‘Carnage’ is a disappointment. Having seen the play staged in Bucharest last spring I knew what it was about, and I was expecting much more from a film directed by Roman Polanski and adapted to screen by the playwright herself, Yasmina Reza, one of the most successful theater authors nowadays. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it is only the cast that did not disappoint, and as much as I love to watch all that Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet do, they do not succeed to break the barrier of the expected.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1692486/
I am not sure what or who is to blame. Maybe it starts with the script, which does little beyond transferring the story from France to Manhattan and does not add any element that can be turned into visual language. It goes on with the setting which is probably intentional banal, but seems to constrain permanently the moves of the actors and interfere with their expressions. It ends with the directing which lets the actors do their job (which is good) but adds little to the overall message of the film with the exception of the prologue and epilogue filmed outdoors. I felt no Polanski thrill in this film and I missed it.
(video source nogoodflix)
Does the message make it? Maybe having seen the play prepared me too much and I was a viewer hard to be impressed. The involution and graduate de-peeling of the layers of civility is there, but less poignant than I expected. The relationship between the bourgeois environment and the violence in the streets, between the violence of the relations between kids and the one experience by one of the characters in Africa are largely lost. Maybe Polanski’s ‘Carnage’ is an example of the differences between what makes a successful play and a successful screen adaptation and a proof that too much good acting does not necessarily make good cinema.
But, Dan the acting is the whole movie! It did not bother me at all that they do not leave the apartment as long as their eyes, their lips their body language say all. I even find this movie more subtle than “Who is afraid of Virginia Wolf”. Jodie Foster embodies the perfect politically correctness of these days Americans. I could not believe that the play was written for the French public!
Hi Erica, I agree that acting is the best thing in ‘Carnage’ but should I not expect more than very good acting in a movie by Polanski? BTW, acting in Bucharest was great as well, Foster’s role was wonderfully played by an actress well-known to my Romanian friends but unknown to me, and the equivalent of the American PCness was a French mid-bourgeois attitude which was well rendered. I actually was wondering before entering the movie how will what I perceived as very French situations be tranplanted in the American context.