Red Tails (and a bit of Contraband and Haywire)

Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr. and other Tuskegee Airmen
receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007

                  Fight or Flight:  Sometimes You Have To Do One
                  Before You’re Able To Do the Other

     

                  Review by Ken Burke           Red Tails
             
Aspects of history often remain hidden until given an opportunity to be recognized, as with this inspiring but overly melodramatic tale of the Tuskegee Airmen in WW II.
     

            You say you want an action flick to keep your testosterone bubbling during these NFL pre-Super Bowl no-game or lame-game days?  (Pro Bowl?  Please!  Does that even rate the energy to make guacamole?  I think not.  I prefer the WWE Royal Rumble which is like the GOP debates in being loud and absurd but at least it’s all over in 3 hours instead of God knows how many more months.)  If that's what you need, there are a good many flying fist/rampaging transport vehicle movies to choose from at the local cinemas (including David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as long as you don’t object to the best beat downs being done by the waif-y “girl” [grrl would be more like it, and if you do object then you better steer clear of Lisbeth Salander]), but if you haven’t seen Marc Wahlberg do damage to some obnoxious characters in his new thriller (with Giovanni Ribisi as his major problem) then you might want to look into Baltasar Komákur‘s Contraband (a reasonable title given the plot but it also conjures up for me memories of some opening act for the Conqueroo or Shiva’s Head Band at the Austin, Texas Vulcan Gas Company in 1968).  This one is a standard stewpot of swagger, threats, loved ones in danger (especially suffering wife Kate Beckinsale), car chases and crashes, fireballs, drugs, bullets, last-minute rescues, revenge, and happy retirement through illegal means—not to mention a blue-collar joke at the expense (a $20 million black market expense to be exact) of Jackson Pollock’s drippy artwork.

            Or maybe you’d prefer something a bit more complex (at least as far as trying to make sense of the various plot entanglements) such as Steven Soderberg’s Haywire where a clandestine operation that apparently aids the U.S. government in certain unpublicized “political” acts turns against one of its own, leaving tough-as-nails mixed-martial-arts champion Gina Carano (Mallory Kane) to her own devices as she’s double-crossed by an assortment of A-list stars: Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, and Antonio Banderas, all of whom eventually get what’s coming to them, and not in a PG manner (equally blue chip Michael Douglas is also in the mix, but he at least seems to be on Mallory’s side in all of the duplicity and homicide).  It’s not always clear what’s going on or why in this story of many global locations and even more brutal combat scenes (where a lot of punches and smashed furniture surprisingly yield little blood or broken bones), but if you want to see a real kick-ass woman holding her own in a gauntlet of attacks (sorry Chloë Grace Moretz, Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass [Matthew Vaughn, 2010], but Carano may be the most ruthless woman on screen since Uma Thurman’s vengeful The Bride character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films [2003, 2004]) then Haywire might stroke your savage beast (so to speak) until the Super Bowl’s opening kickoff.

            However, if you'd like to see some historically-based action, a war film to be exact, with an important message of social justice behind it, you might put your money on Red Tails (directed by Anthony Hemingway, a guy with brief film experience but lots of TV credits, hired by Executive Producer George Lucas because of his work on the critically-acclaimed series The Wire), which in my case takes me from Haywire to Hayward (California, that is), partly because I saw both films in the same local theatre and partly because of a special treat next door to that theatre that I’ll say a bit more about below.  What I wish I could say more about in a praiseworthy fashion is Red Tails because it’s an inspirational account of the Tuskegee Airmen, the many brave African-American men who stood up to racism at home and in the military as well as to Nazism in Europe in World War II, but what would ideally be much more compelling as a narrative just comes across as too melodramatic and overly sanitized, except for the aerial combat scenes which are as tense and active as the entire film aspires to be.  I can’t fault the actors—the more well-known ones such as Terrence Howard (Colonel A.J. Bullard) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Major Emanuelle Stance) along with the fresh faces who carry much more of the screen time—because they’re making a consistent effort to bring passion, determination, and respect to their historically-inspired characters, but the script is just flat and at times a little silly.  That’s surprising, given that the screenwriters are John Ridley (who’s penned a lot for The Wanda Sykes Show and Barbershop TV series, among many others) and Aaron McGruder (well known for writing the uncompromising social critique comic strip and TV series, The Boondocks), but as my pop-culturally-well-versed wife pointed out, sometimes the dialogue sounds like something from the 1950s Superman TV series, broadcast in the late afternoons to appeal to its kiddie audience (along the lines of “Well, Lois, sometimes we’ve just got to all work together to solve these problems”). 

