Children aren't born innocent so much as they are unformed; like Adam and Eve before the fall, they live in a world where good and evil are meaningless. Raising them from that state means confronting the fact that before the blessings of civilization take hold, we are all animals, and no amount of good breeding can far suppress our bestial nature.
The children in Roman Polanski's Carnage are mostly unseen, barring the playground preface that's filmed in wordless long shot, like a nature documentary. But the standoff between a single boy and a group of his would-be friends is both the movie's pretext and its subtext. The blow that knocks out one boy's teeth necessitates a meeting between both sets of parents, with the perpetrator's wealthy father and mother, Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), dropping in on the Brooklyn digs of the victim's liberal mom and dad, Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly). And it also serves as a reminder that, even though the only casualty of the verbal sparring match that follows is an insistently buzzing BlackBerry, the desire to draw blood is no less acute.
Carnage opens at what ought to be the end, with the Longstreets' printer ejecting a typewritten accord between the two parties. But though the Cowans quickly make for the elevators, they never get farther than the hallways. On stage, where the material originated as Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage, their inability to leave was a theatrical necessity, but on film, it takes on an existential cast. They're boxed in like the dinner guests in Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, or the madwoman in Polanski's Repulsion, prisoners of their own nature.
Even before Michael says, with a hint of forced joviality, "We're all decent people," it's obvious that it's only a matter of time before the gloves come off, with Alan and Penelope in opposing corners. The predictable downslide into animal behavior is the movie's greatest weakness, an attempt to pass off sophomore cynicism as anthropological insight. But Polanski is in expert form, infusing the material with impish glee and executing it with breathless velocity. He knows it's a zesty snack rather than a hearty meal.
Like Robert Altman, or Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, Polanski retains the physical confines of the play but smashes through the proscenium, setting his camera loose inside the apartment. Rather than "opening it up" as is the hack's wisdom, he films it from the inside out. Although Reilly's part is underwritten and therefore haphazardly played, the rest of the movie's cast is superbly on point, especially Foster, who does her best, most precise work in decades. Carnage promises no great revelations, but it drives home an oft-observed truth with wit and style. It's thin, but then so is a knife between your ribs.
