Funny Games

(2008)

Directed by

Michael Haneke

Review by Zach Saltz

Funny Games is not merely the torture porn it appears to be.  On the surface, Michael Haneke’s American remake of his own 1997 Austrian cult classic is nothing more than an exercise in pure sadism, complete with golf clubs used as batons and whips, pillowcases wrapped over heads, and the ever-increasing unfortunate Cell-Phone-Which-Selectively-Shuts-Off (a sort of modern variation on the Selective-Number-No-Longer-In-Service).  Indeed, there are more scenes of physical and psychological torture in this movie than explosions in a Michael Bay flick.  When Naomi Watts’ character, Ann, asks her sadistic captor why they simply don’t kill her, Michael Pittman’s deadpan Peter responds coolly: “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment”; and somehow this line will not only provide the capricious mood ripe for mutilation and beyond, but will also serve a deeper meaning when considering the film’s ultimate purpose.

The set up is formulaic, at best: A smug upper-class family (Tim Roth, Watts, and Devon Gearhart as the son) arrives at their idyllic gated vacation home on Long Island.  On the way to the house, they casually sift through album after album of classical music, quizzing each other on which composer wrote which piece.  They run into their neighbors and ask when a good time to play a round of golf would be.  Once they arrive at the house, they are so self-absorbed with their own material possessions that they do not notice their hungry dog, pining for attention.

Oh, dare I say that Haneke has something provocative to say about the new American bourgeoisie?  Such cool and uninflected cinematography while accentuation the solipsism of nuveau riche seems worthy of Buñuel (to whom Ed Gonzalez likens Haneke), but I feel his style lends itself more to Jean Renoir in Rules of the Game, whose camera catches the actions of its characters but whose viewers are asked to interpret the significance (or, more importantly, the insignificance) of their screen figures.  We have relatively little moral grounding in which to make our assumptions about George, Ann, and Little Georgie, but after several unbearable minutes of their dull banal affluence, the viewer is quick to find them guilty of being dull.

In any event, the unnamed family encounters two impeccably white-clad polo-sporting young men calling themselves Peter and Paul (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) who are a mix of Vladimir and Estragon and Leopold and Loeb.  They refuse to leave the house, hold the family captive, and kill each of them off.  Complete with unnerving self-reflexivity (Pitt’s Peter breaking the “fourth wall” and directly glancing and communicating with audience members) and use of unorthodox technique (one scene is literally rewound and altered to better fit the film’s profession of the excitement of evil versus good), Haneke’s film runs the gamut in experimentation, but nothing is quite as experimental as the idea that murderers ought to have the ability to express their opinions, too.

The acting in Funny Games is proficient, if not slightly one-dimensional.  Tim Roth basically reprises his role as Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs, except this time instead of getting shot in the stomach, he is whacked in the leg and has to sit out for the remainder of the movie.  Naomi Watts and little Devon Gearhart scream quite a bit, but are nonetheless effective in some major sequences, such as when Watts runs along the side of a street and when Gearhart sneaks into a neighbor’s house.  But Pitt and Corbett steal the show here, as they should, since their characters have been deliberately allotted by Haneke as the film’s actual heroes -- quaint and humorous murderers who light up the screen with their presence.

Jim Emerson, the plebian editor and (hopefully) temporary replacement for Roger Ebert writes: “If you liked those pictures from Abu Ghraib, you’ll love Funny Games!”  But this is precisely the point Haneke is getting at: the abhorrence of violence is wholly relative to perspective.  Do we truly want to see Ann talking on the phone to her affluent suburban friends?  Are George and Georgie all that remarkable on their miniature yacht?  Do we want to see more classical music composer sound-off?  Or would we rather see something exciting, like the use of weapons and scenes of utter fear and dread?  The brilliance of Funny Games is that it makes us feel depraved, on the one hand, for playing voyeur to torture, but also for condoning the repugnant behavior of the two mean by finding their scenes most interesting.  Haneke knows his audience to an almost unhealthy extent.

The ultimate verdict on Funny Games depends on whether the sum of its parts add up to a satisfying whole.  I believe it does.  While many of its sequences are admittedly dull, relentless, and unremitting in their stark and unblinking portrait of brutality and torture, the boredom is contained for a purpose.  Haneke is too intelligent a director to make a bland and routine slasher flick, and this film seriously questions the validity of the genre, not in the framework of conventional good versus evil, but rather no good and all evil.  Funny Games may be more of a concept than an actual movie, but the conversations which will naturally arise afterward are worth the price of admission alone.

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