Carnage

B

Petty social commentary whose direction adds nothing visibly special and quartet of stars posture lazily.

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A successful stage play becomes a worthwhile movie if its narrative intensity is heightened by close-ups of actors' faces and reactions. God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's French comedy of modern parental manners, was a hit in Paris and then (translated by Christopher Hampton) in London and New York, and might have been the basis for a movie triumph in the mode of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like that stage and cinema classic, the French satirical, farcical and bitter comedy had a quartet of strong acting roles; it was retitled as Carnage, and got an accomplished director (Roman Polanski).

Unfortunately, a whole generation has passed since Edward Albee wrote his truly dramatic play (1962) about an academic's acerbic marriage, for which Mike Nichols directed the 1966 on-screen magic pairing of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. By comparison, four decades later, Reza's 70-minute extended sketch is a weak concoction.

Maybe Hampton's original translation worked well in the theatre. Given a new translation by another writer (suggesting Hampton's disapproval of the film production), which was turned into a screenplay by Reza and Polanski, the story looks and sounds more of a petty social commentary than any sort of indictment of modern parenting or social attitudes. The direction adds nothing visibly special, and the talented quartet of stars posture lazily.

Jodie Foster is an uptight socially-aware very PC prig married, incredibly, to a flabby bullied red-neck housewares manufacturer (John C Reilly). Similarly, Kate Winslet is the ill-matched socially-vacuous second wife of a sneering corporate attorney (Christoph Waltz) who lives through his mobile phone. All four are phony stereotypical metropolitan characters, who've met to deal with the fact that one son knocked out two of the other couple's son's teeth.

The couples' dramatic highlights are the off-screen abandonment of a hamster, and vomit on precious art volumes. The prickly quartet exchange niceties, barbed insults and drunken confidences, and the non-drama's theatrical box-office success may have depended on one actress having to vomit on stage in each performance. In the movies, that's no big deal and nothing else is worth watching.