         I realize that this film is set in 1944 and maybe verbal exchanges then really were as tactful and simplistic as some of the talk in this film, but I can’t help but think that some of the surviving Tuskegee Airmen who met with the actors while Red Tails was in progress would find the presentation of their comrades a bit hokey at times, even though they’d still be proud that their story is being told for a wide audience who have gone far too long without knowing much about the aerial exploits of these men whose presence in our nation’s history is slowly getting the place of honor that it deserves (although it did come to light in 1995 in the made-for-HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen [Robert Markowitz]—a take on this story which got considerably better reviews than Red Tails—with big name stars such as Laurence Fishburne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Courtney B. Vance, Andre Braugher … and Cuba Gooding Jr. [while Terrence Howard previously played a Tuskegee Airman pilot being falsely court-martialed in Gregory Hoblit’s 2002 Hart’s War]), just as the real Airmen finally got the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 (the highest civilian honor in the U.S., which, ironically is often awarded to those who have fought in our wars), as shown in the first photo above which emphasizes Captain Brown (after the war a professor at New York University and President of Bronx Community College, now the director of the Center for Urban Educational Policy at the City University of New York) who is the one actually responsible for first shooting down one of the more powerful German Me-262 jet fighter planes and for attacking a German destroyer, both events depicted in the film (for which he was a consultant) but attributed, along with the actions of other Airmen pilots, to the fictional Joe "Lightning" Little (my thanks to Ben Henderson of the [San Francisco] Easy Bay Aviators Incorporated for this clarification).

          As with the Brown to Little transformation, while there are now increasingly more sources of information on the collective history of the Tuskegee Airmen you’d be frustrated in trying to research the individuals featured in Red Tails (although you can find an earlier version of Cuba Gooding’s character’s name with Sergeant Emanuel Stance, a member of another famous black military unit, the Buffalo Soldiers cavalry of the mid-19^th to mid-20^th centuries, who got the Medal of Honor, our highest military commendation, in 1870) because they’re all fictionalized composites of the actual Airmen:  the real commander of the 332^nd Fighter Group was Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., not Howard’s Col. Bullard, and his second in command, from the earlier 99^th Fighter Squadron that was brought into the 332^nd was Major George Roberts, not Gooding’s Major Stance, while the other pilots depicted in the film resemble actual Tuskegee Airmen but don’t exist beyond the silver screen, odd in that Red Tails is supposedly based on John Holway’s book Red Tails: An Oral History of the Tuskegee Airmen which is just now becoming available in conjunction with the current release of the film. 

          (Reader Warning! Detour to Long but Relevant Digression!  Road May Be Hazardous!  Proceed at Your Own Risk!  And be careful not to use up your monthly allocation of exclamation points!  You wouldn’t get any of the information about the fictionalization of the Lucas/Hemingway production from the publicity about Red Tails that I’ve seen nor in its official website that I could find but if you download Dr. Daniel Haulman’s new ebook What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails—available through Google Books, Amazon’s Kindle, and other sources—you’ll find the needed clarification.  Haulman also co-authored one of the several books on the fighter group, his 2011The Tuskegee Airmen: An Illustrated History: 1939-1949.  The fact-to-fictionalization isn’t unusual, though, in cinematic histories of these soldiers because the 1995 film also used constructed composite characters except for Col. Davis played by Braugher, as noted in more detail at http://www.answers.com/topic/the-tuskegee-airmen-1. 

