“Carrying a stick” is substituted. Everyone’s reasonable. Everyone means well. Coffee and cobbler are served. As someone says at one point, “We’re all decent people.” If only the kids could get along so well.
Which is what investment-banker mom soon proposes, only to be met with passive resistance from liberal-writer mom. Well, no. Let’s be real, here. We’re talking Jodie Foster. Make that passive aggression.
“If Zachary hasn’t acquired accountability skills,” she demurs, “they’ll just glare at each other.”
“Accountability skills?” bristles the corporate lawyer, and soon there’s a mini-explosion.
Aha, you think, so that’s where Zachary gets his temper. Maybe he is a maniac, swinging sticks at innocent kids. The thing is, every time you decide you’ve got a handle on who’s what and how that must’ve influenced the boys, the script throws you a curve.Winslet and Walsh are the parents of the aggressor, and Type A sorts themselves — though as events proceed, their allegiance to each other will waver.
On Broadway, Yasmina Reza’s play was called God of Carnage and was widely regarded as at once efficient — four characters, one set, 90 minutes — and lightweight. It served as an acceptable place to watch stars (initially James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels and Marcia Gay Harden) behaving badly, at least until you could find a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? somewhere to pass the time more profitably.
Here, the lightness of Reza’s script is heightened by the casting of such powerhouse actors, then amplified by the fact that theatrical unities are still being observed: one plot arc, one locale, one day. On stage, given the exigencies of theatrical production, where sets and additional actors cost money, this minimal approach qualifies as naturalism; on screen it feels artificially constricted. There’s a world out there that the camera could show us, and won’t.
Still, constriction can be useful. Director Roman Polanski has always been good at ratcheting up pressure with compression — everything happening on a yacht in Knife in the Water, say, or in an apartment in Rosemary’s Baby or The Tenant. And since he filmed Carnage shortly after being released from 10 months of house-arrest in Switzerland, it may have seemed second nature to restrict his cast almost entirely to a living room.
But it does mean you’re always aware that you’re watching filmed theater — a scripted pressure-cooker where playability is being allowed to trump plausibility as theoretically cultivated adults morph into savages — going from civility to carnage in 80 minutes flat. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
