MOVIE REVIEW: Carnage, a black satire directed with wicked glee by Roman Polanski

Carnage

(out of 4)

Starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz. Directed by Roman Polanski. 80 minutes. Opens Dec. 23 at the Varsity, Dec. 30 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 14A

Don’t let the bright yellow tulips on the coffee table fool you.
The pot of posies Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster) displays so proudly — “They fly the bulbs right in from Holland!” — can’t disguise the fact that the living room of her Brooklyn apartment is really a boxing ring. Or perhaps a gladiator’s colosseum.

That’s what it becomes, with sucker-punch suddenness, in Carnage, a black satire directed with wicked glee by Roman Polanski. Adapted from Yasmina Reza’s award-winning play God of Carnage (there’s no god in Polanski’s bleak world), it’s about what happens when adults pretend to be more civilized than their children.

It’s also a showcase for four great actors.
In this corner: Penelope, an aspiring writer of urgent African issues, and her husband Michael (John C. Reilly), a housewares salesman, who are parents to Ethan, age 11.
And in this corner: Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet), an investment broker, and her husband Alan (Christoph Waltz), a corporate lawyer, who are parents to Zachary, age 11.
Ethan (Eliot Berger) and Zachary (Elvis Polanski, the director’s son) got into a fight in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Viewed from a distance in a prologue that is silent save for the sound of tribal drums, Zachary hits Ethan in the face with a stick, to stop Ethan and his gang of friends from bothering him — maybe bullying him?
Ethan suffered two broken teeth, maybe even some nerve damage, and something must be done about this. An apology, at least.
It’s the kind of thing responsible parents should be able to work out, and that’s what the Longstreets and Cowans at first attempt to do. Penelope puts her writing skills to work on her computer, drafting an agreement of apology and restitution that the Cowans seem amenable to.
“It’s so much better than getting caught up in that adversarial mindset,” says Penelope, who fancies herself a pacifist standing on high moral turf. She wants the matter dealt with peaceably but firmly.
The others just want to get it over with. The slightly dim Michael is willing to agree with anything — he’s a little proud that Ethan runs in a gang, just as dad used to — and Alan and Nancy just want to get back to work.

Alan might as well have stayed at work, because he won’t get off the damned cellphone. He represents a major drug company, and he’s talking to an office flunky about how to dodge and weave past a damning Wall Street Journal article that has just been published about his client.

Coffee is offered, as civilized people are wont to, and so is apple-peach cobbler, a Longstreet specialty. Alan and Nancy opt to stay for a small visit.
Bad idea, it turns out, because politeness only goes so far to paper over barely concealed feelings. Penelope isn’t really happy with how the Cowans are addressing this matter. She wants a sincere apology from Zachary, whom she maintains needs to be taught “accountability skills.”
Nancy and Alan bristle at this, especially Nancy, who seems a little too made up with her fire-engine-red lipstick.
Where does Penelope get off, Nancy wonders, talking about decency and accountability, when chatty Michael has just admitted that he released the family hamster Nibbles into the cold streets of New York? Michael complained that Nibbles, a nocturnal animal, was keeping him awake nights.
Just imagine what happens when Michael breaks out the Scotch ...

Carnage is a comedy of claustrophobia and revealed truths, and Polanski knows both all too well. He’s packed tightly wound characters into tight apartments many times before, in such films as The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, pushing his camera close to reveal the grotesque secrets behind supposedly serene faces.

The film’s ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, but Foster stands out for the vein-popping intensity of her Penelope, who is used to controlling a situation. Note that the family letterhead on the agreement she’s drafting reads “Penelope and Michael Longstreet,” not the other way around.
Note also the subtle sexism of the men: Michael calls Penelope “Babe,” while Alan calls Nancy “Doodle.” The women don’t have such demeaning nicknames for their husbands.
And you could spend much time just parsing the body language of the room, which includes Alan thoughtlessly using a side table as a chair.

