The Film Experience

[Editor's Note: Ferdi, pictured left, is one of our two correspondents in Venice this year. Which affords us the rare pleasure of reading two pieces on the same movie back to back. I hope you're feeling appropriately spoiled since we're getting original photography and everything! Here's another opinion on Carnage. -Nathaniel R.]

Carnage (2011)

80 acid minutes of poison, screams, metaphorical scratches, literal vomits and memorable laughs. God, this movie rocks. Maybe it’s the original stage material which is so funny, clever and so well translated to the screen. Maybe it’s the eye of European mega-auteur Roman Polanski, who has rarely taken a misstep in his career. Maybe it’s just me: I love movies where all the focus is on the actors branch. The fact is I can’t stop thinking of Carnage since this early morning press screening.

What else can I say? You have to sit and watch and have fun. You're taken by the tension of the story without even taking a breath from start to finish. It’s a pitch-perfect arthouse movie, a little, subversive masterpiece about verbal violence and adult hypocrisies; a complex, powerful, crazy kammerspiel that begins, as many of you already know, as a polished comedy of manners and ends as a cruel psychological massacre.

Christoph and Kate are "best in show" says Ferdi

The pleasure of seeing these incredible actors going so over the top has no price. John C Reilly is surprisingly right for the part, hilarious and totally convincing. Christoph Waltz is once again genius and effortless as in Inglorious Basterds. Maybe the weak link is Jodie Foster who has some great moments that prove she can be very funny but she is too tight and anxious from the very beginning. (She is a great straight-forward physical actress but the part required something more subtle.) In fact, Foster doesn’t really seem to catch the satirical tone of the pochade; she goes more and more hysterical from one scene to the next instead of being multi-dimensional. This is were Kate Winslet excels. She’s the real standout, absolutely exhilarating without even doing too much.

All that said, I don’t see any Oscar play for anyone (Winslet aside, maybe, as supporting actress, but it would be a category fraud, because they all are leads), neither for the movie, which is possible too cynical, dark, weird and beautiful by Academy standards.