          (In the ebook Haulman recommends that anyone who wants to watch a more historically accurate version of the Airmen should see the Double Victory documentary also produced by Lucas, not available for sale yet but has been shown around the country at some special venues and is due to be broadcast on the History Channel in their History Classroom series next month, Feb. 6 and 13.  You can get a taste of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBuxFuOCCCA.

            (However, bringing up Haulman also brings us to the claims that he’s what some critics of the Airmen’s exploits call a Tuskegee Denier because of his study called “Nine Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen," found at the following website: http://www.tuskegee.edu/sites/www/Uploads/files/About%20US/Airmen/Nine_Myths_About_the_Tuskegee_Airmen.pdf.  Based on what I’ve read in a few Internet screeds, those who are more interested in denigrating the accomplishments of these African-American military crusaders than in honoring them—especially pouncing on the false claim made by some that no bombers were ever lost if under escort from the 332^nd— often cite Haulman as their verification that the Airmen’s accomplishments are overrated.  But, if you actually read Haulman’s “expose” you find his more positive conclusion: 

          (“Whoever dispenses with the myths that have come to circulate around the Tuskegee Airmen in the many decades since World War II emerges with a greater appreciation for what they actually accomplished. If they did not demonstrate that they were far superior to the members of the six non-black fighter escort groups of the Fifteenth Air Force with which they served, they certainly demonstrated that they were not inferior to them, either. Moreover, they began at a line farther back, overcoming many more obstacles on the way to combat. The Tuskegee Airmen proved that they were equal to the other fighter pilots with whom they served heroically during World War II. Their exemplary performance opened the door for the racial integration of the military services, beginning with the Air Force, and contributed ultimately to the end of racial segregation in the United States.” 

          (For whatever reasons that serve their own purposes those who attempt to debunk the Tuskegee Airmen generate their own myths about Haulman’s research and respect for the men of the 332^nd, but if you’re tempted by their citations I encourage you to read his actual statements, as I have in doing in what’s amounted to an enormous amount of unanticipated research on the background of Red Tails, fueled originally by the simple curiosity of noticing the odd fact that the character list of the Lucas film doesn’t overlap at all with the characters of the 1995 film—which I admit I haven’t seen.  That led to a lot of inquiries into both films and their historical inspirations which yielded the various Web sites I’ve cited, and countless others found in the many hours of my various searches, but one question still unanswered is why the Red Tails scriptwriters so completely changed all of the characters’ names and presumably fabricated certain aspects of what we’re shown.  My only guess is that, to create the compressed story that had to be told in standard movie running time and still tuck in the various actualities and folklore desired to be shown, characters had to be constructed that could be connected to those attributes without risking backlash from unsupportive families or historians—just as Bennett Miller’s Moneyball completely fictionalizes Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand from actual Assistant General Manager Paul DePodesta while leaving many of the other characters mostly historically intact, probably to allow creative license that wouldn’t have passed DePodesta’s legal team otherwise.  Thus, you can criticize Red Tails all you want to for factual errors because like Moneyball and most attempts at historical recreation that I’ve seen it follows its own needs in rearranging/reimagining actualities in a relatively short dramatic movie, but what really matters is how compelling the story on screen is, even if it’s not your best source for a Jeopardy answer.)

