Roman Polanski's Carnage

Polanski in close quarters with his stars.

Now that the Huntington's production of God of Carnage has closed, I think it's safe to let you in on the secret that there has been a better version of Yasmina Reza's notorious four-hander playing in town all along: Roman Polanski's Carnage.  I know the script isn't actually a great play, but it's a better play than the yuppie critics who look down on it like to pretend it is, and so you may want to check it out (if it has actually already left the Hub's movie screens, it will soon be available on Netflix). I like Yasmina Reza, basically; I find her chilliness refreshing in a world of synthetic theatrical (and cinematic) emotional warmth - I'd even describe her as bracing. I think if she can carry her gimlet-eyed predilections through a larger structure, Reza might come up with something quite striking someday.  And Polanski - unlike the director at the Huntington - does seem to understand the structure of the piece, and how it should unfold; even if, intriguingly, he's not quite the "natural" for the material that you might imagine.

For the conventional wisdom regarding this director is that he was just right for this particular job because he's the god of small spaces - after all, Polanski has made a career of filming paranoia in a variety of modes, in a variety of confining environments, from Knife in Water to Repulsion to Rosemary's Baby to Cul-de-Sac (perhaps his most apt title, if not his best movie) to The Tenant and The Pianist (even in the epic Chinatown, all of L.A. felt slightly claustrophobic).  The trouble is - and almost every film critic has missed this, because they just don't think this way - the enclosing apartment of God of Carnage isn't a naturalist conceit at all; it's essentially an abstraction of social attitudes; indeed, the highly effective New York production rendered it as an island of furniture on a symbolically blood-red sea, before a wall of scorched earth (below).  The set's imagery only made the slightest nod to naturalist chic; no real apartment could or would look this way; it announced itself instead as a symbolic battlefield; and yet the actors before it could easily conduct a comedy of manners in a naturalist mode.

It's funny to realize that film doesn't have a readily-available model for that kind of double valence; thus it's hard to create a filmed environment that is evocative in the way that great theatre sets regularly are.  Indeed, it's tricky making film sets "heightened" or evocative at all without making them operate in theatrical quotes (like the highly-keyed fantasias of Michael Powell); objects on film just seem to immediately nail themselves down as what they are, and when actors carry themselves in a stylized fashion before a "realistic" set,  everything suddenly seems vaguely ridiculous.  Thus even film fantasy is literally rendered; a movie can take you to the center of the earth, or the moon, or even to heaven, but it's always literally the center of the earth, the moon, or heaven, never the idea of it. (If you think about it, sound is what makes the film medium feel so over-determined; silent films can be far more fluid than talkies, and directors who have successfully trafficked in symbols, like Bergman, Fellini, and Kubrick, tend to conjure them with a naturalist excuse, and in silences, or baths of background sound.)  This penchant for childish literalism infects even the smartest film critics; the Times's A.O. Scott, for instance, railed against the fact that the setting of Carnage was clearly not really Brooklyn, as the actors claimed; the idea that the setting could be Paris and Brooklyn at the same time simply didn't seem to occur to him, because his unconscious preference for verisimilitude blinded him to that possibility.

An easy mix of expressionism and naturalism: God of Carnage on Broadway.

So watching Carnage, you slowly realize that Polanski's accurate, naturalistic eyes and ears are going after some of the wrong things; the dogs barking in other apartments and the distant traffic sounds, the elevator doors almost, but not quite, allowing escape - all these subtly observed details never really build in their effect because that's not how this play works; we're not supposed to feel things closing in on us, instead we're supposed to sense the action undergoing an expanding re-iteration of its central theme (thematic expansion is another stage commonplace that film struggles to convey, btw).

Thus, funny as it sounds, God of Carnage, as simple as it seems on paper, may be unfilmable.  Still, Polanski's technique offers up some of its usual pleasures, and allows for at least one hilarious in-joke - the director  himself makes a brief cameo as a neighbor overhearing the angry harangues through a half-open door; it's both a quote from Repulsion, and, I think, a wittily self-aware reference to his own methods.

