Review of Carnage (2014) by Edgar C — 06 Jan 2014

Why can't they leave? From El Ángel Exterminador (1962), the answer has been implied. "It's absurd, but it's in their nature. They just can't!".

Based on Yasmina Raza's play titled Le Dieu du Carnage (God of Carnage), Polanski adapts wonderfully and with a truly underrated array of great, though theatrical performances (especially Foster, who gets a lot of unfair criticism) a roller-coaster intellectual exercise of how your typical middle-class veil of politeness and mutual caring is broken down when either your ethical, social or moral standards are challenged by external factors that you cannot avoid because you were unwillingly involved in them since the very beginning. In this case, such factor is the son of a family hitting the son of the other.

Catalogued in my book as one of the best "verbally gory" films, Carnage seems to carry some Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) parallelism of degradation, moral assault and lots of liquor, while two couples unrealistically, though justifiably theatrically, "word" each other to death, taking contradictory sides when the situation seems convenient and mirroring the impulses that they so much condemn in minors. After all, the immature impulses of adults are not that much different, now are they?

Unfortunately, the adaptation to the big screen seems to drag along some unrealistic moments that seem to be placed in order for the plot to advance, e.g., the Cowans reaching the elevator twice and still not leaving because of secondary coffee invitations. Those moments could have been easily rewritten. Also, "realistically", any couple would have left after 15 or 20 minutes of arguing, so the script asks us to some suspension of disbelief and dig deeper into the original social criticisms and statements that the original material (the play) had instead of judging the film in terms of cinematic realism.

Still, Polanski is still an expert in scenario construction and suspense escalation, not as masterfully as Hitchcock's single-location mysteries would manage, but more or less as interestingly as Polanski did in the 60s.

79/100.