Problematic casting — particularly of Jodie Foster as a protective mother — detracts from this stage-to-screen adaptation. (Sony Pictures)
It’s safe to say that Roman Polanski does not harbor warm feelings toward the US, whose officials have long refused to accept his “genius’’ as an excuse to pardon Polanski after he fled sentencing following a guilty plea to having sex with a minor.
So it’s somewhat surprising that, handed an opportunity to skewer bourgeois American mores with “Carnage,’’ his first film set here since he began his long life as a fugitive from justice, Polanski pretty much avoids going for the jugular.
Yes, this slick adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s worldwide stage hit “God of Carnage’’ — necessarily shot in a remarkable simulation of a Brooklyn apartment with a quartet of movie stars — is fast, furious and often funny.
But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).
Few in tonight’s opening-night audience at the New York Film Festival are going to identify with the pair of caricatured New York couples who can’t help lobbing verbal grenades while trying to amicably resolve the aftermath of that playground fight.
That “Carnage’’ fails to truly disturb, as Polanski’s best films have always done, is partly because the more realistic medium of film exposes the shallow contrivances of Reza’s social satire. (The film uses a slightly different translation of her original French play than Broadway did).
It worked brilliantly onstage, but the film version’s effectiveness is also diluted by a mismatched cast. The film is overly dominated by an over-the-top Jodie Foster, as a tightly wound author who hosts the meeting at the apartment she shares with her boorish salesman husband, improbably played by schlubby John C. Reilly.
She’s so full of unrestrained anger — because her son has lost two teeth to the other couple’s son (“disfiguring’’ him, as she puts it) — that her more upscale guests begin trying to flee almost immediately.
But the other mother, who works in financial services and is played by Kate Winslet, feels enough guilt that she prevails upon her sleazy lawyer husband to stick around — though it takes drastic action indeed before she can eventually pry her disinterested spouse’s BlackBerry out of his hands.
Before that happens, the stressed-out Winslet vomits all over her husband and Foster’s precious art books, which she’s arrayed like totems on the coffee table. Even if the apoplectic Foster’s not mugging, Polanski’s decision to keep shoving a camera in her throbbing face sure makes it look like she is. The actress, whose forte is naturalism, is also not always comfortable with the highly stylized dialogue.
The most fully satisfying performance is by Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds’’), who truly gets under the skin of his role by underplaying Winslet’s amoral husband. (It’s hard not to view the Austrian actor as something of a surrogate for Polanski, even if he does affect an American-ish accent).
When he isn’t helping a corporate client manage a crisis with a problematic new drug, Waltz casually dismisses Foster’s psychobabble and explains that, in the end, everyone is only looking out for themselves — and that morality is a relative concept, anyway.
After Reilly breaks out the scotch and Winslet gets roaring drunk, the conversation quickly tips into misogyny, racial prejudice and homophobia.
It’s often a hoot, but the pressure cooker that is “Carnage’’ never boils over and scalds like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’ which remains the gold standard for a four-person dramatic movie.