Director: Roman Polanski
Cast: Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Riley
Running Time: 80 min
Certificate: 15
Synopsis: Two sets of parents hold a meeting after their sons are involved in a fight. As their time together progresses, increasingly childish behavior throws the evening into chaos and disorder.
A fight between children has always ended in the traditional meeting of the parents, with the typical engaged mothers dragging along their husbands to a discussion they feel is really a ‘woman’s issue’. What we never ask ourselves though is, how responsible are the parents in representing their child’s problems, and more importantly, how much can you rely on your parents to act as adults?
Roman Polanski’s CARNAGE does exactly that. The film, adapted from a Yasmina Reza play, seems like a social experiment in which four polar-opposing characters are put together in a room, working out a problem with no real solution. Starting out with a polite and proper exterior, it slowly becomes clear that each parent is hiding their own secret agenda and their own childish need to prove themselves, and is just waiting to explode.
Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) are parents of eleven-
year-old Zachary Cowan, who in the opening scene of the film hits his classmate Ethan Longstreet across the face with a stick. Enter the Longstreets. Penelope and Michael (Jodie Foster and John C. Riley), with their perfectly decorated house and respectful manners, seem like a couple who have life, and their child, under control. They invite the Cowans to their house to hold a meeting as to how it would be best to work out their children’s fight.
Though the two sets of parents do everything in their power to be well mannered and to not say what they really think, it is only a matter of an invitation to stay for some coffee and apple cobbler and a few glasses of whiskey that turns the sensible and patient atmosphere into a tense and outraged situation.
While Penelope, a true believer in human rights and justice tries her best to control the scene, and herself, her husband Michael, with outbursts of crude behavior, starts to give away his accommodating nature. The tension, triggered by Alan’s continually ringing cell phone, reaches a turning point when a stressed Nancy vomits all over the Longstreet’s coffee table. Suddenly, it is not only the children’s fight, but also the state of the marriages and each parent’s own mental stability that comes into play.
With a brilliant cast, CARNAGE is really an ode to the crazy and stressful world we live in. All four performances live up to their expectations, with some of the film’s best lines given to Christoph Waltz’s cool, dead-serious and mocking character. A must-see for anyone who enjoys witty dialogue, so-called liberal minded attitudes and watching four adults deteriorate into immatureness. I wonder what their kids would say!
CARNAGE arrives in cinemas 3rd February 2012.
