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Carnage
2011
(Roman Polanski)
14A, 80 minutes
John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz
Here are two couples, brought together to talk over a bullying incident between their respective sons. They begin their afternoon with utmost civility and calm, but a mere 80 (real-time) minutes later in Polanski's deliciously nasty Carnage, the Cowans and the Longstreets are at one another's throats. And Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) are going for each other's jugulars, too, as are Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster). Allegiances have been shattered, loyalties destroyed. The cozy Brooklyn apartment where their meeting takes place is a literal and figurative disaster area. Waltz especially - as a lawyer with a crisis on his hands (a Big Pharma client in big trouble), he moves from one corner of the Longstreets' place to another, manning his cellphone as if he were alone in the world. His character is clueless, but the German actor of Inglourious Basterds fame - working a decent American accent - is winking all the way. And as Winslet's Nancy casts increasingly anguished, embarrassed looks in her husband's direction (she's beginning to wish he was alone in the world, too), the actress expertly walks that path between truth and farce. Reilly's Michael is the lug of the bunch, a home furnishings wholesaler who cheerfully chats everybody up - until the cracks in his buffoonish facade are exposed. Carnage is about the battle of the sexes, but it's also about class: The Cowans are New York elites, the Longstreets struggling to maintain their middle classiness. (Although their apartment, by New York real estate standards, is decidedly upper tier.) Was Ethan, the Longstreets' 11-year-old, really an innocent victim when he got thwacked in the head by the Cowans' boy? Or was there something about Ethan's station in life, and the sense of entitlement of his aggressor, that casts this schoolboy skirmish in a trickier sociocultural light?