FILM REVIEW: CARNAGE

Sony Pictures
Now Showing




Much like Closer, Mike Nicholls' 2004 adaptation of the Patrick Marber stageplay, Carnage, adapted from the hit French play, God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, centres on four people you are happy to spend time with in a cinema but wouldn't want the misfortune of encountering for a prolonged period of time in the real world.

In Closer, it was the sexual mores between men and women that was under examination. In Carnage, Roman Polanksi's fun and succinct film (a swift 80 minutes), it's the thin facade of civility which we in the West construct around ourselves to convince others -- and ourselves -- just how evolved we are, and just how quickly that facade crumbles when put to the test.

When one boy takes to another with a stick, damaging his face and a couple of teeth, the parents of both boys meet to discuss the situation. That meeting takes place in the New York apartment of Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly): she's a writer-of-sorts with a penchant for a cause (currently Darfur), and he's the owner of a high-end hardware store who appears jovial enough but may not be as liberal as his wife (or as his wardrobe suggests).

The other couple are Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) Cowan, an investment banker and corporate attorney, respectively. It was their son who was the aggressor so they're naturally more contrite during the meeting, and somewhat more forgiving of Penelope's choice of loaded words and her tone in delivering them.

Well, Nancy is. Alan is more preoccupied with his mobile as he conducts crisis management for a pharmaceutical client throughout the mediation, which not before long breaks down into recriminations: couple versus couple, ideology versus ideology, and eventually, spouse versus spouse.

With an obvious influence being playwright Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where an alcohol-fuelled evening brings two marriages to a head, Carnage adopts a more comic tone as it takes a knife to both the Longstreets and Cowans, and white, middle class self satisfaction and first world problems generally.

And it's good fun. Polanski, shooting in just the one New York city apartment setting (though not actually NY, given the director's legal troubles), may not overcome the material's obvious stage origins but the four actors definitely bring the material to life.

Foster's Penelope, almost imploding with self righteousness and anal retentiveness, and Winslet's Nancy, whose inhibitions and tongue loosen up with the help of alcohol and an empty stomach (easily the film's best moment), get the best of the material.

Not that the guys are slacking off. Waltz, finally escaping Hollywood typecasting as the villain without necessarily dispensing with the menace, underplays Alan's contempt if not his arrogance, while Reilly, seemingly out of his depth at first, comes into his own in the film's second half, when the gloves come off and the pretense of civility is shattered.

If ultimately Polanski's Carnage isn't as satisfying a whole as those individual elements -- by all accounts Reza's play pops in a live theatre -- both its brevity and levity are reasons enough to indulge it as an entertaining diversion.

FILM REVIEW: CONTRABAND

Universal Pictures
Now Showing




A remake of the 2008 European thriller, Reykjavik-Rotterdam, the latest Mark Wahlberg action vehicle, Contraband, would seem to have lost something in translation -- and gained some 25 minutes.

The original (which I've not seen) clocked in at just 88 minutes, and was Iceland's submission for the 2010 Foreign Language Oscar. But the remake, with no awards aspirations other than Razzie, runs 109 minutes and gains nothing in the process.

Oddly enough, the leading man from Reykjavik-Rotterdam, Baltasar Kormakur, is the director of Contraband; his ninth time in the director's chair and his first time shooting in English.

But I suspect the language barrier has less to do with the convoluted proceedings as they unfold in Contraband than do the holes in both plot and logic in the screenplay, adapted by Aaron Guzikowski.

Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) is a retired smuggler now home security installer who's made a legit life for himself in New Orleans, with a wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), and two young boys.

But when his brother-in-law, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), botches his own smuggling operation and falls foul of Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), a two-bit crim with a hot head and a penchant for violent intimidation, Farraday is forced out of retirement to protect his family.

Setting sail on a freighter, Farraday, Andy, and some of his former crew (including Lukas Haas) head to Panama City where they plan to take delivery of a large order of counterfeit money.

But once there, Farraday's plans are continually thrown into disarray: the money has been printed on the wrong paper and the only viable replacement belongs to another hot head crim, Gonzalo (Diego Luna), who's not about to hand it over unless Farraday helps him out with an armoured car hold-up.

And things just go from bad to worse for Farraday (and sillier and sillier for the audience), including an unplanned drug run by Andy at the behest of Briggs, and the threatened safety of Farraday's family. They've been left in the care of his best friend and best man, Sebastian (Ben Foster), who has had an ulterior motive all along for helping his buddy get to Panama.

Will Farraday make it out of Panama alive, and back to the freighter before it returns to New Orleans? Will they be able to hide their two illegal hauls from both the ship's captain (J.K. Simmons) and U.S. Customs? Will Farraday make it to his wife before she becomes a permanent piece of New Orleans architecture?

Who cares?! Any initial promise the film showed, with its impressive cast list (Ribisi and Foster are deserving and capable of so much more) and its New Orleans setting -- which gives the film a misleading sense of being grounded in a working class reality -- vanishes faster than a cocaine stash overboard during a Customs raid. And so, too, does any interest in these proceedings.

FILM REVIEW: LATE BLOOMERS

Palace Films
Now Showing




There are only two inevitabilities in life: taxes and death, and the former is a burden you bear from the beginning of your working life. Death, on the other hand, can come at any time but if you're lucky, you'll live to a ripe old age. And it's old age which is the focus of Julie Gavras' comedy of manners, Late Bloomers.

