Foster and Reilly’s child, and Winslet certainly wants to avoid further confrontation, and Waltz needs to get back to his litigation. End of story, right there. But with over an hour left, somehow they need to stop pushing the elevator call button and get back in the apartment. How about a cup of coffee? Sure, why not? This simple exchange is wrong for two reasons. First, inherent in the act of watching a play in a theatre is a subconscious benefit of the doubt constantly at work; we don’t expect to see skylines, or running water, let alone multiple locations. We want the characters to stay in the same room, and so we conspire with the play to keep them together; in other words, our tolerance for implausibility is greater. In a film we want people to leave the room, we want to see where they go and how they get there, and what problems they face along the way. This leads to the second reason, the betrayal of a main principle of drama regarding character motivations. Waltz and Winslet want desperately to leave, and we also want them to leave, so whatever makes them stay must trump that incredibly strong desire of which the audience is now complicit. Accepting a spot of tea might work in England , or France where this play was written, but in New York City
There are moments in Carnage that are almost worth the price of admission. Of all the actors, John C. Reilly fares the best, and there is a certain sadistic glee in watching him wave a drink around, and attack his wife for writing a book that she couldn’t possibly know anything about from her elitist, upper East side perspective. And Waltz has a great time snaking his way through several moments where he dissects Jodie Foster’s choice of words with the precise language of his profession. But for every one of these moments there is an appalling amount of juvenilia, mostly in what is arguably the worst performance of Jodie Foster’s career. Ridiculously over-the-top, she is an insufferable creature, and Polanski destroys any redeeming qualities with his relentless close-ups of her constantly furrowed brow. And Winslet? Well, she never quite manages to conceal the fact that she is acting the entire time.
The final shot returns us to the schoolyard as a hamster scurries through the grass, and it is meant to signify Polanski’s attempt at another layer of meaning, that renders an earlier, precipitous argument moot. But it’s too little too late. With the film’s characters reduced to shouting heads, and the film’s desire to hold a mirror up to so-called authority figures an abject failure, Polanski has no claim upon which to stake his pretensions. Carnage is Polanski’s worst film in decades, and the best argument I have seen in quite some time, for the continued support of community theatre. ** out of *****
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