            So, with that HUGE sideways trip completed (and assuming that you’re still diligently reading), I’ll now get what’s left of the review back on the main road with the understanding that the story’s primary participants such as Flight Leader Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) represent real pilots even if this particular manifestation is a hybrid of actual and fictional Tuskegee Airmen in action as the Allies stormed across Europe in the latter days of WW II.  “Easy” is the rock of the pilots’ missions, even though he has higher-ranking officers on the ground to satisfy (Col. Bullard, Major Stance) and an anxiety-based drinking problem to overcome for the welfare of his men.  The upper echelon officers provide appropriate inspirational encouragement for the pilots prior to the launch of their missions and help keep their frustrations in line with the proper code of military conduct when the pilots’ anger at their backwater action and outdated P-40 Warhawk airplanes threatens to disrupt the continuance of the unit (and Cuba Gooding Jr. gets to do an oddly amusing General Douglas MacArthur imitation with his constant pipe prop), but “Easy” is the reason for success in the air as he keeps his squadron on target during deadly clashes with the more experienced German aces and even talks wounded comrade Declan “Winky” Hall (Leslie Odom Jr.) into a safe return when consciousness and aircraft control are quickly eluding “Easy”'s team member.  But in a film that wants to conquer the stereotypes of gross prejudice, especially the prevailing Army Air Corps notion that black pilots weren’t mentally or emotionally capable of combat missions, “Easy” is just one big war movie stereotype himself as the stoic but psychologically wounded leader who bears the burden of responsibility for every action taken by his men … and by himself, as with his decision to allow enthusiastic Declan back into the air after an injury when he was not really ready for combat again, thus leading to the crisis so narrowly averted.  But "Easy" is up against another typical war movie stereotype in his intra-squad conflicts with brash “top gunner” Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo).

            “Lightning” can’t be kept in a bottle any more than “Easy” can be kept away from one.  He’s the typical talented but arrogant macho stud of the group whose expertise in the air allows him the latitude he forces from “Easy,” but he’s also the one whose anger at the racism he faces from his white “fellow” officers shows no latitude in one critical juncture of the film that threatens the active combat status of the whole unit.  As usual, “Easy” manages to smooth things over and keep the men in the air on the front lines, but “Lightning” has other conquests in mind anyway: Sofia (Daniela Ruah), a lovely local Italian woman whom he falls madly for even just from a flyover of her family home where she’s hanging laundry on her roof.  He’s as insistent on the ground as he is in the air so after a brief and comic courtship with Mama’s supervision (a bit reminiscent of Michael Corleone’s [Al Pacino] equally fast and sanitized connection with Apollonia [Simonetta Stefanelli] during his exile in Sicily in The Godfather [Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, as if I really had to cite this info but I’m trying to be consistent]), “Lightning” and Sofia are married, despite the huge language barriers and cultural differences which seem to matter little to either of them in another of the film’s essentially easy integration of these Airmen into every space they enter.  When tragedy strikes “Lightning,” though, after one last heroic sacrifice during the raid on Berlin it’s up to his long-suffering Flight Commander to break the news to the new bride in a very uneasy scene of heartbreaking wartime tragedy (somewhat reminiscent of bad news coming stateside with another dead husband message in Penny Marshall’s 1992 WW II comic-drama A League of Their Own and innumerable other “horrors of war” stories).  “Lighting” gave his all to take out the chief German villain, cocky pilot “Pretty Boy” (Lars van Riesen), in his best John Wayne fashion—although Wayne rarely died in his films’ combat or gunfight scenes—but he’ll always be remembered in the hearts and minds of those he left behind (including those who return to safety at the last minute after POW capture, such as Ray “Junior” Gannon [Tristan Wilds] in another melodramatic implication that our “hearts will go on” as one loss is balanced by another gain).
     

          Red Tails is an effective action movie when it’s in action but a bit too reverential to its subject when the guys are giving each other pep talks about the need to overcome adversity and fight for the common good as well as to show their worth to the world.  None of that content is unworthy of a well-tuned drama or of a lesson in humanity to those who denigrated the real Tuskegee Airmen and everyone else who’s judged not on the content of their character but on the color of their skin (or the functions of their genitals or the mobility of their limbs or anything else that stupidly divides us within our common humanity), but this story as told works a lot better in the skies when Lucas can encourage cast and crew to channel their inner Star Wars Rebel Fighters against the Evil Empire (just as Lucas himself is a fan boy for military aviation and based his space dogfights in that galaxy long ago and far away on actual WW II combat footage), cheer themselves on to mutual victory against a soulless enemy, and be part of dynamic flying scenes that move the adrenaline in ways that the ground-bound dialogue just can’t duplicate.  

