Mannered creeps spar in play-based 'Carnage'

LITTLE ROCK — Refreshingly brief and depressingly reductive, Carnage is the filmed version of Yasmina Reza’s obvious, heavy-handed Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage. It’s a rote, antiseptic exercise performed by earnest professionals who clearly relish the mouth feel of their lines.

And given the quality of the players, it’s not all bad - just petty and ungenerous, a sort of sub-Edward Albee take on the animalistic nature that lies just beneath our socialized surfaces. You can enjoy Carnage for the flashing of the actors’ eyes and the way they snap off their lines, but the arc of the production - the slipping off of decorous masks, of moving from civility to ferality over the course of a few minutes - is pretty pat. In all, it feels a little bit like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for dummies.

I’m not sure all the fault lies with the playwright; after all, her play was originally written in French and set in Paris; it was translated into English and adapted for the London stage and subsequently tweaked for Broadway with the setting changed to Brooklyn. No doubt certain subtleties were lost,and atrocities introduced.

Which might have been all right if the thing were relieved by sufficient comedy, or at least had a more interesting point. Trouble is, there’s nothing terribly interesting about any of the four types that the script contrives to put together in an upper middle class (yet still claustrophobic) apartment.

While the actors do manage to flesh out the parts with a few grace notes - seeming as people rather than symbols on the stage ... er, screen - they never escape the pressure of their scripted destiny. Stripped of free will, they can’t do what any rational real person would, which would be to run far away from the creeps across the coffee table.

The story is a simple one. Before the movie begins two boys have argued on a playground - one has struck the other with a stick, popping out two teeth and exposing some nerves. The “victim’s” parents, Michael and Penelope (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster), have invited the other boy’s parents, Alan and Nancy (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), over to talk about the situation.

At first the tone is conciliatory and self-congratulatory: Penelope and Michael agree that the phrase “armed with a stick” is freighted and prejudicial, that “carrying a stick” is better; Alan refers to his son as a “thug”; Nancy observes how wonderful they all are, since most parents would be reflexively defensive.

But each character eventually reveals a nasty side. Michael is a self-made wholesaler and a moral coward. Just the night before he’d released his daughter’s hamster into the street because he found it annoying. He was surprised when the domesticated animal seemed terrified. Alan is a corporate lawyer unable to ignore his cell phone or to take the discussion about the children seriously.

Penelope is a shrill, politically correct scold who’s writing a book about the tragedy of Darfur. Nancy is so eager to find common ground that she’s open to charges of appeasement and lack of interest that quite literally upset her.

Buried in all the turgid bellowing, bonding and breakups that cycle predictably, the film is a smart critique of petty bourgeois manners. What really matters to these people seems to be the preservation of their idea of themselves as generous, urbane souls who have lots of interesting things (like irreplaceable, out of-print art books, ungettable single-malt Scotch and contraband Cuban cigars) and know what other fruits to add to their peach cobblers.

With an ending that seems to echo (and rebuke) Cache, Michael Haneke’s more disturbing and disorderly essay on collective guilt, Carnage seems an overly neat, smug movie that, like the helicopter parents it pretends to satirize, is all about reassuring rather than instructing. It’s not as tough as it pretends - it’s just another chance for us to feel superior to these poor proud puny humans.

Moviegoers unaware of the film’s provenance might mistake Carnage - which was shot in Paris because of an Interpol warrant in effect for 188 countries for the extradition of director Roman Polanski to the United States to face sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 - for an anti-American screed. It’s not that at all. It’s not anti-American. It’s anti-human. Or at least anti-Western civilization.

These people, they’re all so phony. And so filled with straw.

Carnage 83 Cast: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly Director: Roman Polanski Rating: R, for language Running time: 79 minutes