Watts No Riot
‘Funny Games’ is the feel-bad movie of the year
By Andy Klein
Have you ever been taunted by a bully? (I’ll assume you have, at least once in your life.) And, the angrier you got, the more it encouraged him, because, after all, his entire motivation was to push your buttons? You had the choice of passively accepting humiliation or escalating a hopeless situation.
Well, any masochists out there who are feeling the pull of nostalgia for such moments can rejoice! For the mere price of a movie ticket, you can relive those rancid memories … by subjecting yourself to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
Those of you who have followed the Austrian director’s career will recall that he made a movie called Funny Games 11 years ago. His new film bears the same title, because it is a more-or-less shot-for-shot remake, except with an English-speaking cast this time around. Yes, in Haneke’s mind, it’s a film so nice, he had to make it twice.
To a healthy human mind, however, it’s one of the most repugnant, unpleasant, sadistic movies ever made. No matter what virtues of craft one can find within, no matter what themes lie beneath, Funny Games is aesthetically indefensible.
When the German-language version was released here in 1999, I was given a VHS copy – how last century! – which I found so thoroughly unpleasant that I shut it off after about a half hour. My job at the time didn’t require that I be the one to review it: This was one of perhaps a half dozen times in 20 years that I bailed on a film, and the only time I’ve ever bailed that early.
The plot of Funny Games couldn’t be simpler or more linear. Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) are a wealthy couple driving to their palatial vacation house with their prepubescent son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and their big friendly dog. They run into a neighbor, who is accompanied by two overly polite young guests named Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet). The neighbor’s manner seems stilted and ill at ease.
Shortly thereafter, Peter arrives at the door, saying his hosts have sent him to borrow a few eggs. Ann obliges, but he breaks one set of eggs … and then another … all the time apologizing fulsomely and being more and more presumptuous. Ann finally loses patience and asks him to leave, but he refuses and keeps apologizing. When both George and Paul show up, things escalate into actual physical violence, and the family begins to realize that these guys are psychopaths, who find only one thing more enjoyable than inflicting physical pain – and that’s total psychological humiliation.
At this point we’re about 25 minutes in, and the remaining hour and a quarter simply elaborates and intensifies what has already transpired: Always oozing preppy, upper-class gentleness of manner, Peter and Paul are two cool cats worrying their three captive mice for the sheer pleasure of it.
There is some suspense, as we wonder whether one of the family will manage to escape or contact the police, but even that is part of the sadistic game Haneke is playing on the viewer as surely as Peter and Paul on their victims. There are three or four moments when Haneke has characters break the fourth wall, in essence reminding us that this is a movie. In some movies, such breaches serve to let the audience off the hook. But here – particularly in the final such scene – they only remind us that these “funny games” are rigged; the filmmaker wants us to suffer, and our natural hopes of relief are laughably naive.
It is bizarre and extraordinary that an American studio – even an art house division like Warner Independent Pictures – would make such a relentlessly unsellable film. Presumably the participation of Watts – who is also listed as a producer – got it greenlighted. But, Watts notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine anyone being eager to see Funny Games, and harder to imagine even the most devout fan of “torture porn” digging it … though it’s interesting to ponder what Haneke’s reaction would be to the latter.
Indeed, the movie is clearly intended to be some kind of indictment of Hollywood violence and the audience’s seemingly inexhaustible hunger for ever-escalating shocks. Haneke would probably feel both appalled and vindicated if a viewer got pleasure from it: “See? I was right: you’re unthinking sheep who revel in blood without any sense of the real-life consequences!”
Haneke wins either way: If, like me, your reaction is anger at the filmmaker, well, then he’s done his job. He meant to push your buttons, and push them he did … like the bully in the first paragraph. And the realization that he will feed off your most outraged condemnations can only make you angrier, thus feeding him more.
I should mention that, in between his two versions of Funny Games, the director has made a series of first-rate movies – including Time of the Wolf, Code Unknown, and Caché – that often deal with similar issues, but in a more conventional and satisfying way. The brilliant Caché likewise forces a comfortable, bourgeois family to confront the violence they have been complicit in creating – both specifically and as a matter of class. It has one moment of sheer jump-from-your-seat violence, which is all the more effective for being in contrast to what surrounds it.
But now I begin to wonder whether, for the last decade, Haneke has been applying his talent to more “acceptable” work just to get a chance to remake Funny Games in English. In a recent L.A. Times interview, he said that the movie was always “intended for an English-language audience because the subject matter – the consumption of violence – is most prevalent in English-language filmmaking … . Because the [original] film was in German it just didn’t reach the audience for which it was intended.”
Interestingly, the passage of time has added a new, more urgent layer of subtext: The invasion of the two young men could be read as a metaphor for the U.S. behavior in the Middle East. The intruders are “nice,” seemingly well-intentioned, polite, and impossible to stop. They begin with small acts of provocation that eventually cause a response – which they then use to justify their subsequent mayhem.
That may be interesting … but it doesn’t make me want to change my assessment of the film. Watts is terrific, the other actors do excellent work, and the movie was shot by Darius Khondji (Delicatessen, Se7en), one of the greatest and most influential cinematographers to have emerged in the last two decades. But their work is all in service of making the audience feel bad with no redeeming positive quality.
There are few things that freak me out more than when I feel I may be sounding like Michael Medved, whose philosophy and priorities I deplore. I’m not a knee-jerk happy-face critic, nor do I believe that there is some golden “single goal” that all films must meet. Movies can provide knowledge; they can provoke laughter, cleansing tears, excitement, crystallized reality, intellectual stimulation, transcendent moments of emotional catharsis, fresh perspectives, and a finite number of other worthwhile reactions. Few films do all, but I do believe that a work of art has to serve at least one of these many goals.
Not on my list is “rubbing the audience’s noses in a hopeless world of shit” – which is all Funny Games comes up with.
Funny Games. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. With Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, and Devon Gearhart. Opens Friday citywide.
Published: 03/12/2008
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