          This film unfortunately gets no Medal of Honor from me, much as I respect its intentions and contents, because it’s just too corny when it’s trying to be sincere, too tactful in confronting the evil in society (then and now) in hopes of not distracting too much from the heroic exploits of the daring young men in pursuit of victory over enemies foreign and domestic.  Nevertheless, another sort of award came in its unanticipated second-place finish in its opening Jan. 20-22 weekend box-office, with an almost $19 million take, but that’s going to need to go a lot further to recoup Lucas’ personal $58 investment.  However, he didn’t spend money to make money here but to help get a story once again into the public mind (along with the documentary support of his accompanying release of Double Victory), so if he encourages more in-depth understandings and deep appreciation of the real Tuskegee Airmen and their notable contributions to our social advancement (just as I learned a lot more than I ever anticipated in trying to get useful information for what started out—once again—to be a short review), then this film has accomplished its purpose and could well be worth your viewing time as long as you’re not mulling over Oscar-nominated scripts and making kick-the-wounded-dog comparisons.  True, you can more easily escape into varyingly successful degrees of mindless action with Contraband or Haywire, but you’ll learn a lot more, even in an oblique manner, with Red Tails so decide for yourself what you need more of until the ultimate mindless distraction kicks off on Super Bowl Sunday.

            To finish up, the photo to the right is of Tuskegee Airman Clyde Grimes (on the left), not an actor nor a composite character but the real deal, and a couple of his fans.  He’s the Parliamentarian of the San Francisco Bay Area William “Bill” Campbell chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.™  On the week that Red Tails opened in the San Francisco area he was a guest of honor at a reception next door to the Hayward theatre where the film was shown (there were other receptions at other locations that weekend as well, but this is the one that I attended very quickly between two sold-out screenings).

            If you’re interested in exploring Red Tails further here are some suggested links:

http://redtails2012.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpA6TC0T_Lw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5up9wOpnwE

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/red-tails/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/red-tails

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/red_tails/

            If you prefer action with less social consciousness (or in this case, none, except for the sympathy generated for the locals who attempt to drive around in Panama when Marc Wahlberg’s in a hurry to get to the docks) then you might explore these links for Contraband:

http://www.contrabandmovie.net/film.html#/film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFOBpZcJh1M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nQOEKyVSw  (this one will lead you to another link that will allow you to see the whole film if you like)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/contraband_2012/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/contraband

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/contraband_2012/

            Or, if you prefer your mindless action with a higher level of directorial ability and the largest number of name-brand actors of any of the three reviewed here then you might explore these links for Haywire:

http://haywiremovie.com/#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj5QE4mLUOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBUt2lQbGJs

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/haywire_2011

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/haywire

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/haywire_2012/

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Carnage

             A Woolf at the Door of a Room of One's Own
     

                            Review by Ken Burke
     
Polanski’s latest is a Broadway adaptation about parents confronting each other over an attack involving their children, leading to worse childish behavior from the adults.

            The image to the right tells you all you really need to know about the action in Roman Polanski’s new film, Carnage, with a screenplay by Yasmina Reza—and Polanski—based on her award-winning theatrical work (2009 Tony for Best Play, among others), which opened in 2006 to successful runs in Paris (original title Le Dieu du carnage), London (original adapted title Lay Waste to England for Me then changed to God of Carnage), and Broadway (adapted a bit again for the switch to an American rather than European setting).  In the movie photo here you see Zachary Cowan (Elvis Polanski, Roman’s son) on the left about to hit Ethan Longstreet (Eliot Berger) with a sizeable stick, leading to a far more brutal but unresolved reaction by their parents (expanding upon Newton's third law of motion about equality between these forces), which takes us through 99% of the rest of our dealings with these characters.
     

