Carnage

I won a double pass in a National Gallery of Victoria competition, so yesterday afternoon during the pouring Melbourne rain, Shaun and I took ourselves off to see Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011) at the Rivoli Cinema. The acting was superb, however, the narrative was not entirely believable, since it seemed untenable that a boy could sustain the loss of one tooth and damage to another just by being hit across the face with a stick and I didn't understand why the parent's of the damaged child would be so amiable to the parents of his attacker,  since they appeared so self-absorbed. Apart from that, the dialogue was witty and at times humorous, however, since the event goes to continuing discussions around bully in schools and male aggressiveness in our society, I took the situation quite seriously and could not fully embrace its comic aspects. This is a film with basically four actors (apart from the cameo from Polanski, who was apparently the neighbor who stuck his head outside the door briefly on hearing the adults arguing). It was shot entirely in one room and was reminiscent of watching a play. There was virtually no reprieve from the continuous dialogue and movement and  for this reason alone it did not reflect life. Also, there were blatant continuity errors, such as the amount of alcohol drunk from the bottle of Scotch didn't reflect the amount that should have been left and drying the pages of the art books would have taken a lot longer than shown in the film. Small things perhaps, but they annoyed me. I have to admit that it made me uncomfortable watching Jodie Foster play the passive-aggressive Penelope Longstreet, since Foster has almost always played strong female roles. I personally liked Polanski's use of the mirror in the apartment and the little hamster that survives. If you absolutely loathe the way mobile phones can intervene into life you are going to hate this film because the mobile phone is one of the central characters and is definitely intrusive. But, the film only runs for 80 minutes so it's worth while watching just to see Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly tear strips off each other.

Just a note: the first episode of the final series of Spooks (BBC) was aired last night on ABC1 and it was, as usual, exciting and provocative. I for one will be watching it every Saturday night, though know already that I'm going to be disappointed that the series will not continue.