Funny Games (2007)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: Anna (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) are enjoying a vacation with their son when a pair of sadistic young men, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), breaks into their cabin and holds the family hostage. The psychotic duo plays twisted games with their prisoners, forcing them to comply to stay alive. Director Michael Haneke remakes his chilling 1997 German-language film as an indictment of the media’s fascination with violence.
SPOILERS!!
REVIEW: The title has multiple meanings, referring ostensibly to the games two young criminals play w/their captives during the course of the story, but there’s a more sly, subversive reference to the games writer/director Michael Haneke plays w/the thriller genre, and even more significantly, the games he plays w/the audience and our expectations.
The film starts w/a nasty little joke as the opening credits are rolled silently in a kind of “arthouse” manner of simple text on a black background, then the film proper opens w/soothing classical music on the soundtrack that lulls us (as the family themselves are playing a guessing-game among themselves while traveling in their car), then suddenly a jarringly loud, discordant, heavy-metal song is blasting away as the credits continue to roll more in the style of a traditional B-movie cheapie thriller. This opening sets the tone and gives us a clue as to what’s to come.
The plot of FG is deceptively simple: Two young psychopaths take a family of three - mother, father, son - hostage in their vacation home and proceed to physically and psychologically torture them, culminating in the eventual murder of all three. And it certainly works on that most basic level. But the film isn’t really a mere thriller, it’s about the thriller genre itself, it’s about the perverse nature of violent entertainment, and Haneke plays w/the conventions of the genre and film throughout. He follows the rules of the genre and then turns around at certain points and breaks all those rules; indeed, he violates the very conventions of film itself.
The most shocking, innovative instance of this happens late in the story after the two boys have murdered the child and the parents are, of course, devastated. At this point we in the audience are primed for the parents to turn the tables on their captives, to exact their revenge on these two despicable characters. And we get just what we expect and long for - the mother has a momentary opportunity and seizes it, she grabs the shotgun used to murder her son and turns it on one of the boys and blows him away. This is filmed in the most conventional “thriller” manner, the boy goes flying back against the wall w/the shotgun blasting a hole literally right through him. (Note that this is the only instance of actual onscreen violence in the entire film, everything else is done offscreen.) There is a brief moment of shock as the other boy reacts and then, before we in the audience can really get our bearings, well, it’s hard to describe, you have to see it to really get it, but the film suddenly goes in reverse, it plays back to the point just as the mother is grabbing the gun, and then restarts and replays. But this time the other boy grabs the gun from the mother and prevents her from doing anything. He scolds her, then turns and shoots her husband dead as punishment.
Of course we feel cheated and of course we’re meant to feel that way. That’s the point. (I’d love to have seen this in a theater w/an audience. Did they cheer when she shot the boy? Did they boo when it reversed?) Haneke has already prepared us for this kind of breaking of film convention when earlier he twice has one of the boys turn to the camera and speak directly to the audience, asking something along the lines of “You want to see how this plays out, don’t you?” And at another point the mother asks “Why don’t you just kill us?” and the boy replies “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” IOW, if we kill you now, where’s the film?
Does it work? I don’t know. This scene, as disturbing as it is, is perhaps too clever for its own good. It does what it’s supposed to do, but it also take us completely out of the movie. I suppose that’s part of its purpose, but it leaves us feeling removed from everything that follows, the film becomes an exercise in making a thematic point rather than telling a story. I wish this scene had been left out, since Haneke does such a good job in other respects of violating the conventions of the thriller genre while still remaining true to the art of storytelling.
My favorite bit is the “climax”, set up early in the film, when the father and son are on their modest little sailboat at their dock and one of them drops a knife w/o noticing. Haneke has a subtle but significant closeup of the knife sitting partially hidden at the bottom of the boat and everyone who’s ever seen a thriller knows that this will come into play later on. We may even anticipate specifically what is going to happen: The bad guys take one of the good guys out to the boat and he/she finds the knife and uses it to fight off and hopefully kill her captors. Well, we get what we expect as, after the father and son are dead, the two boys take the mother out to the boat, taped up, and set her down at one end while they then fiddle w/the sail at the other end. She sees the knife, picks it up and begins discreetly cutting away at the tape holding her wrists and ankles. But then, in the most offhand manner, one of the boys sees what’s she doing and says carelessly, sarcastically: “Look. Now that’s what I call Olympic spirit.” Then the other boy, just as unperturbed, leans over and takes the knife, while his friend cautions him to be careful because he can’t swim, then they nonchalantly drop the knife over the side. It’s about as un-melodramatic a sequence as possible but I think it’s brilliant just because of that. Haneke sets up a traditional blood-revenge climax that we anticipate throughout the whole film, then just casually drops it over the side like dead weight. A few minutes later, indifferent and w/o any fanfare, they toss the bound mother into the water the same way they did the knife and that’s that.
The film ends w/the two boys pulling into another private dock and going to the house, presumably to start all over again w/another family. The last shot has the older boy again looking directly into the camera, this time smiling knowingly, defiantly, as if to say, “I know. We won, that’s not supposed to happen is it?”
4 stars
Harold
