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January 12-18, 2012 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 21
Film>>
House arrest in Brooklyn Heights by David Lamble
I
t’s a terribly fitting tribute to a sadly forgettable year that the last film to sneak onto my Top Films list is a very black comedy directed and cowritten by a fugitive from American justice, Roman Polanski. Polanski’s Carnage (co-written with Yasmina Reza, based on her widely produced play God of Carnage) is that peculiar dramatic animal, a powerful play that doesn’t totally transform into a film but rather occupies an uncomfortable demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two art-forms. I say DMZ because Polanski’s Carnage reminds us beat after beat that theatre at its best is a blood sport. And who better than Roman Polanski to simulate the sensation of house arrest as a hilarious metaphor and backdrop for the verbal karate waged by two sophisticated couples over a playground fight between their respective 11-year-old sons? While the grownups – the stellar Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz – initially play nice, soon the gloves come off and heavy weapons emerge: cell phones, projectile vomit, the disorienting effects of single malt whiskey, and the insidious guilt that can be summoned forth when a modern man is accused of unspeakable cruelty to a domesticated rodent. It’s all in service to a visceral and highly emotional undressing that blurs lines between a power couple and two politically correct Brooklyn liberals. For us, the paying guests or hostages, the payoff, depending of course on who you are and what pushes your buttons, may be howls of possibly inappropriate laughter. Warning: Carnage, not unlike Polanski’s four-decade asylum from LA justice, may prove a tad indigestible to certain politically anal types such as many New York film critics, but this badly raised child of the suburbs was howling from opening shot to closing credits. The movie opens in a long shot of adolescents facing off in a riverfront
Sony Pictures Classics
John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster in Roman Polanski’s Carnage.
playground. One boy, Zachary Cowen (Elvis Polanski), strikes another, Ethan Longstreet, with a stick. We then find ourselves in a smartly furnished Brooklyn townhouse where a kind of peace conference is underway between the Longstreets and the Cowens. Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster) is putting the final touches on what, to her, appears to be the equivalent of a peace pact, actually a computer-assembled account of the boys’ scuffle with pauses to adjust the language. Out goes the phrase “armed with a stick.” The endgame is a truce between the boys with some kind of apology from the Cowens’ kid, Zachary. The drama begins with Penelope seemingly holding the whip hand: she’s got her salesman hubby, Michael (a sensational John C. Reilly), evoking every drop of a working-class guy’s seething resentment for having to defer to his wife and kow-tow to the rich and condescending Cowens. Alan Cowen (Christoph Waltz) is a ferocious attack dog drug-company lawyer, who’s forever excusing himself from the “playground peace treaty” to address an unseen drug executive about the best strategy for avoiding a class action lawsuit. Alan’s boorish use of his cell phone infuriates not
of Ethan, and you’re in my face over a hamster.” “What you did to that hamster was wrong, you can’t deny it.” “I don’t give a shit about the hamster!” “Well, you’re going to give a shit about the hamster when your daughter gets home,” “Bring her on! I’m not going to be told how to act by some nine-yearold snot-nose brat!” “You see, it’s pathetic.” “Watch it Penelope! I’ve kept my shirt on up to now, but you are pushing me over the line.” “If you feel no remorse, why should our son?” “You know what, all this conciliation shit, I’m sick to death of it. We were nice to you. We bought tulips. You know my wife dressed me up as a liberal, but the fact of the matter is I’ve got no patience for this touchy-feely bullshit. I am a shorttempered son-of-a-bitch!” “No, I’m sorry we’re not all short tempered sons-of-bitches.” “Not you, of course,” “Not me, thank god!” “No, not you, Darjeeling, you’re so evolved, you never go off halfcocked.”
only the Longstreets but also his too tightly wrapped wife, Nancy (Kate Winslet), who we are led to believe devotes her professional life to managing the couple’s swag. Penelope and Michael attempt to turn this impromptu summit meeting between strangers into a pseudo social event, complete with a decorative flower arrangement (tulips), a display of Penelope’s rare art books, and servings of her special recipe, apple/pear cobbler. Supposedly gathered to see that their sons avoid future mayhem, the Longstreets and the Cowens start dueling over everything that enrages each about the other. When Penelope lets slip that Michael has just that morning tossed their daughter’s pet hamster Tibble out into the street, the “murder” of a pet rodent becomes a kind of proxy for an escalating game of one-upmanship, as Nancy Cowen throws the plight of the hamster onto the scales as some moral equivalent of the dental damage suffered by Ethan Longstreet at the hands of her son. “You have no remorse?” “No. I have no remorse! That animal was disgusting, and I’m glad it’s gone.” “Michael, that’s ridiculous.” “What, have you lost your mind now, too? Their son beats the shit out
DVD>>
True stories by Gregg Shapiro
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’Amour Fou (Sundance), Pierre Thoretton’s odd and non-traditional doc about the relationship between gay fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his life partner of 50 years Pierre Bergé, is an unexpectedly removed and frosty affair. The doc begins with YSL, the creator of the modern woman’s wardrobe and a liberal quoter of Proust and Rimbaud, at a press conference where he announces his retirement. Shortly
Sony Pictures Classics
Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet in Roman Polanski’s Carnage.
thereafter, we are at his 2008 funeral. From there, L’Amour Fou intersperses the story of Saint Laurent and Bergé’s lifetime together, beginning with how they met following the death of Christian Dior, with the preparations for the auction of the couple’s massive art collection. It’s a strange juxtaposition. One can’t help but wish there were tw separate docs two to watch, because th their romantic a and business p partnership really does d deserve its own platform. B Bergé’s AIDS and gay rights a activism alone was worthy o more time. As for the of a amazing collection of objects t they acquired over the course o their partnership, it too of d deserves its own focus, so t that the viewer can fully a appreciate the extraordinary w works of art. As it is, neither t love story nor the other the p points of interest really g the attention they so get j justly deserve. DVD bonus f features include a “making of ” featurette and more. Jean Carlomusto’s Sex
in an Epidemic (Outcast Films), an East Coast companion if you will to David Weissman and Bill Weber’s San Francisco-based AIDS doc We Were Here, is as enlightening as it is emotionally powerful. With an emphasis on “honest, comprehensive sex education,” the doc begins by tracing important 20th-century events, including the Kinsey Report, the introduction of the birth control pill, the Stonewall riots and birth of gay lib, Roe v. Wade and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, that got us to where we were when AIDS first arrived on the shores of New York. See page 28 >>
“Why are you being so aggressive?” “I’m not being aggressive, I’m being honest.” With its astutely chosen social buzz-words and character facades – Penelope’s facile use of a politically correct agenda to intimidate her husband and silence her guests, Alan’s ruthless intrusion of his business world into a supposedly offlimits private setting, Nancy’s barely disguised contempt for a socially inferior couple’s attempt to humiliate her son, and Michael’s fury that his domestic sanctuary has been invaded by snobs and hypocrites, abetted by his hyper-liberal control-freak wife – Carnage’s tasteful Brooklyn living room becomes a mosh pit for a quartet of terribly unhappy adults who are pissed that they, unlike their boys, can’t just lash out with the nearest weapon at hand. While it’s no Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnage may well be this award season’s best excuse to comically lash out at all the vile indignities of the digital age. I dare you not to applaud when a certain cell phone is tossed into a vase full of tulips. And take notes on the uses to which a hair dryer may be put to repair socially inflicted carnage.▼