Carnage (2011)

Roman Polanski's Carnage assembles four excellent actors in a Brooklyn apartment and lets them dismantle one another for eighty minutes. The premise is a meeting between two sets of parents whose sons have exchanged a stick to the face. The meeting is meant to be brief. It is not brief. Polanski, working from Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning play, keeps the camera close and the exits visible, and the four performers do the heavy lifting with the weary precision of people who have done this on stage before. The film is a comedy of errors, which is to say it is a comedy of people who cannot stop talking long enough to leave.

The two women, played by Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, hold the room with force and complexity, and they escalate the argument with a conviction the men never quite match. This is not a thesis about patriarchy. It is a play about four people behaving badly, and the film treats their gender as a fact of casting, not a cause for commentary. Christoph Waltz's corporate lawyer, forever taking calls about a risky pharmaceutical he is paid to defend, offers a light jab at professional amorality. The jab lands and then it is over. Nobody in the film is trying to teach us anything about the economy, and the screenplay has no interest in converting its audience.

What we get instead is a hamster, a vase of tulips, a BlackBerry in the water, and a slow collapse into name-calling. The film wants to amuse and to expose hypocrisy, and it does both without a single sermon. There is no racial reckoning here, no environmental conscience, no advocacy of any kind. The characters are white, comfortable, and consumed by their own grievances. The closing shot of two boys quietly reconciling in a park suggests the adults were never the point. A tidy, unfashionable film about the pleasure of watching intelligent people lose an argument.