Carnage never quite escapes its stage origins, but this doesn’t matter, least of all to Polanski. To him, all of human existence is Grand Guignol theatre, where caged creatures fight and claw at each other for survival, sometimes even while wearing a fake smile.

 

War Horse

(out of 4)

Starring Jeremy Irvine, Niels Arestrup, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Tom Hiddleston. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 145 minutes. Opens Dec. 25 at major theatres. PG

If anyone thought Steven Spielberg couldn’t top himself for manipulating audience emotions, they didn’t reckon with War Horse.

Short of placing a bit between our teeth and riding us like an unruly steed, it’s hard to imagine greater Spielbergian exertions in search of tears, gasps and rapid heartbeats. That’s really saying something about the man who gave us E.T., The Color Purple and Saving Private Ryan.

But what he does, he does very well. He’s a master emotion jockey, and War Horse finds him in full gallop, skillfully riding Michael Morpurgo’s well-liked 1982 novel (which also begat a Broadway stage play, soon headed to Toronto) across the battlefields of World War I.

You risk accusations of parody, or comparison to Disney, to go in for as much anthropomorphism as does War Horse, which has been written for the screen by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary).

Spielberg doesn’t fear sneers. Short of actually speaking, his equine star Joey — variously called “miraculous horse,” “remarkable horse” and “my bonny boy” — might as well be human.
Joey embodies our most noble virtues of loyalty, bravery and pluckiness in the face of danger, and he looks you straight in the eye (a feat no doubt aided by some seamless CGI work).
You can spot his majestic russet form from a distance, even in the midst of cannon and gun smoke, because of the bright ribbons that have been symbolically draped across his broad shoulders.

The ribbons are also a badly needed visual aid to keep track of the many human handlers of Joey crammed into the film’s 145 minutes, a compaction of the narrative that makes War Horse episodic and robbed of some urgency.

This handsome movie, triumphal almost from the get-go, opens on the lyrical green fields of England. Carried by Janusz Kaminski’s wide-eyed lensing and John Williams’ insistent score, we’re heading towards Devon, where the action begins with the war at home.
Dirt-poor and drunken farmer Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), more possessed of pride than common sense, bids far more than he can afford at auction for a frisky bay thoroughbred that his son Albert (Jeremy Irvine, a bright debut) promptly names Joey.
Ted’s wife Rose (Emily Watson) is furious — the farm needs a plough horse, not a show horse. But young Albert is determined to show Joey how to turn a field of rocks into a field of dreams.
It’s corny yet effective symbolism, proving the pluck of Joey and Albert, and it segues credibly into the battlefield action to come. The year is 1914, and the British Army desperately needs horses to battle the Germans on muddy European fields.
And so Joey is tearfully sold to the war effort, but not before Albert vows to him, “I solemnly swear we’ll be together again.”
Joey is placed under the compassionate watch of Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), but the dangers ahead are very real, as we see when the Brits launch a poorly planned surprise attack on the Germans in occupied France.
Spielberg’s battle scenes are a marvel of sight and sound — the latter literally shakes the theatres from the pop of rifles and the thunder of cannons. Spielberg tugs at the heart strings, but he’s also not afraid to smack you upside the head with combat that realistically shows the madness of war.

He interrupts the action too often, perhaps fearing a punitive censor rating. There are long stretches of War Horse where Joey passes from hand to hand like the precious golden circle of The Lord of the Rings, as this barnyard Balzac further demonstrates its wisdom and stoicism while dispensing silent life lessons.

These interludes cross all battle lines. Two German soldiers (Leonhard Carow and The Reader’s David Kross), natural brothers, make use of Joey while fleeing the war and the deadly wrath of their superiors.

Later, Joey falls in with a French farmer (Niels Arestrup, A Prophet) and his devoted granddaughter, Emilie (Celine Buckens), and the animal briefly feels once again the joys of simple country living.