            Minus the brief opening scene of the boys’ encounter presented right after the opening credits—but all within the same long shot of the park in their Brooklyn neighborhood (with Paris as a likely stand-in, given that it’s the only shooting location listed and that Polanski is still not about to set foot in the U.S.)—and the closing shot in the same park that leads to the end credits, everything takes place in real time and in one interior location, the high-rise apartment home of Ethan’s parents and their adjoining public hallway.  While this confined chronological structure is not so radical for a play (one example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 claustrophobic No Exit, but there are many others that use these time and space tropes) it’s extremely unusual for a film (for one of the few comparisons, see Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 Rope, adapted from an equally sparse setting for the theatre, written in 1929 by Patrick Hamilton and seemingly inspired by the 1924 murder of Bobby Franks by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb).  Polanski makes no attempt to “open up” the confinements of the story except for the brief visual bookends that give a little substance to the boys, something that their parents aren’t nearly as successful at doing throughout the remainder of the film.
      

            In that we see the attack on Ethan (which leaves him injured but not in a manner that some dental work and plastic surgery can’t fix) and there’s no denial that the assault took place by Zachery’s parents, sullen investment broker Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet) and constantly-distracted pharmaceutical lawyer Alan Cowan (Christopher Waltz), you’d think that this situation would produce a rather cut-and-dried outcome of accepted responsibility and its financial aftermath.  But when the Cowans get further into their required meeting with idealistic social crusader Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster) and folksy decorative-kitchen-appliances wholesaler Michael Longstreet (John C. Reilly) recriminations fly at a furious pace, with inter-parental verbal warfare from one couple to the other accompanied by plenty of intra-parental conflicts as each couple takes turns lashing out at each other and shifting sides as the men periodically join forces against the women, followed by more vice-versa roundelays than you can easily keep up with.  By the time it’s all over they agree that this has been the “worst day” in any of their lives, but only because of their incessant pettiness not because the boys’ incident even begins to resemble the “worst day” events suffered by another child, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) in Stephen Daldry’s just-opening Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (see review elsewhere in this blog).  The Longstreets and the Cowans are all fraught with varying degrees of self-loathing, marriage disappointment, life frustrations, and repressed hostilities.  But still, compared to what happened to countless other New Yorkers in Extremely Loud these feuding parents should hope that their worst day is just about arguments and upchucks (an awful source of Nancy’s problems that “spills over” to the others in the film as well).
     

  

         The obvious comparison for this film, made by virtually everyone who’s aware of it including those who’ve reviewed it, is to Mike Nichols’ 1966 scathing couples-collision, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (itself an adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 drama of the same title, another Tony award-winning Best Play in 1963), but George (Richard Burton), Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), Nick (George Segal), and Honey (Sandy Dennis) were in their own version of Sartre’s interpersonal no-exit hell while the bickering Brooklynites in Carnage are just beginning to approach that level of perversity with their mere semantic quibbles, drained bottle of Scotch, and hair-dryer-aided cell phone resuscitation.  That doesn’t mean that the relatively lighter take on melted-down adults that we witness in Carnage is just a poor imitation because it isn’t—and it’s played much more for well-generated laughs than Virginia Woolf? ever wanted to be—but it provides nowhere near the emotional power that radiates from the Nichols film.  By the time we get through with Carnage it’s clear that all four of these parents would benefit from a similar dunk in cold water as what happened to Alan’s overused cell phone because they clearly have no business trying to understand and manage the business of their sons, boys who obviously have moved past their initial trauma as we see in the final shot where they’ve already forgotten their grievances and become friends again, a very unlikely result for their parents as they finally acknowledge their inner directives to each other.
     
