Following a fight, the parents of the two children involved
meet to discuss what happened and how best to go about resolving it. They start
off as overly polite and attempt to remain adult about things but it soon
descends into chaos after being stuck together in the same room for a while.
Having never been in a fight, I’ve never had to experience
the sheer awkwardness of parents attempting to be sensible about dealing with
it. There’s a part of them that’s obviously furious that it would happen and
that their child is hurt, but there’s also a part that realises that it was the
children who did it and the adults have to behave in a polite way. Penelope
(Jodie Foster) is clearly furious that her son was beaten up but she also tries
to rise above it and see things in a more impartial way. Her attempts at being
the bigger person, however, fail right off the bat due to her inability to stop
making little remarks at every available opportunity. It’s clear that she doesn’t
have the support of her husband and that she forced him into the meeting; he
starts off doing exactly what she wants but in the end, he doesn’t actually
care about any of it. The other mother, Nancy (Kate Winslet), tries to be accommodating
to Penelope and Michael (John C Reilly) because she knows her son has done
wrong but she doesn’t care about resolving it in a healthy way, she just wants
it over with. After continual provocation from Penelope, she lashes out and
tries to lessen her son’s responsibility in the incident. Her husband, Alan
(Christoph Waltz), couldn’t care less about any of this as he is completely
preoccupied by his work. During the time they spend together, he continually
answers his phone in the middle of everybody talking and as the film progresses
everyone becomes more irritated by it. In the end, nothing is resolved and
everybody has said and done things that they will no doubt later regret.
I kept comparing this film to ‘Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?’ despite them not having similar storylines. The set-up is similar in
that there are 4 people and they are mainly confined to one place and they all
get progressively drunker and more aggressive. Carnage is the poorer of the
two, so I’d suggest watching the other if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s
not that it was bad, but it was all done too quickly. I understand that they
were all on the edge anyway and that it certainly wouldn’t have taken them long
to topple into anger but I would’ve preferred if it had been drawn out. The
film itself is only 76 minutes long and it does do well in that short amount of
time but it might’ve benefitted from taking some time to build the tension.
No comments:
Post a Comment