Spielberg even gives Joey a bromantic partner, a steed that might be called Black Beauty in a different kind of film.
These meanderings tend to distract more than instruct, but by the time the story returns to the war proper — this time to the trench warfare of the Battle of the Somme — Spielberg is once again in command of his story.
This is where the so-called Great War becomes truly horrific, and where the man vs. nature backdrop of the film is thrown into sharp relief.
Scenes where a horse takes on an advancing tank, and where Joey becomes entangled in barbed wire, requiring human antagonists to join in common cause, are emotional yet also extremely effective. They’re a tribute to Spielberg’s abundant skills.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, but he can’t resist going for that final tug on the blood pumper, with an ending lit up like a climactic moment from Gone with the Wind (although Spielberg denies the influence).

Watching War Horse is like turning the pages of a very long children’s book, each chapter a different adventure.

But it succeeds in dramatizing the message that humanity must triumph even in times of great inhumanity, and even if it takes four legs to lead two.

War Horse

(out of 4)

Starring Jeremy Irvine, Niels Arestrup, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Tom Hiddleston. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 145 minutes. Opens Dec. 25 at major theatres. PG

If anyone thought Steven Spielberg couldn’t top himself for manipulating audience emotions, they didn’t reckon with War Horse.

Short of placing a bit between our teeth and riding us like an unruly steed, it’s hard to imagine greater Spielbergian exertions in search of tears, gasps and rapid heartbeats. That’s really saying something about the man who gave us E.T., The Color Purple and Saving Private Ryan.

But what he does, he does very well. He’s a master emotion jockey, and War Horse finds him in full gallop, skillfully riding Michael Morpurgo’s well-liked 1982 novel (which also begat a Broadway stage play, soon headed to Toronto) across the battlefields of World War I.

You risk accusations of parody, or comparison to Disney, to go in for as much anthropomorphism as does War Horse, which has been written for the screen by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary).

Spielberg doesn’t fear sneers. Short of actually speaking, his equine star Joey — variously called “miraculous horse,” “remarkable horse” and “my bonny boy” — might as well be human.
Joey embodies our most noble virtues of loyalty, bravery and pluckiness in the face of danger, and he looks you straight in the eye (a feat no doubt aided by some seamless CGI work).
You can spot his majestic russet form from a distance, even in the midst of cannon and gun smoke, because of the bright ribbons that have been symbolically draped across his broad shoulders.

The ribbons are also a badly needed visual aid to keep track of the many human handlers of Joey crammed into the film’s 145 minutes, a compaction of the narrative that makes War Horse episodic and robbed of some urgency.

This handsome movie, triumphal almost from the get-go, opens on the lyrical green fields of England. Carried by Janusz Kaminski’s wide-eyed lensing and John Williams’ insistent score, we’re heading towards Devon, where the action begins with the war at home.
Dirt-poor and drunken farmer Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), more possessed of pride than common sense, bids far more than he can afford at auction for a frisky bay thoroughbred that his son Albert (Jeremy Irvine, a bright debut) promptly names Joey.
Ted’s wife Rose (Emily Watson) is furious — the farm needs a plough horse, not a show horse. But young Albert is determined to show Joey how to turn a field of rocks into a field of dreams.
It’s corny yet effective symbolism, proving the pluck of Joey and Albert, and it segues credibly into the battlefield action to come. The year is 1914, and the British Army desperately needs horses to battle the Germans on muddy European fields.
And so Joey is tearfully sold to the war effort, but not before Albert vows to him, “I solemnly swear we’ll be together again.”
Joey is placed under the compassionate watch of Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), but the dangers ahead are very real, as we see when the Brits launch a poorly planned surprise attack on the Germans in occupied France.
Spielberg’s battle scenes are a marvel of sight and sound — the latter literally shakes the theatres from the pop of rifles and the thunder of cannons. Spielberg tugs at the heart strings, but he’s also not afraid to smack you upside the head with combat that realistically shows the madness of war.

