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Battle Tale

There's a storytelling trope about peeling back the facade of oh-so well-behaved characters and watching them be reduced to their feral selves (see "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "War of the Roses"). Frequently these stories take the form of stage plays - involving excessive amounts of alcohol - and provide platforms for tour de force acting indulgences. Yasmina Reza's acclaimed play, "God of Carnage", is a prime example. It follows two couples as they try to come to terms over a playground dispute that left one couple's son the victim of a nasty beating at the hands of the other's. What starts as extremely forced pleasantries devolves into a virtual rending of each other's feelings.

Transplanted to Broadway, translated to English and now re-set in New York City and renamed "Carnage" for Roman Polanski's film adaptation, the fun of the story is in recognizing ourselves in these characters and imagining how - or if - we might steer clear of the pitfalls they suffer. As a result, your enjoyment of this movie will be dircectly proportional to your desire to see this movie in the first place.

Jodie Foster reaches unseen heights of high-strungedness, popping veins in her neck that I didn't even know she had, as Penelope Longstreet, the mother of the victimized boy. Her son Ethan was slashed in the face and had two teeth knocked out courtesy of Zach, son of Al and Nancy. Penelope tries to play it as politely as possible, but her casual use of words like "armed" and "disfigured" quickly sets the proceedings on edge.

For her part, Nancy plays it contrite - almost to a fault - admitting that Zach needs to apologize. Her husband Al goes so far as to call the boy a "maniac", revealing some clear martial strife. Meanwhile, Penelope's husband Michael tries to keep everything as civil as possible, playing the great mediator.

John C. Reilly has a blast relaxing into the role of Michael, a streetwise salesman. Though the mystery of how he and Ms. Foster's Penelope ever ended up together is surpassed only by the question of how they could afford the apartment in which the film is set. Kate Winslet shows off her flawless American accent - which gets better as she plays drunk. Christoph Waltz' accent is more of a problem, but he more than makes up for it with the sheer glee he injects into Al, playing a ruthless blackberry-addicted lawyer with the same zeal as his Nazi commander in "Inglourious Basterds".

These are four powerhouse actors and, for the first half of the film you'd better believe they are acting - with a capital "A". As the characters inevitably disintegrate - for various reasons in the well-observed script - they start to ease back. It's almost poetic that, as the characters drop their artifice, the actors loosen up similarly.

It all blows up as it must and the ringleader of it all is director Roman Polanski. Like his actors, he approaches the material as an exercise: how to film a 90-minute script in one location and in real time. He's attacked the single location problem before (in 1962's tense "Knife in the Water") and he handles the chronological aspect like a pro. The film never drags and, thanks to a well-placed mirror, he makes the most of his small location.

What he fails to uncover is the point behind it all. On stage, "Carnage" feels like an acting showcase. On film, it feels like a filmed play. I'm all for bringing the story to a larger audience, but aside from that altruistic notion there doesn't seem to be much of a need for this adaptation. Unless you really yearn to see well-to-do yuppies getting cut down to size. In which case, have it at.