          Penelope feels that everyone needs to be “collectively concerned” about all the world’s injustices, so Ethan’s injuries to her are just a local manifestation of ongoing global crises, such as the genocide in Darfur, Sudan making it difficult for her to ever just accept an agreement with the Cowans without bringing up another point of dispute.  Husband Michael finally admits that he’s comfortable with being “openly despicable” to the Cowans, whom he does not respect, but he doesn’t seem to have a great deal of respect for his son either, nor for his daughter’s pet hamster that he released into the streets to fend for itself before our story began (at times this is presented as the cruelest act of the entire confrontation, but we do see the hamster happy in the park at the end so he’s probably better off not having to cohabitate with the Longstreets).  Smug legal strategist Alan admits that he believes in “the law of carnage” as human nature, so it’s little surprise that he’s easily able to swing into action against the integrity of his wife, his son, or anyone else within cell phone service range.  Nancy finally sees all of their barbed conflicts with “a pleasant serenity,” but only after she’s vomited all over Penelope’s precious art books and anything else in a close radius, then filled up again with Scotch so that her serenity is from a good dose of spirits rather than any spiritual harmonizing.

            All in all, they’re a pretty despicable lot who continue to spiral into absurd dehumanization as their attempts at resolution continue to fail, leaving them stuck in the confines of the Longstreet apartment just as the dinner guests in Luis Buñuel’s 1962 barbarically surreal The Exterminating Angel find themselves incapable of leaving a dinner party with increasingly disastrous results (again, this is a film intended to be much more disturbing than the mildly satirical but well acted Carnage).  For that matter, this no-exit theme (previously noted with Sartre) is also familiar to anyone who’s sung along with the Eagles 1977 monster hit single “Hotel California,” where “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”  So, there’s a lot of familiarity in Carnage but it ultimately begins to breed a little contempt, just as the bickering parents get more fed up with each other the longer their defensive clashes drag on into the story.
     

          On its own merits Carnage is a harshly funny exploration of adults with adolescent sensibilities that demonstrates its theatrical heritage without feeling suffocating as a movie because of its limited spatial setting.  Unlike another powerful play put to film, Sidney Lumet’s 1957 12 Angry Men (based on Reginald Rose’s 1954 teleplay for CBS’ Studio One in the early days of live TV drama, then adapted by Rose for the stage, but it took until 2005 to get its own Tony, for Best Revival of a Play; ironically it found its way back to TV in 1997 with an adaptation for Showtime directed by William Friedkin), where the dialogue carries the day because the visualization consists mostly of static midshots and closeups of the argumentative jurors, Polanski’s visual presentation is one that constantly keeps the eye in motion with active cutting and choices of camera angles.  While you know you’re mostly in the Longstreets’ living room, with a little movement into adjoining spaces, you also get to see the four conflicting protagonists from a marvelous variety of camera placements so that your eye doesn’t feel nearly as trapped as these hostile parents do in their own version of a jury room (you also get to see the surrounding neighborhood through the apartment windows, with an occasional elevated commuter train moving by, adding a little further action to an essentially verbal, static situation).  The four principals move around in the limited space of the living room quite a bit, shifting positions just as the camera keeps shifting angles so that there’s a slow choreography of actual movement with added energy from the frequent but unobtrusive cutting pattern of the image flow.  Cinematically and dramatically it all holds up quite well in its brisk, frustrating expose of the parent as child.

            Where the credit lies with this film, though, is mostly with the superb rhythms and deliveries of the actors, which in a small way is a bit of a disappointment for those expecting something more from a Polanski film.  He’s certainly true to his source material and once again presents a subject that’s deliciously disturbing in its implications of human frailties, but it’s hard to give him too much praise for what transpires here except that he coaxed consistently engaging performances from four experienced and publically-embraced actors (with Reilly as the only one without an Oscar win, although he does have a nomination for Chicago [Rob Marshall, 2002]).  With such talent on screen and such a narrowly focused premise and plot structure the best thing that a director can do is mostly stay out of the way and let the material dictate its own result as long as the original idea can carry the weight of expectations.