Mary (Isabella Rossellini) and Adam (William Hurt) have been a long time, happily married couple with three adult children and four grandchildren. They're both about 60 years old and look good for their age, especially Mary, a recently retired language teacher; Adam's a partner in a London architecture firm.

But when she suffers from a minor memory lapse, Mary is quietly alarmed. Has her age finally caught up with her? If her mother, Nora (Doreen Mantle), is any indicator, she needn't be too worried. Nora, who lives in the apartment next door to her daughter and son-in-law, leads an active social life and seems to still have her wits about her.

Still, in an attempt to ward off decrepitude, Mary takes up aqua-aerobics and throws herself into volunteer work with her best friend, Charlotte (Joanna Lumley). Conversely, Mary also decides to meet old age head-on: age-proofing her apartment with bath rails, automated beds, and a large-numbered keypad phone.

All of these actions send Adam spinning in the opposite direction. Having recently been commissioned to design a retirement home (his firm's ethos is to undertake projects other firms traditionally wouldn't), Adam's thoughts had already turned to the prospect of getting old.

But rather than embrace it like his wife, he opts to have what is best described as a post-mid-life crisis: dressing younger, throwing in with his 20-something colleagues on a pro-bono museum design project, and drinking Red Bull like it was water.

Co-written with Olivier Dazat, Late Bloomers is the second feature by Julie Gavras, daughter of Costa Gavras, an esteemed director known for his political dramas (see Z (1969) and Missing (1982)). But there's nothing political or radical about Late Bloomers other than its focus on ageing and people of 'a certain age', a subject rarely broached by filmmakers.

Not that Late Bloomers is an overly insightful or even realistic examination of two people's coming to terms with their impending entry into the geriatric club. The lightly comic he said-she said (or, more appropriately, he did-she did) approach is intended to entertain rather than educate the audience.

Still, I have no doubt the intended audience (the post-middle aged through to the so called 'late bloomers') will enjoy the film's mildly comic tone and performances. Isabella Rossellini is an interesting screen presence who makes 60 (which she will be in June) both appealing and alluring. William Hurt, on the other hand, is a little too grizzled and subdued here, and his English accent often wavers.

But the 72-year-old Doreen Mantle (whose resume includes The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Yentl (1983), and a decade on British TV's One Foot In The Grave) provides both them, and the film, with some much needed pep, which I guess underlines the overall point of Late Bloomers: that you're only as old as you feel.

FILM REVIEW: MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Roadshow Films
Now Showing




Much like The Iron Lady, My Week With Marilyn succeeds or fails on whether or not you believe the recognisable leading lady as the recognisable historical figure, in this instance, the most recognisable woman on the planet in 1956, Marilyn Monroe.

And at first it seems as though Michelle Williams, a fine actress who often manages to do so much with so little (see Blue Valentine and the films of Kelly Reichardt), may have bitten off more than she can chew in accepting the role of the blonde bombshell.

Williams has the hair, the curves and the voice (including singing) down pat, but her fleeting presence in the early stages of the film have you fearing the essence of Marilyn may have eluded her.

But then Simon Curtis's film, penned by Adrian Hodges from two memoirs by Colin Clark, settles down, focussing on the week in question and bringing Marilyn the woman into sharper focus.

That week was when Monroe, in England for the summer of 1956 to shoot The Prince And The Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), absconded with the production's third assistant director, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), to escape the pressures on and off the set.

Beautiful, talented but highly insecure, Monroe relied on her entoruage (including acting coach, Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker), and agent Milton Greene (Dominic Cooper)), to keep her confidence high and her moods in check; pills and alcohol playing a far greater role than soothing words. But in the young, naive and far-too-honest Colin, Marilyn seems to find someone in whom she can confide, someone "on her side".

And it's in these scenes where Williams's Monroe transitions from solid impersonation to a full-bodied character, capturing the mix of womanly wiles and little girl lost residing in the same woman; a woman who knows that 'Marilyn' is just an act but one the rest of the world, including current (third) husband, playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), can't seem (or want) to get beyond.

Surprisingly good also is Kenneth Branagh. Cynically, I originally believed that the Brit actor-director's turn as Laurence Olivier was garnering awards attention (Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA nominations) in much the same way that Morgan Freeman did two years ago for playing Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood's Invictus (2009): a form of manifest destiny.

Whether intentionally or not, Branagh's career has been modelled on Olivier's -- a young actor-writer-director keen to bring Shakespeare to the masses via film -- so to play his hero in film sees his career trajectory come somewhat full circle.

Branagh may not look like his idol but he capture's the man's self possession and insecurity, simultaneously commanding of those around him and yet exasperated with the antics of his leading lady, whom he wishes to impress, seduce and, hopefully, have some of her stardust rub off on him. It doesn't hurt either that Branagh's Olivier gets the lion's share of the film's best and funniest lines.

It's these two performances (both Oscar-nominated), and the film's behind-the-scenes look at world of 1950s filmmaking and the inherent nostalgia -- something to be found in so many 2011 films: Hugo, The Artist, War Horse, Midnight In Paris -- which makes My Week With Marilyn the enjoyably sweet film that it is.