Carnage - review

But it isn't just the acting that should make your evening. It is the impish and highly skilled way Polanski directs this ineffably middle-class quartet, mostly in one very accurately furnished New York apartment, as they tear each other to pieces, much as Luis Buñuel was wont to do with his bourgeois nincompoops.

The Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C Reilly) and the Cowans (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) have come together in a hopefully civilised fashion because the Longstreet boy has been injured, though not too seriously, by the Cowans' son in a Brooklyn park.

It is all very well-mannered at first. More coffee? Oh, thanks. Perhaps the boys themselves should talk it out. Or it was much ado about nothing. But there are individual agendas to be dealt with, and slowly but surely whisky and bared teeth replace coffee and polite smiles.

Each of the four parents are skewered by Reza and Polanski with a bleak and pessimistic ridicule that never quite reaches into the realms of caricature or parody. The actors know exactly what they are doing as they find their claws. Foster, in particular, moves brilliantly from understanding liberal to screeching harpie, while Waltz's ludicrous lawyer, constantly taking calls on his BlackBerry, is the nearest to a farcical figure. Winslet, as his defensive, peace-maker wife, and Reilly, as Foster's at first genial and placatory husband, both make a considerable mark.

Before the end, the offending mobile phone is chucked into a flower vase, a bag is thrown across the room and there is a vomiting scene that's a tour de force of comic timing. We opine that civilisation is skin deep and flesh is raw.

The whole isn't just very funny, it is also highly pertinent. Not exactly sympathetic to anyone except the boys themselves, who are finally seen in the park being a good deal more worldly about their fracas than their parents. The film is well able to make us think exactly how we might have behaved in similar circumstances.

Carnage
Cert: 15