            Certainly there’s nothing essentially wrong with how this strategy works for Carnage, but given the larger-concept work we’ve come to expect from Polanski in such triumphs as The Ghost Writer (2010), The Pianist (2002, which got him an Oscar to match those of his cast), Tess (1979), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Repulsion (1965), and many others including, for me at least, his ultimate turn as a director with 1974’s Chinatown (in which he appeared—shown in the photo to the right—as the nameless knife-wielding enforcer in the employ of Noah Cross’ corrupt Water Dept. thugs, and for which he could easily have won a Best Director Oscar in another year [and the film could have been Best Picture] but had the misfortune to be competing with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II), it’s hard to really appreciate Carnage as a “Polanski film” as such, despite its overall high quality, because of the limits imposed by the constant comparisons it gets to the above-cited work from Nichols and Buñuel.  Polanski certainly can’t be faulted for choosing to adapt a well-received play and give four prominent film actors an opportunity to display their well-nuanced craft, so ultimately my marginal reservations about Carnage come back to Reza’s original.  She’s crafted a situation that exposes contemporary urban upscalers whose assumed sophistication is proved to be all façade and abdication of reasoned responsibility, she’s written marvelously funny and humiliating dialogue for all of them, she’s provided a fine balance in the shifting momentary triumphs and defeats of each of the Longstreets and Cowans, but in the end—while there’s plenty to appreciate for its own worth here—it’s just too hard to not always feel the heavy shadow of George, Martha, and the Exterminating Angel’s deteriorating Mexican socialites whose presence haunts Carnage too vividly (probably more with the Virginia Woolf? analogy for the mainstream audience than with Buñuel) for it to stand firmly on its own.

          When something’s intended to be incorporated into something else, as with The Hours (1998 novel by Michael Cunningham [itself a Pulitzer Prize winner], 2002 film by Stephen Daldry [Oscar winner for Best Actress Nicole Kidman]) where Virginia Woolf herself, her writing of the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, the nicknaming of Meryl Streep’s Clarissa character as a modern “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf’s actual suicide, the related suicide of fictional Richard Brown (Ed Harris) in the contemporary story, and the attempted suicide of his mother Laura Brown (Julianne Moore—married to John C. Reilly as Dan Brown in this film) are all intended to resonate with each other, then you have a true homage to the original and a reasonably considered extension of it.  With Carnage, despite the high quality contributions of all involved from its genesis as a French play, there’s just too much of a disturbing derivative-works lawsuit waiting in the wings to allow this story to fully succeed in its intended form (at least in the minds of aware viewers, if not lawyers of Alan Cowan’s temperament who, surprisingly, don’t’ seem to have filed any injunctions).  It’s still brutally funny, a sad editorial on the misguided priorities of too many contemporary “adults,” and a marvelous demonstration of professional story telling by all involved, but just as George and Martha never really had that child they so savagely fought about Polanski and Reza don’t quite have the narrative “child” they need here for maximum impact, at least with me. 

          Maybe I’m the one guilty of unjustly beating their “kid” with a stick, but I just can’t get past the allusions to other, more substantial, works when experiencing Carnage.  I like it a lot and it’s effective in delivering the message it sets out to explore, yet I’ve just seen it all too much before to be able to be completely satisfied with it.  I’m not saying that there’s only one effective way to explore a topic or that an earlier version of something must negate a new approach, but in this case the Ghosts of Crises Past are just too foregrounded, as evidenced by the constant references to the famous antecedent films in virtually every analysis of this offering.  There’s a lot about Carnage to be satisfied with but there’s also plenty that seems borrowed if not stolen.  With all the talk recently about Internet copyright policing I’m even beginning to feel uncomfortable just writing this review because I feel like I should be paying royalties to someone for all the un-footnoted referencing I’ve watched Polanski and company do.

          Ultimately, I recommend this film for those who aren’t too bothered by its missing bibliography; just don’t be too surprised if your popcorn comes flavored with melted déjà vu (but that’s still better than what Nancy had to offer before they found a bucket for her needs).

       If you’d like to explore Carnage in more detail here are some suggested links that you might find useful:

http://www.sonyclassics.com/carnage/site/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPX6-4Bo7XU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW2tn68fX44

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/carnage/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/carnage-2011

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/carnage/

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