And to be fair, film does allow for a quick, pin-point-accurate directorial shorthand that the parameters of the stage often frustrate.  In Carnage, for instance, we immediately register (because close-ups pluck them out of the mise-en-scène) the meaning and psychological import of objects like Penelope's Kokoschka limited edition, and Nancy's compact and handbag.  And Polanski remains, as ever, a master of camera placement; over and over again, we sense the intensity and meaning of a character's response simply from where he positions his lens in relation to them.

In film, we can sense the psychological import of make-up in a handbag from the get-go.

The play, of course, concerns the meltdown into petty violence of four adults who have gathered to discuss their children's previous meltdown into petty violence.  (Polanski frames the main action with two vignettes from the playground - staged between two withered trees that look like protesting hands - which I didn't think would work, but actually comes off as fairly witty.) As the action is therefore fairly repetitive, the script depends on the ability of its stars, and Polanski has drawn at least two great performances from his quartet of actors: Kate Winslet is as good as she has ever been as the nervous, tormented Nancy, and John C. Reilly is better than he has ever been as the easy-going, but just-as-easily-belligerent, Michael.  These two alone are probably reason enough to see the movie.  Alas, as the slimy Alan, Christoph Waltz is certainly on the right track but a bit too snaky and recessed, and his Austrian accent, though carefully suppressed, still rings falser than anything in the set design or dialogue.  Or perhaps the basic problem with his performance is that while his performance makes sense as a strategic response to his attackers, he hasn't ratcheted his energy up to the bizarre heights Jodie Foster reaches as his antagonist Penelope, in a performance that's so alarmingly stricken and bug-eyed that I'd call it hilariously broad if it weren't so neurotically over-worked and calculated.  Did Polanski have it in for this particular character, and the type of liberal femininity she represents?  I don't know; but Foster's miscalculations repeatedly threaten to sink the movie - good thing the rest of the actors are there to save it.

Thus despite Foster, many of this quartet's nasty exchanges snap with a pleasantly acid rhythm, even if in the end, Polanski can't quite translate the play's sense of extrapolation onto film, and his action therefore peters out rather than reaching a curiously natural end.   The Huntington production, by way of contrast, did conclude with a surprisingly appropriate coup.  In the film version, Kate Winslet simply tosses apart the set's central bouquet of tulips (from the peaceable kingdom of Holland) in a kind of frustrated fidget; but at the Huntington, the actress playing her role (the amusing Christy Pusz) transformed this gesture into a grand fuck-you to even the idea of peaceful negotiation; in a fury of disgust she sent individual tulips soaring all over the stage.  It was hilarious, and made you realize something about her character that Winslet has missed, I think.  This woman retches and even vomits at key junctures in the play; but is she doing it because she's disgusted by the aggression she is witnessing - or by the repression of aggression that civilization insists upon?  Is childishness sickening - or is it maturity that's really disgusting?  Perhaps the kids are right just to get things over with and smack each other in the face?  This is the kind of question that Reza likes to bury in her scripts, and on which, I think, Polanski actually realizes God of Carnage pivots (given his playground framing).   But he hasn't managed to embed that question into his main action. And a really great production - or a really great film - of Reza's text I think would hint at an answer to that question.

Polanski's ghosts

What happens to kitty-cats who get too nosy in Polanski's latest.

Who would have thought Roman Polanski still had it in him? Or that, given his legal troubles, The Ghost Writer, still in post-production when the director was arrested and incarcerated last year, would ever make it to theatres?

Yet here the movie is, thanks to editing by Polanski while under house arrest, and its sleek sophistication not only haunts and provokes, but also gives ample evidence that, perversely enough, the old perv is not merely an astute moral analyst but also perhaps the last surviving avatar of adult-oriented pop cinema. Indeed, whatever his sexual tastes may be, The Ghost Writer reminds us that on screen Polanski has always been most interested in grown-ups.

