A couple of geriatrics garnered gongs in this year’s Academy Awards – octogenarian actor Christopher Plummer and septuagenarian writer Woody Allen.
Septuagenarian filmmaker Roman Polanski’s latest picture CARNAGE (M) shows these two codgers are not alone in bringing to the screen daring, funny, mature and entertaining stories.
Based on Yasmina Reza’s play THE GOD OF CARNAGE, Polanski has rendered a brisk, biting, hilarious picture that reverberates, recoils and rebounds its theatrical origin and transcends it.
Polanski is a prolific practitioner in both cinema and theatre and here he melds his proficiency of stage and screen into a seamless cinematic presentation of a modern day drawing room comedy.
Politically correct parenting is at the heart of this acerbic comedy of manners as two couples meet to discuss a playground pummeling perpetrated by one couple’s progeny against the other.
Power couple Nancy and Alan Cowan have come to Penelope and Michael Longstreet’s apartment to mitigate and mediate over their son’s attack on the Longstreet lad.
At first, all seems cool, calm and collected, as they discuss parenting and discipline over cake and coffee. But the veneer of civility slips with the introduction of “button” words like victim and bully and attorney Alan’s incapacity to curb taking constant calls on his mobile phone.
Manners mortared, politeness torpedoed, the discussion of the scuffle escalates into a verbal squabble of stupendously espoused vitriol, an uncivil vomiting of contradicting convictions, a spewing of grotesque prejudices and a skewering of veiled hypocrisy. I couldn’t have loved it more!
As the mobile phone fetishist, Christoph Waltz delivers his best screen performance since he took out the Oscar for INGLORIOUS BASTARDS. His on screen spouse is played with piss elegance by Kate Winslet.
The other couple teams two time Academy Award winner, Jodie Foster with nominated yet to win but only a matter of time Oscar bearer, John C. Reilly.
This is an awesome foursome unleashed in the confines on apartment to inflict conflict of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF proportions
Decorum and diplomacy scuttled by the adults, Polanski slyly bookends the film with the children who instigated the story and their micromanagement of the mêlée. Enfant terrible? More like parents infantiles!
Brilliantly paced, beautifully scripted, perfectly performed, CARNAGE is 80 minutes around a whirl with a girl hurl full of burl; pitch perfect Polanski and the funniest film so far this year.
© Richard Cotter
3rd March, 2012
Tags: CARNAGE, Roman Polanski, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslett, Jodie Foster, Jophn C Reilly, THE GOD OF CARNAGE, Yasmina Reza, Richard Cotter, Sydney Arts Guide.