Crowe Becalmed

The bull’s name, Romero, means rosemary, an herb held by many Spaniards to heal a multitude of ills. But deliverance — or more precisely, opportunity — comes to these benighted sufferers not as soothing balm, but as a resource. Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it’s a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who’s barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay. Gleize brings to her blazing palette of crimson and hot pink the comedic touch of a burlesque artist, and, by way of Almodóvar and Bunuel, a brutal vision of beauty that equates with life itself. The disemboweling of the huge bull is as lovingly attended to as the little girl’s huge brown eyes, or the livid green light of a copy machine spewing paper over a fornicating couple, or a pile of white rabbits tumbling, unexplained, out of a decrepit trailer. Though Carnage sometimes feels overstuffed — it suffers from the first-time filmmaker’s desire to pack every movie she wants to make into her first — there’s a casually impressionistic logic that links each scene or gesture to the next as the bull’s power spreads through this abject crew, spurring them to confront the sources of their pain or paralysis, and move on, though not always to greater peace. American movie violence often has a patina of naughtiness, as if we’re getting away with something artificial and extraneous to the business of living. In Delphine Gleize’s Dionysian vision, violence is not just part of life, but central to the struggle to slay our dragons and become more than the sum of our inherited selves.

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD Directed by PETER WEIR | Written by WEIR and JOHN COLLEE, based on the “Aubrey/Maturin” novels by PATRICK O’BRIAN | Produced by SAMUEL GOLDWYN JR., WEIR and DUNCAN HENDERSON | Released by 20th Century Fox, Miramax and Universal | Citywide

CARNAGE | Written and directed by DELPHINE GLEIZE | Produced by JÉRÔME DOPFFER| Released by Wellspring | At the Nuart