Maybe the shrill, politically incorrect and pointedly erudite bickering of Yasmina Reza’s play "God of Carnage" works better in live theater, where everyone is playing to the back row.
In director Roman Polanski’s movie version, the Manhattan apartment (filmed in a Paris studio, due to Polanski’s prolonged legal exile) is too cramped for all the self-righteousness.
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‘Carnage’
Opens Friday, Jan. 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated R for language; 79 minutes.
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The story centers on two couples — Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), and Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) — trying to reach an amicable solution after the Cowans’ son smacks the Longstreets’ son with a stick in a playground fight.
But the veneer of civility and liberal parenting is soon peeled away, thanks to copious amounts of scotch and annoyance at Alan’s ever-ringing BlackBerry. Battle lines are drawn and redrawn, first between the couples and later along gender lines, but never in ways that genuine married couples (even New Yorkers) would behave.
Foster comes off the worst, terribly miscast as the rigidly liberal art snob. Waltz, as the boorish businessman, is the only actor who leaves "Carnage" in higher esteem with the audience than when he entered it.
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