Venice Reviews Suggest Polanski's 'Carnage' Doesn't Live Up to Expectations

Polanski on auto-pilot seems to be the largest complaint

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Thursday, September 1st 2011 at 8:40 AM

Another one of my most anticipated films to come over the final six months of 2011 is Roman Polanski's Carnage, and it had its Venice Film Festival premiere only a short time ago. Based on Yasmina Reza's Tony Award-winning play, the film stars Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly and centers on two pairs of Upper East Side parents one of whose child has hurt the other at a public park. The couples meet to discuss the matter in a civilized manner. However, as the evening goes on, the parents become increasingly childish, resulting in the evening devolving into chaos.

Running a brief 79 minutes one would expect fireworks from such a cast and early response from commenters to the first trailer were encouraging. However, early reviews from the Lido don't paint a very pretty picture.

Justin Chang at Variety writes:

The gloves come off early and the social graces disintegrate on cue in "Carnage," which spends 79 minutes observing, and encouraging, the steady erosion of niceties between two married couples. But the real battle in Roman Polanski's brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza's popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins. [...]

One is continually made aware of buttons being pushed, of the actors taking pains to say precisely the wrong (or right) thing to fan the flames, yet the film actually becomes less tense as it progresses. Certain repeated questions — "Why are we still here?" and "Should we wrap this up?" — begin to take on unwelcome meanings, despite the compact running time.

Over at The Playlist, Oliver Lyttelton seems even less impressed, though his largest complaint seems aimed more at the fact it doesn't have any of Polanski's "directorial flourishes" and that he may "as well have stuck some cameras in the audience of a stage production" and released that.

[It's] a film of very little ambition, a minor entry in the director’s canon. Perhaps it was just the desire to shoot something fast and quick after his brush with justice, which is certainly understandable, but he has essentially taken a pre-existing script, cast four A-listers, locked them in a room, and shot it. There are few directorial flourishes beyond a firmly Polanski-esque opening shot, and almost nothing to enable the identification of the movie as a Polanski picture; for once in his career, it feels like almost anyone could have directed it. It’s not as though the play could have been opened up much, but he really might as well have stuck some cameras in the audience of a stage production.

Guy Lodge's review at In Contention seems to be playing tennis with itself, bouncing from one side of the net to the other. Lodge seems to not be a fan of Reza's play, recognizes the actor friendly dialogue and at the same time seems to agree with Lyttelton in that Polanski seems to be working on cruise control.

He doesn't really have a grabby quote that sums up his opinion in a concise manner so I'll give you this and let you do with it what you will.

As with his well-acted but somewhat embalmed 1994 adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, the director hasn't broken a sweat trying to Polanskify material that speaks very much to his sensibilities in the first place — it's not hard to imagine the beleaguered auteur filtering his own exasperation at the hypocrisies of the bourgeois moral police, however obliquely, through that of Reza.

There is one largely positive review to mention, coming from Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter who writes, "Snappy, nasty, deftly acted and perhaps the fastest paced film ever directed by a 78-year-old, this adaptation of Yasmina Reza's award-winning play 'God of Carnage' fully delivers the laughs and savagery of the stage piece while entirely convincing as having been shot in New York, even though it was filmed in Paris for well-known reasons."

On an acting front, most of the players are congratulated, Waltz being the one name given the most attention. Lodge says he "most creatively interprets and restyles Reza’s brittle writing, and consequently walks off with the film." Chang adds that Waltz "gives the film's most delectable turn… Almost mumbling his lines to himself and delivering half of them into a cell phone, his Alan radiates supreme indifference to the needs of anyone but himself."

Polanski's film will open the New York Film Festival at the end of September before Sony Classics takes it to theaters on December 16. I've included the trailer below for those of you that have not yet seen it.

As far as these reviews go, nothing I read has deterred me. I'm still wildly looking forward to seeing this film and as someone that has not seen the play (from what I can tell all three reviewers above have) I hope it will play much differently for me than it did for them.

Links from Other Sites You May Like