Most of you haven’t heard of this film (and probably won’t be too inclined to look it up after this review) but it’s a small, scratch that, VERY small film that stars Jodie Foster, John C. Rielly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet as dueling sets of parents who get into it when their sons get into a playground fight. The film is based on the broadway play “God of Carnage” and, like the play, is set entirely in a Brooklyn apartment.
What Works: Well of course some of the lines are going to be funny and the performances are going to be at least decent when you get a cast like this together. Still, I kept thinking some of the actors might have been miscast, but we’ll get to that below…For now, I would say the best thing to come out of this movie was a nice, comfy way to kill 80 minutes and that I didn’t pay to watch it.
What Doesn’t Work: It’s just too slight and insubstantial to work as a film. I didn’t see the play, but I suspect this works much better on stage (it also doesn’t hurt that James Gandolfini played the Jon C. Reilly part and Jeff Daniels played the Christoph Waltz part) than it does in a movie theater where there’s so much distance between the performer and the audience. In a darkened theater watching something that’s not live, we have real time to think “Does Jodie Foster’s character have to be so damn hysterical for the last thirty minutes and is she over acting?” “Does Christoph Waltz always have to play a mildly sociopathic, cold, smarmy bastard and is he really the right actor to cast here?” “Just what the hell is Kate Winslet doing here?” “If the characters want to leave so bad, why don’t they leave?” As is, Carnage is one of those ridiculous movies that’s set in a single setting, where people keep threatening to leave but no one does…Maybe that works on stage, but as is, it made me long for the days of Richard Linklater’s “Tape” and other stage-based movies that actually work.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Roman Polanski is the wrong director for this and probably half this movie’s problems are his fault. He doesn’t have the right style to make a stage based movie come alive and, again, I would point to Richard Linklater’s rocketing camera in “Tape” as a much better example of how to direct a stage-movie that doesn’t put the audience to sleep: Explore corners, tilt perspective, send the camera ricocheting as characters try to verbally hurt each other, invest the movie with real energy by way of camera work, etc. Even if the characters aren’t free to leave, your camera shouldn’t feel trapped too.