Carnage

Saw Carnage, a slam-dunk of a film based on the play by renowned playwright Yasmina Reza, directed by Roman Polanski, starring Agent Singer, Rose from Titanic, the head Nazi from Inglorious Basterds, and John C. Reilly (for whom I can't come up with a cute show-case role.) It's great. Of course it's great.

The film is a one-room drama where two couples meet to civilly discuss a park brawl that their kids were involved in. Things start off brittle and overly chipper, one the husbands constantly serving coffee and "crumble," one of the wives repeating that it must all have been a mistake. They clearly annoy each other, but it's kept petty, only little fake smiles and repeated words conveying their mounting frustrations. Eventually things gloriously break apart and they're all openly shouting at each other, airing marital laundry and slinging politically charged vitriol.

I was worried that the film would just become a cynical Mamet knock-off, or a retread of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (both of which I'm gonna go ahead and claim as influences because both of them have influenced pretty much everything anyway.) and although that would've been fun anyway, instead it turns out that everyone gets along much better after the hostility is out in the open and that's the little knotty core of the film's preoccupations. Yes, civility is all well and good, the film keeps saying, but honesty is better. The characters each indulge themselves and lose their restraint and by the end, they all seem to get along much better.

The film is pretty much flawless. It feels a little arid sometimes and my only real criticism of it is that no one here seems to be trying especially hard. Everyone is doing what they've become famous doing. This isn't a challenge to them, it's stuff they could sleepwalk through and, alas, I think for the most part they kind of do sleepwalk through it. The film is extremely professionally made but I think that the result of all of this raw talent is something kind of unexciting and almost corporate-feeling. I wonder if too much compromise had to be made between egos to allow for exciting risks? Was this a film by committee? I also wonder if I'm actually on to something here or if I've just found a weird way of dismissing something I can't find an actual fault with.

Well, as ever, your mileage may vary. I think this film would be great to study for acting tips (or for writing tips or cinematography or whatever) because it really is great and really polished in every way that I was paying attention to. Like I say, I may have merely hit upon a way to dismiss a good film and feel clever about doing so, but it felt a tad tame to me.