Carnage: movie review

Release date: 3 February 2012
Certificate: 15
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Jodie Foster, John C Reilly, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet

What's the story?
Nancy Cowan (Winslet) and husband Alan (Waltz) visit Penelope Longstreet (Foster) and her hubby Michael (Reilly) to cordially discuss a playground altercation between their children. The cordiality doesn't last long...

What did we think?
Four great actors with four Oscars between them tear entertaining strips off each other in a claustrophobic chamber piece impressively orchestrated by a playful Polanski. At the end of the day, however, it's a filmed play full of arch dialogue and behaviour that seemed a lot more credible on stage.

After Chinatown, the Sharon Tate murder and that pesky conviction for statutory rape, director Roman Polanski is perhaps best known for the so-called "Apartment Trilogy" - Repulsion, The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby - that prompted one festival organiser to call him "a poet of small spaces". Set within the confines of an upscale flat in New York, his latest movie sees him once again analyse human behaviour at close quarters with the help of a stellar ensemble.

Based on a play by France's Yasmina Reza, Carnage opens with a wordless scene in a park that ends with one child taking a stick to another's face. It is this that brings their four parents together, ostensibly to resolve the situation amicably but really to reach a financial settlement without involving their lawyers.

What starts off civilised, however, rapidly degenerates into cattiness and hostility, one parent's exasperating habit of taking phone calls and another's unfortunate inability to keep her food down setting this urbane foursome at each other's throats. As much fun as this is to watch, though, this remains an unavoidably theatrical affair that, for all its director's inventive use of Dean Tavoularis' elegant set, becomes less convincing the more it goes on.

Verdict: All talk

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