Carnage is decidedly stage-y for a film. There are two reasons for this - it is adapted from a French stage play and (due to his well-publicised legal difficulties) director Roman Polanski shot the whole thing in a Manhattan apartment completely recreated on a French sound stage, rather than on location. There are disadvantages to this - the reasons that one couple don't just leave sometimes feel rather implausible, the characters become drunk that little bit too quickly - in other words, at times it feels contrived. But it's worth bearing with it, because once it really gets going this is a brutally funny satire of middle-class mores. It's probably the best that Polanski has produced in a decade.
The strong cast are all on great form too - Christoph Waltz's lawyer is probably the most emotionally, morally and physically detached, spending half the time on the phone trying to hush up a scandal with a drug company he's representing. He also seems to almost delight in the mayhem that ensues and gets most of the best lines. Kate Winslet does well with perhaps the most difficult, least defined character who swings the most from compliant to resistant. Jodie Foster is perfectly cast as the liberal writing a book on Darfur, the most attached to doing the right thing as she sees it, but unaware of her own hypocrisy, whilst John C Reilly is great as her blue collar husband pretending to go along with her values whilst pining for the world of John Wayne. There are some great moments like the men bonding in mourning over the drowned Blackberry.Also notice the moment not in the apartment over the closing credits and what this says about the point of it all.
Overall - 7.5/10 Funny, at times brutally so. Get past the theatricality and there's a brilliant ensemble with great material.
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