He interrupts the action too often, perhaps fearing a punitive censor rating. There are long stretches of War Horse where Joey passes from hand to hand like the precious golden circle of The Lord of the Rings, as this barnyard Balzac further demonstrates its wisdom and stoicism while dispensing silent life lessons.

These interludes cross all battle lines. Two German soldiers (Leonhard Carow and The Reader’s David Kross), natural brothers, make use of Joey while fleeing the war and the deadly wrath of their superiors.

Later, Joey falls in with a French farmer (Niels Arestrup, A Prophet) and his devoted granddaughter, Emilie (Celine Buckens), and the animal briefly feels once again the joys of simple country living.

Spielberg even gives Joey a bromantic partner, a steed that might be called Black Beauty in a different kind of film.
These meanderings tend to distract more than instruct, but by the time the story returns to the war proper — this time to the trench warfare of the Battle of the Somme — Spielberg is once again in command of his story.
This is where the so-called Great War becomes truly horrific, and where the man vs. nature backdrop of the film is thrown into sharp relief.
Scenes where a horse takes on an advancing tank, and where Joey becomes entangled in barbed wire, requiring human antagonists to join in common cause, are emotional yet also extremely effective. They’re a tribute to Spielberg’s abundant skills.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, but he can’t resist going for that final tug on the blood pumper, with an ending lit up like a climactic moment from Gone with the Wind (although Spielberg denies the influence).

Watching War Horse is like turning the pages of a very long children’s book, each chapter a different adventure.

But it succeeds in dramatizing the message that humanity must triumph even in times of great inhumanity, and even if it takes four legs to lead two.

 

 

 

Pina

(out of 4)

A dance tribute to Pina Bausch featuring Wuppertal Tanztheater. Directed by Wim Wenders. 103 minutes. Opens Dec. 23 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. G

German director Wim Wenders had all but given up on his 20-year collaboration with celebrated modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch: a film that adequately portrayed her majestic accomplishments, her values, her character, and her artistic imperatives as performance art, while eschewing such standard documentary tribute baggage as academic talking heads, third-party narration and cold biographical data.
The problem, he said during an interview at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where his elegiac masterpiece premiered, was the inadequacy of the two-dimensional film image in conveying the full expressiveness of the movements Bausch created, and the overwhelming dynamics of her constructions.

Not long before Bausch died in 2009, Wenders had already started experimenting with 3-D as a possible solution to his problem. It was a medium he had long disdained, save for James Cameron’s Avatar, and whose complex mechanics he found clumsy.

But it was the ineffable sense of Bausch’s absence in the unique and unconventionally gifted dance troupe she had created, Wuppertal Tanztheater, and the likelihood that it would not be able to continue without her, that forced him back to the fray.

His eureka moment was Catherine Owens’ and Mark Pellington’s 2007 concert documentary U2 3D, a film, he said, that explored the depth and dynamics of stage performance as nothing he had previously seen.

Wenders persevered, working similar quirky miracles with 3-D as he had done with digital cameras in his groundbreaking 1997 Cuban music performance documentary Buena Vista Social Club, to bring us Pina, not as a gimmicky visual enhancement of Bausch’s best-known work, but as a vital, organic representation of those astonishing expressions of the agony of human existence, experienced from the inside out — What do we want? Why are we here? Why do we live only to die? Why do we love? Why do we hurt? Who are we?

These are the big questions that preoccupied European writers and thinkers in the 1950s and ’60s — Dürrenmatt, Ionesco, Camus, Beckett — when Bausch was beginning to develop her own variations on these existential themes. They clearly resonate still in Europe: Pina is a $20-million-plus box-office hit there, and Wuppertal Tanztheater’s fortunes have dramatically improved, with bookings well past the end of 2012.

