Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Funny
Games, or Neither
(Funny Games, 3/24/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Michael
Haneke's taut, sadistic Funny Games wants to be the kind of movie
people either love or hate. By that measure, it's a failure—the
vast majority of people just plain hate it. By the time you read this,
it will already have washed out of the line-up at Fall Creek.
A remake of Haneke's 1997 German-language
version, the film portrays the fate of the upper middle-class Farber
family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Devon Gearheart) as it falls victim to
a home invasion. With unstinting politeness and a look right out of
an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, the young sadists "Paul"
and "Peter" (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) take advantage
of the Farber's sense of bourgeois neighborliness to gain entrance to
their vacation cottage. They then subject Mom, Dad and sonny to a series
of excruciating tortures, including but not limited to asphyxiation,
mutilation, and sexual humiliation. Without giving away the ending—such
as it is—Haneke doesn't exactly see the situation going anywhere
good.
There's no denying Haneke is a filmmaker
of fair skill. His 2001 film The Pianist, for one instance, presented
a chilly but effective portrait of a woman (Isabelle Huppert) in psychosexual
free-fall. From a technical point of view, Funny Games is as
simply and effectively constructed as a good pair of stainless-steel
shears. Where many Hollywood thrillers follow reassuring conventions
in storytelling (the strategically-hidden knife or gun, the aggressors
fall into dissension, the victims turn the tables, etc.), Haneke anticipates
them all, and denies them so relentlessly I had no idea what was going
to happen. The result is an experience that leaves the viewer spent,
stunned, and appalled.
But the point of Funny Games
is less obvious than Haneke's talent. It's probably beneath Haneke's
concern—but worth mentioning—that the script is far less seamless
than the filmmaking. Dead bodies are left unconcealed, and assumptions
made about the number of phones and AC chargers in the house, to the
point that "Paul" and "Peter" seem to be counting
on good luck as much as on the Farbers' ineptness.
Haneke's
distaste for his victims is palpable. There's an excruciating scene,
for instance, where the torturers pretend to leave, giving Mom and Dad
a chance to call for help. Instead of going into survival mode, the
bougeois numbskulls waste precious minutes wallowing in grief, then
make a lame attempt to fix their sabotaged cell phone. Unfolding in
real time, the sequence is so frustrating it can only be meant to inspire
contempt. Trusting in gadgets and institutions, Haneke's victims are
too hapless to just get up on their feet and leave.
There's a long tradition of aristocratic
sadism in Western literature. Freedom to victimize the less-fortunate
whilst keeping one's knee-breeches spotless was a prerogative of noble
decadence going back to de Sade himself and beyond. But visionaries
like Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom [1976]
is still unsurpassed for pure, prurient shock) at least had some sense
of the larger context, where the victimizers are as much on a string
as the innocents they toy with.
Haneke lets his villains turn to
the camera and address the audience, but never allows the victims to
do the same. The point, one supposes, is to indict the viewer as a passive
co-conspirators. If this were 1962, the device might have qualified
as something radical and interesting. But this is 2008. At a time when
torture not just something that happens in movies, the stakes seem to
call for something more than Haneke's kind of arty cleverness.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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