Carnage, Roman Polanski, France, Germany, Spain, Poland 2011

A first-rate, award winning play, a highly talented, seasoned director, and a stellar cast - there's little room for anything to go wrong, is there? And nothing did. Practically. Based on Yasmin Reza's play, God of Carnage, Roman Polanski's latest offering is a sort-of updated version of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Which, to be clear, is not to imply that Reza borrowed from Albee's iconic play. If anything, she took her cue from it, got inspired by it, in order to create something that is entirely her own but which, similar to Albee, also comes very much to live through Reza's relentless, razor-sharp, observations of the debilitatingly political correct times we live in.

However, my one issue with Polanski's film is that it ends rather abruptly ... Since I'm unfamiliar with the original play, I'm unable to say, of course, if this is how Reza intended it. Don't get me wrong - I'm usually all for open endings and for films that tell their story succinctly. Nevertheless, here goes one film which I'd have wished to be a little longer and to have some sort of a closure rather than just stopping smack in the middle, depriving the audience of the last act (e.g the brawl which is about to take place ... or so it seems). But, you may argue, that is exactly why it ends where it does.


Carnage, opening scene

One of the best things about Reza's play is her achievement to well-nigh unnoticeably shift the spectator's sympathies and empathies from one character to another - and back again. Identification is thus tricky if not impossible, for every character is in almost equal parts as likeable as they are dislikeable. I also take my hat off to each and every one of Polanski's cast, for they manage to own up to the play, keeping our sympathies in murky waters, and just when you thought you found the one person in this bizarre, yet very real, bunch of neurotics that offers identification, he - or she - does or says something which renders them completely dislikeable.



Carnage premiered to rave reviews at last year's Venice film fest. All the more astounding that it is strangely and inexplicably absent from the list of Golden Globes nominations and other similar such awards ... if nothing else, at least Jodie Foster as well as Kate Winslet should have received a best acting nod. They, even more so than than John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, are especially outstanding in their very own definition and creation of women-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown. Yet they didn't ... can it be that America's 30-year grudge held against Polanski should have something to do with it ...? I hope not! It's time for bygones to be let bygones!

Something else that deserves pointing out are the wardrobe and the set design for Polanski managed to bring two dinosaurs on board who are at least as seasoned and top-notch as he himself along with his cast, are: costume designer Milena Canonero and set designer Dean Tavoularis. Canonero, who, for instance, worked with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, is a woman of impeccable, flawless, taste. Like every talented costume designer - though there are so few - she's an expert in highlighting character traits through costume, which is precisely what she does in Carnage (e.g. black power suits for Waltz's cynical attorney and Winslet's investment broker and softer colours for Foster's would-be writer and Reilly's peddler of household goods).



Dean Tavoularis' set for Carnage looks like straight out of a Woody Allen film, his films usually being set in the exact same New York, upper middle-class surroundings, which form the background of Carnage. Tavoularis' achievement to make Foster's and Reilly's apartment look like your quintessential Brooklyn Heights digs is all the more remarkable as Carnage was, of course, shot entirely on a sound stage outside Paris as to this day Polanski is still unable to enter the US without risking to be arrested upon arrival.

Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes, US/ UK 2008

I recently watched Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road for the first time, having been quite reluctant to watch it all, since I'm such an admirer of Yates' book. And, perhaps inevitably, I've come to the conclusion that the problem with Mendes’ film is not that it is a bad one, but rather that it is ultimately inferior to the book it is based on. Although literature and film are two different entities and should be treated as such, even if one is based on the other, Yates’ book is so ‘alive’, so filmic, so rich in images - with, paradoxically very little action - that one’s imagination is switched on to the hilt while reading it. And needless to say, one’s own images hardly ever match those of the finished film and as a result, watching the film can only be a disappointment. Another glitch Mendes had to face was the fact that the book is full of inner thought, monologue and dialogue - something that is very tricky to translate into the language of film. Hence, considering the richness of the book’s, shall we say, ‘non-verbal action’, using a voice-over narrator would have solved that problem elegantly.

Regarding the plot itself, there is, what I think, a very significant omission, and that’s the childhood and upbringing of both, April and Frank Wheeler. It is important for the viewer to have this background information as this explains, for instance, why Frank is so easily dissuaded from their plan of moving to Paris as Yates illustrates so plausibly in his book how man has a tendency to -subconsciously - replicate the lives of their parents. April, on the other hand, having been raised by relatives, with her father mostly absent and a mother who succumbed to alcoholism, has had an entirely different upbringing from Frank’s. And this may make it so difficult for her to lead the kind of suburban conventionality that Frank appears to be contented with - for their childhoods are almost at opposites ends from each other. Thus April, like so many women whose father was mostly absent - Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Romy Schneider, to name only some of the most famous examples - aspires to become an actress: a shattered dream, to be replaced by another, almost equally ambitious one: the dream of moving to Paris (without having a job or speaking French!).

So much for the differences between the book and the film. Looking at the film itself and pretending not to know the book - which is literally impossible as the images from Yates’ book are still so vividly present in my mind - it must be repeated that Revolutionary Road is certainly not a bad film, even though my review may make it sound like one, and, perhaps, as careful an adaptation of the novel as possible. Kate Winslet as April is superb, infinitely superior to DiCaprio, and, to me, most definitely the film’s highlight. She carries the film. The film’s production values - camera, lighting, costumes - are unobtrusively appropriate, however, Thomas Newman’s music isn’t. His score is boring and uninventive and it’s a shame that in spite of the film’s promising trailer - which used Nina Simone’s hauntingly beautiful Wild is the Wind - Newman didn’t manage to come up with something more inspiring, something that may have, if not furthered, at least matched, the plot better than the trivial music he composed for Mendes’ film. It’s a far cry from his masterful score for American Beauty. Music in a film - its score - should either be used in a way that you don’t notice it at all, or, if you do, it has to underscore the narrative. In this instance, the music is there all the time, yet it its function is unclear as it seems like a separate entity that was written for another film or, perhaps, not even any film at all.


Revolutionary Road is now out on DVD.