Perhaps desperate times drew from the director a renewed energy - indeed, The Ghost Writer may be meant as a kind of baleful warning of what we'll all miss out on if he is, in fact, imprisoned in America. Well, Roman, all I can say is, message received and understood. Certainly at least in technical terms, The Ghost Writer is at least as strong as, and perhaps even a bit better than, his Academy-Award-winning The Pianist. Its ambitions, of course, are smaller, and it devolves into genre-style twists at its finish. But for most of its length, it's like no other film seen in years - utterly calm in its command, with a mysterious sense of surface believability and what used to be called "atmosphere," along with a barely-hinted-at contempt for the postmodern histrionics of not only our newest filmmakers but even such "masters" as Scorsese (whose ridiculous Shutter Island makes something of a bleak companion piece to Ghost). Everything is scaled just right in Ghost Writer, and there are no immaturely obvious flourishes of "style." Polanski's manner (and it's his own manner, not a pastiche of quotes and references) is meant to not only subtly direct our attention but also call no attention to itself - and it succeeds utterly on both counts.

It helps that the script resonates in all sorts of ways with the director's perennial themes and personal dilemmas. As in many Polanski films, the plot centers on an innocent drawn into the power games of an evil elite: Ewan McGregor plays a nameless ghost writer hired to finish the memoirs of a former British PM (Pierce Brosnan) - because his earlier "ghost" has literally given up the ghost: he wound up drowned in an apparent suicide. Once McGregor is ensconced with Brosnan in his Martha's Vineyard hideaway, however, he begins to guess that his predecessor's death may have been anything but a suicide: the manuscript he was editing begins to give up clues that he was on the trail of something terrible in the PM's past, something having to do with the CIA, rendition, and torture. Indeed, right on cue, the World Court in the Hague announces an investigation into that very chapter of the PM's past, and everyone suddenly wants to get their hands on the manuscript MacGregor is revising.

We soon realize we're in a classic Polanski set-up: isolation in a gothically romantic locale (here Brosnan's ulta-modern beachhouse, which is more Hamptons than Chilmark, but never mind - this locale isn't so much Martha's Vineyard as an address in Polanski's mind); intimations of a horrifying conspiracy operating just beyond our field of vision; a subtle erotic undertow flecked with glints of morbid wit; and, of course, a superbly detailed mise-en-scène.


Many in Polanski's cast deliver the performances of their careers.

This last factor may be what's most delicious about The Ghost Writer. Scale has always been of primary interest to Polanski - he loves getting maximum mileage out of minimal detail (think of the hem dipped in blood in Tess, or the broken glasses glinting from the goldfish pond in Chinatown). And in Ghost Writer, his mojo for precision is back in a big way. It's been a long, long time since a popular movie has exhibited the kind of sophisticated sense of proportion seen here, and I found myself mentally stretching out in (and snuggling up to) the director's mature, confident juggling of cinematic time and space. Polanski knows just where to place his camera, just when and how to open up (and then close down) his point of view, and precisely how to direct his actors; Pierce Brosnan, Tom Wilkinson and the great Olivia Williams do the best work they've ever committed to film, and Ewan McGregor isn't far behind as "the ghost." Only Kim Cattrall, as the PM's conflicted mistress, stumbles here and there (but never disastrously, and she recovers elegantly by the finish).

Of course to many viewers there is the problem of the director's admitted crimes. It seems useless to point out to these people that the list of artists linked to serious sexual crimes includes James Brown, Michael Jackson, Caravaggio and Leonardo da Vinci; when I brought up The Ghost Writer at a recent dinner, in fact, I was immediately met with a shouted chorus of "I-had-a-friend-who-was-date-raped-how-can-you-even-mention-that-film!" Discussion of the work's merits probably can't take place in the current atmosphere. But I would like to at least whisper that Polanski's work (unlike, say, that of Woody Allen) may have in one way actually grown in depth since his crime. In the director's heyday, he objectified sexual evil into vampire counts, depraved billionaires and even the Devil himself. All that has changed.