Everyone who sees Wenders’ moving evocation of Bausch’s work will take from it something different. What will be unanimously agreed upon, however, is that his dalliance with the 3-D process has paid off big time. Pina’s physicality is overwhelming. We are among these dancers in their pain and joy and longing. We hear them breathe, feel the heat of their skin, smell their sweat, sense the pounding of their hearts, the ache in their thighs and feet.

And because the experience is so overwhelmingly inclusive, we are drawn into Bausch’s world, into her characteristically German passions, as if they were our own, while her epic tableaus are played out in a deserted café between intrusive tables and chairs, a rocky plain pounded by rain, an urban wasteland surrounded by industrial architecture, a bucolic knoll, a crammed cable-car.

Pina is a benchmark achievement, and for his mastery of the mechanics that bring it to life, Wenders deserves a place with the great film visionaries of this or any other time.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

(out of 4)

Starring Tom Hanks, Max von Sydow, Sandra Bullock and Thomas Horn. Directed by Stephen Daldry. 120 minutes. Opens Dec. 25 at AMC Yonge-Dundas. PG

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close approaches what I would call “9/11 porn” in the way it exploits tragedy to milk emotion.

Stephen Daldry’s irritating adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s cloying novel uses the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as the backdrop for a feel-good fantasy. It concerns a troubled New York boy (Thomas Horn), who is following unfathomable clues supposedly left by his dead father (Tom Hanks, ever smarmy), who perished in the World Trade Center collapse.
The film feels all wrong on every level, mistaking precociousness for perceptiveness and catastrophe for a cuddling session. It’s calculated as Oscar bait, but the bait is poisoned by opportunism and feigned sensitivity.

In my opinion, and I recognize that reasonable people might disagree, the movie should have been called Extremely Maudlin & Incredibly Awful.

The teardrops that the film so cravenly summons, beginning with a dreadful scene of bodies falling from the Twin Towers, are entirely unearned.
The boy in question, 11-year-old Oskar Schell (Horn), may or may not suffer from Asperger syndrome: “Test results were inconclusive,” he tells us via a constant and grating voice-over.

This supposedly gives Daldry (The Reader, The Hours) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) license to make Oskar both incredibly cute and unbelievably obnoxious. The lad just can’t help himself!

Oskar has an abundance of quirks, which include carrying a tambourine with him at all times to ease anxiety, randomly stating arcane scientific facts and demanding drinks of iced coffee mixed only with half-and-half creamer.
He also has a much more unappealing side, which is a tendency to shout at and rudely treat other people. He screams obscenities at his apartment doorman (John Goodman) and he’s impatient with the mute elder gentleman (Max von Sydow) who occasionally accompanies him on a picaresque tour of all five boroughs of New York City.

The mute senior, known only as The Renter, rooms with Oskar’s grandmother, and communicates by scribbling words on a notepad. The empathy and gravitas that von Sydow brings to this bizarre role is one of the few good things about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but he’s not enough to save the movie.

Oskar wants to visit every one of the several hundred people surnamed “Black” in the New York telephone directory, to see if they have the lock for a key he found after the death of his father Thomas, a jeweller who enjoyed playing word and puzzle games with his son.
The boy’s quest, set to Alexandre Desplat’s insipid flute-heavy score, will take many months and the outcome is not only uncertain but utterly ridiculous.
There is no indication whatsoever that the key is a clue to anything — how could Thomas have foreseen the events of 9/11? — but Oskar becomes convinced that the key, found in an envelope with the name “Black” on it, will somehow open a pathway of consciousness with his lost dad, whose body was never found.
Thomas did manage to leave a series of increasingly emotional voicemails before the towers fell, which are parceled out throughout the film to ratchet up tension.
In this movie’s head-slapping use of symbology, “Black” also points to characters played by Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, both in very small roles, who contribute badly needed dignity and believability to the film.
To give young Horn one small benefit of the doubt, he is asked to carry the lion’s share of the film’s dramatic dead weight, a load that even an actor of vastly more experience and skill would find difficult to pull off.
And what of Oskar’s mother, played shakily by a barely there Sandra Bullock? She seems like the worst mom in creation — who would allow an 11-year-old to wander New York City for months, often alone? If you remotely accept the resolution provided to this query, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
I was not a fan of Foer’s gimmicky novel, for many of the same reasons listed above. But Daldry’s film is even worse, since it eliminates the book’s parallel story about the bombing of Dresden during World War II, which provides some family context and history to Oskar’s quixotic trek across New York.

