Topic: Kate Winslet

Discussing a child’s less than perfect behavior with another parent is perhaps a milestone in motherhood and fatherhood that deserves more credit. Aside from having endured my own childhood in which my family willingly went head to head with other people’s parents, my babysitting years have afforded even more vivid examples about the unwritten etiquette of parenting confrontations. Whether your child has been bullied on the playground, has been the bully on said playground, or even a witness to some inappropriate behavior, approaching the other parent is fundamentally awkward.

But even if your kid hasn’t gone so far as to assault another child, you can probably identify with the delicate and stressful dynamics of the film Carnage. In a plot that is pretty commonplace to a lot of modern parents, power couple played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz attend a polite sit down at the home of politically correct hippies played by Jody Foster and John C. Reilly to discuss an “incident.” The power couple’s child, who is a admittedly “a maniac” by his father’s estimation, struck the hippy kid in the face with a stick — and what ensues between the parents is far from model behavior. More »