What we feel in films like The Pianist and The Ghost Writer, in fact, is a newly complex, almost mournful tone toward evil. The Pianist ends with a haunting coda, in which a single "good" German disappears into the Soviet gulag. And in The Ghost Writer, Pierce Brosnan's PM is utterly compromised morally, and yet has his reasons for his crimes, and ironically enough, believes his best hope for salvation lies with the United States, which Polanski points out (with tongue firmly in cheek) is now a safe haven for torturers. So not only can we savor the weird sense of "house arrest" that floats over the movie, which largely takes place within the confines of an ultramodern beachhouse/prison, we can also ponder Polanski's impish implication that the United States is in no moral position to extradite anyone for anything, given the blood on its hands. We're no better than he is, in other words. This will make some moviegoers scream in indignation, I'm sure, but it's a message rarely heard in pop cinema these days, and perhaps it's worth hearing.

In the case of Roman Polanski

Polanski at his court appearance in 1977.

I've been having my own little late-night Roman Polanski film festival the past few days, replaying Knife in the Water, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, and pondering why, exactly, I'm sad that U.S. authorities finally nabbed the diminutive director for a disgusting crime he has admitted to committing.

Although actually the reason was staring me in the face the whole time: the films themselves. And the fact that no one, not even Polanski (with the possible exception of The Pianist) has been able to equal them since the last dark heyday of Hollywood in the 70s. It's true that his career was highly variable in quality. Rosemary's and of course Chinatown, a film I've found myself watching many more times than The Godfather, are the obvious peaks; the rarely-seen What? is the obvious low. And Bitter Moon is more than a little ridiculous, Pirates more than a little grotesque; I'd never watch either again. But The Fearless Vampire Killers is an unforgettable curiosity, Repulsion is, well, seminal, Knife in the Water haunting, and there are wonderful stretches in Macbeth, Frantic, Death and the Maiden, Oliver Twist and Tess, and yes, even The Ninth Gate.

The gnomic sensibility that connects all these quirky cinematic points is perhaps most memorable for its innate sophistication, which is so naturally worn that it never even declares itself, much as the 30's décor in Chinatown never begs for attention but is simply there. Polanski was a master at precisely sizing the effects he required; his films open up to epic scale and then shrink down to intimacy at will, while always maintaining their quietly fascinating surface. He was also expert at conjuring potent cinema from next to nothing; in Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, long, absorbing scenes concern themselves with such minutiae as piano scales in distant rooms and a crack inching up a plaster wall; when we learn in The Pianist that the hero must spend several weeks alone, we know Polanski will make his isolation interesting. And he does.

The director was also a genius at discreetly rendering the unspeakable - particularly the sexually unspeakable (rape by the Devil figured in one movie; incest, in two more). His technique was simple: he only showed as much as he had to, and suggested the rest; but how hard it seems to be for any other director to learn that deep lesson! Of course it's not lost on me that his later, actual life has amounted to an application of something like that same elliptical technique: there's a horror in the background that he always manages to not address directly. And indeed, a deeper irony moves behind that one. For if Polanski's greatest work took as its theme the vain struggle of individuals against hidden, but organized, evil, then his fractured later films were riven by the awareness that his earlier point of view was untenable, now that he had been revealed as evil, too.

So does it make sense to say that I have no sympathy for him, but rather for what he stood for, and that this may be what his defenders feel, too? I know that to some, those defenders look a bit like the crazies who stood vigil outside the Michael Jackson trial, and released doves once the pedophile had been set free. But then again, weren't those fans accorded more respect than Polanski's? Let's say it again: Michael Jackson was by all appearances a serial pedophile - and an ongoing risk to children (which Polanski demonstrably was not, and is not). And, of course, the deeply mourned James Brown allegedly raped a woman at gunpoint. Rapper R. Kelly was, by all accounts, videotaped committing statutory rape on a 14-year-old, and has been arrested multiple times for possession of child pornography. Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman seduced and maintained an ongoing sexual relationship with a 13-year-old. Bad boy Jack Nicholson once had to settle out of court with a prostitute he had savagely beaten. Even California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger repeatedly forced his attentions on vulnerable women during his Hollywood career.

