Roman Polanski has adapted plays for the screen before, including the single-location Death And The Maiden, so maybe one could understand the appeal of Yasmina Reza’s static examination of two New York couples meeting to discuss their children’s schoolyard fight. And the actors—Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Chrisoph Waltz—get a wordy piece to chew through. But what do audiences get? An academic exercise in class-baiting delivered at a painful pitch, implausible staging (why doesn’t the one couple just leave?) and terminally unsympathetic characters. A few hollow laughs come from a lot of selfish behavior, but the whole endeavour is obvious and, even at a scant 79 minutes, exhausting.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2012.
