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Title: Carnage
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents, there are is some brief strong language in the dialog, but not much else. Recommended for ages 14 and up. |
Watching “Carnage” is akin to being the middleman in a group therapy session. You listen to all sides of the agreement, there's some small talk in the middle, and then everyone leaves exhausted over something that should have been settled three hours ago. “Carnage” is thankfully mercifully short at a brief eighty minutes or so, but it still manages to overstay its welcome. The film stars two couples, one played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly while the other couple is played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. They are meeting because one of the couple's sons knocked out the other son's teeth with a wooden stick over an argument.
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The point of the meeting is to deal with a respectable form of punishment without getting the law involved (and experience director Roman Polanski is probably all too familiar with). Of course, this is always a futile effort, because both parents see their kid as the innocent one. Sure one of the kids knocked the other kid's teeth out, but who's to say the kid wasn't provoked to into doing that in the first place? And isn't this sort of thing what insurance in for anyway? Never mind, I think you can already see the problem with this film. This is a situation that has the potential to go round and round in circles. That is does will surprise no one.
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That it is funny at times will also likely surprise no one. But does that make it entertaining for the fully eighty minutes of the film? I'm not convinced it does. To me, this sort of screenplay writes itself as a single joke that gets repeated for over an hour. Unless the payoff is truly remarkable there's no way for you not to feel exhausted by the end of the film. Maybe the problem is the source material isn't suited well for film? It's based off a Tony-winning Broadway play called “Gods of Carnage.” I'm not entirely sure why the name is abbreviated here, but “Carnage” describes the emotions this film leaves with the viewer all too well.
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Contained in one New York apartment for the entire time, there seems to be no way for these people to walk around and breath. We have three Oscar-winning actors and one nominee in this movie, and all they have to do is stand around and yell at each other, getting all the more outrageous as they go along. Maybe this humor works on a stage play where there's some distance between the actors and the audience, but in a film it just sort of feels like we're stuck in the middle of everything without much room to breathe. Considering the limitations of the film itself, I'm surprised Polanski even wanted to make it in the first place.
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The film leaves no room for him to breath as an artist or director. Did the man who directed such epic classics like “Chinatown” and “The Pianist” just want a day off where he could film a whole movie in an office for once? Recently I saw Seven Spielberg's “War Horse” which was a failure, but an ambitious failure at that. “Carnage” is also a failure. And though it does get an extra half star from me because it was slightly more entertaining, its ambitions are so low that you feel really bad that a great director made it at all. It's almost like Polanski took an easy paycheck on this one. I think everyone involved in this film might want to go back outside and learn to enjoy life a little bit again.
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