Film review: Carnage (15)

‘WE’RE all decent people,” says John C Reilly, but when you are one of four characters in a film called Carnage, this seems unlikely. Sure enough, although Reilly and Jodie Foster invite Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet to their home for a civilised chat, it spirals into verbal bloodletting.

Reilly and Foster are the Longstreets, middle-class liberals with a son who is minus two teeth. This is the result of a playground fight with another boy. He belongs to the Cowans (Waltz and Winslet), who are younger, ritzier and, understandably, keen to dispose of the dispute and get the hell out. But every time they edge to the door, some new bit of business drags them back to continue the chat over coffee and a piece of day-old cobbler pudding and later, fatally, whisky. Thus the conversation, shot in real time, starts with discussions of responsibility and regret, crosses into scoldings and repressed anger, before exploding into unrepressed hostility and admissions of hamster abuse.

True colours are revealed. Reilly’s affability conceals casual boorish cruelty. Foster’s sensitive arty heart bleeds for the Third World but she’s a control-freak. Waltz’s lawyer pays lip service to parenting but is really welded to his BlackBerry, counselling a drug company whose new medicine has catastrophic side-effects, while Winslet’s immaculate investment banker has something churning up her guts which has got to come out somehow, and soon.

Everyone is pretty good in rather cartoonish roles, especially Foster. Yet as a couple, the teeny, tightly wound Foster and the bearish blowhard Reilly seem the most unnatural romantic pairing since Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques in Carry On Matron.

Of course, Carnage is not a bit interested in naturalism: it’s chokka with ideas and symbolism about how rapidly our veneer of civility gives way to aggression. That’s why they manage to get fighting drunk after 20 minutes and two fingers of whisky. Movie boozers haven’t been as lightweight as this since Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

Roman Polanski and Yasmina Reza have adapted Reza’s award-winning play God Of Carnage into a short, sharp, spare flick. During awards season, when many of the new releases last longer than Balkan wars, this is no bad thing. However, Carnage struggles to escape the feeling of a play acted in front of a camera. Polanski has pulled off single-set paranoia in the past – Knife In The Water does the job on a yacht – but here the wonky angles and harsh close-ups of Foster popping a vein still feel as if we’re off-Broadway. Carnage’s satire of bourgeois self-righteousness strikes a familiar chord, but fails to bring anything new to the dinner party.

RATING: ***

On general release from Friday