'Carnage'

Polanski's latest release Carnage returns to themes, one cannot help but imagine being predominant in Polanski's mind, namely the themes of social confinement and an underlying brutality to a self-congratulatory notion of civility self-imposed by a modern society which proves itself to be more Hobbesian in nature than it would care to admit.

What starts as a somewhat stiff, but nevertheless polite settlement of a dispute of a children's fight, soon turns into a veritable battle of all against all. From the beginning the artificiality of civilization as a discourse is exposed over the petty quibble of the word 'armed' and the negative connotations it might involve. Things turn from bad to worse as the self-proclaimed liberal writer Penelope and her salesman husband Michael face the somewhat ritzier well-to-doers Nancy and Allen. Deliciously slow and with obvious glee, Polanski strips away layer after layer of his characters' personalities, a bit like evil onions, exposing a raw brutality inherent in this bourgeois way of life. As such, in this post-modern societal drama, culture is displayed in the form of coffee-table books, originality takes the form of adding pears to an apple cobbler and the ethically charged Gretchen-question reverts into a hamster-question as the unfortunate rodent is left to its own devices in the neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Hypocrisy rules the day and a breaking point is reached when Nancy has a very corporeal reaction to the Martha Stewart-like culinary efforts of Penelope. Throw in a bit of booze and some very phallic cigars and the bourgeois krakken is released. Between the four characters alliances are formed only to be broken and the viewer has the pleasure of seeing things degenerate from an 'we're all decent people' to a vehement 'Fuck you all'.

Carnage does at times feel fairly staged, being based on the play 'the god of carnage' by Yasmin Reza, however, the real time action and confinement to four walls only help to emphasize the claustrophobic set-up. The camera taking the point of view of a detached observer, almost like a perverse scientist dissecting the behavior of a species within its natural habitat. As such the camera becomes equivalent to the emotional tensions either isolating the characters in harsh close-ups smoothly binding them within the same frame. Even though masterfully done, one cannot help but feel that the smooth controlled cinematography stands in direct contrast to the depiction of carnage as a theme.

Being a character-study par excellence, Carnage's real asset lies in its performances as Foster plays Penelope with an up-tightness in which the strained veins on her forehead deserve at least as much acclaim as her acting skills, Reilly turns Michael from a loving parent into a raging Republican, Winslet plays Nancy with a beautiful shallowness which admittedly is literally turned inside out and Waltz delivers the best lines of the dialogue with a dry wit and honesty which are a delight to watch.

Ironically, Carnage has been acclaimed by exactly the middle-class bourgeois audience it exposes as fake. An audience which discusses the film in a civilized manner over a nice glass of Merlot and a bit of home-made hummus with fair-trade flat bread, all the while not realizing that it watched slightly distorted caricatures of itself for the last eighty minutes. All in all, while being hugely entertaining, the film ultimately presents half-developed truths while never bringing any theme to its conclusion. As such it presents nothing original, thus being a true product of the very thing it attacks, namely post-modern emptiness pervading all modern discourse. True Carnage this is not, an entertaining bicker for a pre-dinner audience more like it.