It’s not too soon to make a movie about 9/11. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center have already made meaningful dramatic statements about this terrible event, and did so without unduly exploiting it.

It’s not impossible to make meaningful fantasy out of mass tragedy. Roberto Benigni managed this feat quite admirably with Life is Beautiful, setting an affecting family story within a Nazi concentration camp.

All it requires is something that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close lacks: intelligence, depth and genuine sensitivity.

 

 

 

 

 
We Bought a Zoo

(out of 4)

Starring Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Thomas Haden Church. Directed by Cameron Crowe. 124 minutes. Opens Friday at major theatres. PG

The elephant in the room in Cameron Crowe’s family friendly We Bought a Zoo is that there’s very little substance to this sentimental comedy-drama starring Matt Damon as a single dad who buys a fixer-upper country house in California, which happens to come with its own menagerie.

Damon does all the heavy lifting here as widower Benjamin Mee, assisted by his philosophical older bro (Thomas Haden Church) and cutie-pie daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), a beguiling pint-size moppet that conjures up thoughts of Zuzu Bailey weeping over her shedding rose in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Based on the true story of Briton Benjamin Mee, who wrote about his family’s exploits in a 2008 memoir, this marks Crowe’s first try at an all-ages film. Fans of his other — and better — movies like Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Say Anything won’t add this to their list of Crowe hits. A filmmaker who could previously be counted on to get us to a personal place with characters amid sharp lines and wry humour (Elizabethtown excluded), he comes up short in We Bought a Zoo, where the players are painted with broad strokes and kept behind barriers, just like the critters.

After the death of his wife, Benjamin finds himself floundering as a parent, unable to run the household or get through to his teen son Dylan (Colin Ford) who acts out his grief by drawing graphic horror scenes. Meanwhile, circling neighbourhood females who want to help Benjamin get over his loss won’t leave him alone. He’s stuck in a rut and the solution seems to be to ditch his newspaper job (hey, who needs work when you have family and a dream?), buy a new house and make a fresh start with Dylan and Rosie.
The dilapidated zoo on the property Benjamin falls for comes complete with an attractive zookeeper named Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), a no-nonsense gal who lives to serve her animal charges. That’s hardly an easy task: there are 200 of them, including an aging tiger, a depressed bear and a mess of snakes who leave Dylan rattled.
They all have to pull together to get the zoo in shape to pass preopening inspection. Easier said than done for Benjamin, who has little more than boundless enthusiasm going for him. While he tries to get the zoo on track, Dylan finds a new friend in Kelly’s delightfully quirky niece Lily (lovely Elle Fanning, whose character could use more screen time).
Various roadblocks, figurative and literal, are overcome in an obvious fashion in this predictable story, which is occasionally enlivened with rock fan Crowe’s choice of musical accompaniment. But through it all, Damon shows there’s little he can’t do onscreen. He is completely likable as the Walter Mitty-like Benjamin.

The final third of We Bought a Zoo gets to the heart of the hurt in everyone’s life and Crowe manages to break free of the corniness of the piece to inject some genuine emotion.

The movie also fails to give voice to the inevitable protest that would rise in any community — especially California — about opening a zoo in these animal-aware times. The sight of flying kites filling the sky on opening day will make those who champion animal welfare grow pale.

What it lacks in animal magnetism, We Bought a Zoo makes up for in some ways, but it’s not enough to elevate this beyond an average movie that’s clearly been crafted to bring holiday families together over the popcorn machine.