Roman Polanski's movie version of Yasmina Reza's play "God of Carnage" has a truncated title (just Carnage) and a cast of brilliant actors (John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, and Jodie Foster) hamming it up as New York City basket-cases getting hot and bothered because their elementary-school-aged sons got into a fight. It's a tedious and gorgeous movie, like a trashy sitcom directed by Ingmar Bergman. A claustrophobia sets in almost immediately, as we watch these four people act like complete and total idiots, with a gloss of philosophy and art-history added on to make the whole thing seem worth the trouble. But what makes it worth watching for real is Jodie Foster. It's like this is her Mommie Dearest moment (the 1981 Joan-Crawford dragshow that featured Faye Dunaway as the famous sadist/actress; Faye never seemed to recover). Foster plays a politically-correct, sincere, creepy, shrill harpie that tows the party-line so hard she makes the word "community" sound like bullets shooting out of a gun. It totally feels like she's channeling Mink Stole's Peggy Gravel all the way through. Peggy Gravel is the main character in John Waters' 1977 masterpiece Desperate Living, and in that movie Stole inhabits Peggy's psyche with a psychotic ferocity close to demon possession. As in all of Waters' movies, the characters mostly speak in hyperbolic hilarious monologues. Peggy in Desperate Living is always screeching about unfairness and crime and how she does not deserve the world she is living in. And Foster's Penelope Longstreet is in the same boat in Carnage. The shrillness is comic and hyperbolic, but the joke is very, very thin, as is the plot, which runs along the lines of Waiting for Godot with a little Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf tossed in for good measure. Polanski has made a John Waters' movie out of scraps from a Woody Allen one. It is delightfully stupid and probably a truly bad movie, but incredibly watchable like a dining room fuss in Mob Wives: pure camp, without any redeeming values. What's better than that?
I just watched this last night and the Waters parallels are right on the surface, including a better puke scene than in any of the last 31 years of Waters films. What came to mind while watching it were the films of John Cassavetes more than Woody Allen. This being a product of its characters screaming at each other for half the running time. But while, my reaction with Cassavetes is to just turn it off [no one is that hateful], with "Carnage" a camp line is crossed and the result was nonstop laughter. So right about Penelope = Peggy Gravel! I stand in awe of Foster's performance. It couldn't have been easy to keep her facial muscles that taut for what must have been weeks of shooting. You could play pizzicato on those neck tendons of hers! Her face tightens progressively into a rictus of tension as the film unfolds and I stand in awe.
ReplyDeleteMe too! Seriousness beyond seriousness becomes total pleasure to watch. I love Cassevetes in ROSEMARY'S BABY, his movieS not so much -- although A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is Gena Rowlands at her finest... But Cassevettes in RB: sexy and scummy and wanting to be famous so bad he helps the devil rape his wife. Roman Polanski strikes again.
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