It's interesting, then, that America should clasp these figures to its collective breast while openly and vociferously despising Polanski - despite the fact that the accusers of several of these men pursued them with passion, while Polanski's victim (who received a reported $500,000 settlement from him) is by now practically a witness for the defense. But perhaps this only underlines the fact that, as our academics tell us, "justice" is socially constructed, and Polanski no longer fits into any protected category of perp - indeed, he is in the formerly protected category that is now often a target of popular villification. He is white, and wealthy, and male - and Jewish, and elderly (while Jackson and other pop perps have played at being overgrown children); he even lives in France. And he is a filmmaker whose best films consciously bridge the gap between pop and fine art - an endeavor which is impossible and useless, according to most fans and critics today. Like Bergman, he is a man of the theatre (indeed he became a celebrated stage director in Europe); like Kubrick, he is an aficionado of serious music. He's even being protected by a more highly cultured foreign power! All this means Polanski taps into America's cultural insecurity as well as its sexual insecurity; in a word, he is everything he should not be to play on our current sympathies.

None of this should matter to the law, as many rightly say - although there are all those other cases, similar to or worse than Polanski's, that don't seem to be bothering any of these zealots very much. Somehow the phrase "he raped a child" is constantly heard of Polanski, when it was rarely heard of R. Kelly or Bill Wyman. Of course the phrase is certainly true, even if as rapes go, the Polanski version was slow and disjointed, and involved constant requests and conversation, interludes with pills and wine, an interruption, and a pathetically obvious effort on the part of the rapist to deceive himself into believing what was going on was some degraded form of seduction. In short, his crime played out as he might have directed it in one of his own films.

Even these details, however, have undergone a political metamorphosis over time. That the poor girl was dressed and made-up as an adult was once viewed as possible evidence of an intended seduction by her (although Polanski knew she was underage, if not how far underage). By way of contrast, today Samantha Geimer's appearance during her ordeal sometimes seems to be nearly a cause célèbre. In the 70's, society looked askance at women (or girls) who ventured into compromising, he said/she said situations; today such situations are considered by many a kind of right, with an unspoken faith granted to the woman's version of events. (It may be worth worth noting, given the widespread publication of Geimer's grand jury testimony, that few of those outraged by her statements seem to realize she has never been cross-examined.) And in a way such faith is required, as the sexualization of young women has become not only a stipulation of so much campus political theory, but also an important global business in its own right.

Yet against statutory rape charges, none of the grotesque circumstances of the case actually prevail (and at any rate, I believe Geimer's version of events is roughly true). Nor does the fact that America is happy to accept statutory rape from more popular entertainers constitute a legal brief for Polanski. The only brief he can cling to, really, is the judge's alleged misbehavior in his case - indeed, Polanski's sudden arrest was probably sparked by his recent attempts to have his case dismissed, given that judge's conduct. The director could make these technicalities stretch a long way, and I'll be surprised if he ever sees serious jail time. And to be honest, it may be that insult to American judicial power - along with the implication from abroad that many in America cannot understand or appreciate his achievement - that is partly driving the rage toward him.

But to be doubly honest, I admit I would be dismayed to see one of our greatest living artists, and probably our greatest living film director, end his days in jail. Not merely because of his past achievement, but because there still might be one more great movie or stage production in him, and punishing him would therefore mean punishing us, too (particularly as he has no real heirs on the cinematic scene). If he were a current threat, like Jackson or Kelly, or if his victim were indeed committed to the prosecution, I'd feel differently. I agree, of course, with the arguments of the accusers about the rule of law and making an example and all the rest of it; I'm just too old, and understand the rule of law too well, to have much sympathy with their selective sense of outrage. Even though I also understand that, ironically enough, Polanski's defenders are more like the unseen conspiracy in Chinatown than some gaggle of Michael Jackson fans - while the director has morphed into his own pint-sized version of his most famous villain, Noah Cross. And yet here I am, guiltily half-hoping that the San Fernando Valley gets irrigated one more time anyway.