Venice Film Festival
When the title of Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed 2006 play “God of Carnage” was given a haircut in its transition to the screen, it was hard to read what — if anything — the change implied about the film to come.
On the one hand, “Carnage” sounds pithier and more aggressive, removing the safety net of metaphor from a text already pretty unreserved in its examination of upper-class ugliness. On the other, shearing the title of any theological implications (though the play’s less-than-incendiary speech in which the titular phrase was coined survives intact) smacked of caution: would Polanski’s treatment blunt Reza’s scalpel, selecting some of the play’s less arguable social transgressions while leaving more troublesome ones on the stage? Or did Polanski simply like the one-word title better?
As it turns out, the mixed signals were a red herring either way: the newly godless “Carnage” stints neither on the bilious wit the play spewed on stage, nor the formality of its construction, which takes an hour to excavate raw animosity and dysfunction from yards of swaddled politesse. It is, in the final event, very much the play that critics and audiences swarmed around from its Paris debut in 2006, and such fans’ relative satisfaction or disappointment with it will hinge largely on their individual response to the wholly refreshed cast.