![]() Nor does she have the skill to trace a plausible course from the human to the beastly. For the ultimate satire of decivilization, see Luis Buñuel's 1963 film The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a posh dinner party find they can't leave, anarchy slowly ensues, one couple commits suicide and sheep wander in to be slaughtered and cooked for food. But Carnage only skates on the surface of such de-profundis dramas as Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, or virtually any play by Harold Pinter, or The Lord of the Flies. Dramatic logic might at least require that by the end the two men are fighting, as their sons had. Reza's diagram of devolution might be made for Polanski if its satire weren't so timid. (See TIME's review of Polanski's The Ghost Writer) Working here in miniature, he finds the collapse of civilization in Foster's forced smile, ready to crack like dime-store pottery, and the first burst of revolution in the Alien-like moment when Nancy, sick with nerves and perhaps on her hosts' apple cobbler, violently vomits onto Penelope's treasured old book of Kokoschka paintings. His sardonic world view, impressed on him as an orphan boy dodging the Nazis, sees through the veneer of good manners to the animal inside. But Polanski, across a peripatetic career that now spans a half-century, has always been fascinated by the drama of people imprisoned in an apartment: Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, Polanski himself in The Tenant. Most movies have wanderlust they're antsy to go places. Any theater piece traps the audience with the characters for the ticketholders, it's voluntary confinement. And the question of why the Cowans never leave having pretty much settled the dispute in the first 20 minutes, and edging out the door three times was answered by the implicit restriction of a one-set play: If they go, it's over. Theater audiences must have enjoyed the way Reza tantalized and taunted them by providing funhouse-mirror images of themselves on stage. God of Carnage sailed through many successful runs: in Paris (where Foster's character was played by Isabelle Huppert), in London (where it won the Olivier award for best new comedy and Ralph Fiennes took on the Alan role) and on Broadway (for a Tony-winning run with James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden as the host couple and Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis as the visitors). ![]() (See pictures of Kate Winslet's best roles.) Carnage is a marital-arts action film with words as the weapons of domestic destruction. Spousal comity disappears, parental protectiveness turns to hatred of children, long-suppressed resentments flare up between and within the couples, and a cell phone and a purse will become guided missiles of revenge. But trap four people in a tight space, let minor animosities fester, add too much liquor and watch the venom fly. All want to resolve the dispute civilly, by talking it out without the boys present. Michael and his wife Penelope (Jodie Foster) have brought the Cowans, Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy (Kate Winslet), to their Brooklyn apartment to discuss an incident in which the Cowans' young son whacked the Longstreets' boy with a stick. The only suspense is in how the vehicle will crash and which of the four principals will survive the ride. Anyone can sense that the trajectory in this comic of discomfort is a toboggan ride to social anarchy. ![]() It doesn't take a sybil to predict that, in this faithful and fastidious movie version of Yasmina Reza's 2006 play God of Carnage, decency will be the first casualty. At that moment, viewers know they're being fed an unintended-irony pill. ![]() Reilly) says to his wife and their two new friends in Roman Polanski's Carnage, which had its world premiere on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. Follow all decent people, all four of us." Michael Longstreet (John C. ![]()
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