A Spirited and Destructive 90 Minutes

Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” his film adaptation of a popular play by Yasmina Reza — “The God of Carnage” — is like a big fat curve ball: It would be difficult not to hit it out of the park.  And so he does, thanks in large part to a stellar quartet of lead actors. Facile comparisons to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” aside, “Carnage” is more an updated inversion of “Lord of the Flies.” In this case, children are essentially absent, except to set the stage, and it is the world of adults that dissolves into primal chaos. After a wordless prologue in which we see a playground argument end with one boy striking another in the face with a stick, we are in the Brooklyn apartment of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster), whose son, Ethan, was the victim; Penelope sits at a computer typing a statement about the incident while the parents of Zachary, the aggressor, look on.  They are a trim business couple, Michael and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), who have been invited for an attempt at reconciliation.From an argument over a single phrase — was Zachary “armed with” the stick, or did he merely swing it? — the meeting devolves into the verbal equivalent of a playground fracas, as fault lines open up in every direction: couple vs. couple, husband vs. wife, men vs. women, anarchists vs. idealists.  Cordiality disintegrates; alliances form and dissolve. Call it 90 minutes of social destruction.  Each person will have to confront at least one bitter truth about him or herself, if not more. One will be sick and drunk, another will nearly lose the cell phone on which he spends much of the time dealing loudly with a legal crisis involving the pharmaceutical company for which he works. This is material nearly any actor can swallow whole, but Polanski and casting director Fiona Weir nonetheless deserve credit for a casting triumph. The actors get to play exaggerated versions of their real selves, or at least as we know them from other movies. The ensemble is brilliant, held together by crisp direction and a script that crackles with humor, wit, and irony.  Has Winslet been appreciated enough? She, the wan Rose of “Titanic,” is an accomplished and versatile actress who shines here as an icy princess, a stockbroker by day, and the first to lose herself in the mayhem. Waltz, the Austrian-born Oscar winner for his menacing SS officer in “Inglourious Basterds,” is imperious and unflappable (until his cell phone crisis).  Reilly and Foster are a perfectly matched, or mismatched, pair, he seemingly nonchalant, she tightly wound to the breaking point, the one with the loftiest ideals who falls the farthest (again, a wonderful play on the archetypal Foster character).  “Carnage” has a few problems.  Waltz struggling to be American is one. Occasionally he sounds as if he has cotton in his mouth; at other times he blurts out a Germanic consonant.  Fortunately, he is too good to be undone by this difficulty.  More seriously, there is a point at which claustrophobia and tedium begin to set in. Unlike Woolf’s classic, the “Carnage” plot doesn’t really go anywhere — emotional battles and character development, yes, but nothing like the explosive revelations in the earlier work. This weakness is merely amplified by the movie’s perplexing non-ending.  Lastly, class issues are hinted at but don’t really work. The Longstreets’ circumstances suggest they are middle-class strivers, but their apartment (actually shot in Paris) would be the envy of upper-crust Brooklynites. For most of it, though, “Carnage” is a spirited display of thespian fireworks, well worth the visit. “Carnage” is rated R for language. It is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington, MA.