FUNNY GAMES
Directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt. Opens Fri, Mar 14.
2 1/2 Stars

Wow, are people going to hate Funny Games. And I mean hate. People aren’t just going to come out of it the way they did at The Da Vinci Code, shrugging and saying, “Boy, that was a bad movie,” and then going out to grab something to eat. Because it’s not a bad movie—it’s very professionally made and skillfully acted, especially by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. 

But that’s not going to matter, because Funny Games betrays the expectations of its unsuspecting audience in such a fundamental way that I’m sure most people’s reaction will be to reject it completely. The hate that this movie will generate is the kind that will persist for generations. It’s a hate that will bind married couples together and cause couples who see the movie on their first date to break up for good. I’m talking hate that will define a generation. I’m kind of eager to see it on the opening weekend, actually, if only to see how the crowd reacts to a particularly outrageous moment near the end of the film involving a TV remote control. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if people started throwing things at the screen.

But let’s back up a bit. Funny Games is writer/director Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his own 1997 German-language film, with Watts and Roth assuming the roles originally played by Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe: Ann and George, a happy, well-to-do married couple who go on vacation with their son at their lake house, only to be taken hostage by a pair of polite young psychopaths in tennis whites who proceed to torture them for no apparent reason, save their own perverted amusement. At first, Haneke directs the film in a conventional (if somewhat clinical) manner, creating an underlying atmosphere of dread even as the happy family arrives at the lake house, and lingering on details (e.g., a dropped knife forgotten in the hull of a sailboat) as if to tip us off that they’ll be reincorporated later on in the story.

But don’t be fooled! The only reason Haneke, a former philosophy student and film critic, bothers setting up these Hollywood tropes in the first place is so he can knock them down later on and shock you out of your alleged complacency. (Yes, you! Sitting there with your popcorn, expecting to be entertained! Michael Haneke’s fed up with you!)

The first hint that there’s something strange going on in this movie comes when Michael Pitt, playing one of the two home invaders, tells Ann to go looking for the family dog and then turns towards the camera and smirks complicitly at the audience, as if to confirm our suspicion that he’s killed it already. As the film progresses, Pitt begins acknowledging the audience’s presence even more overtly, asking us if he thinks the family will survive and explaining that he’s only doing certain things because it makes the story more dramatic.

I saw the original Funny Games when it first came out, and I didn’t like it much. Back then, a lot of reviewers, noting the way the two killers casually refer to each other as “Tom and Jerry” or “Beavis and Butt-head,” interpreted the film as a comment on how TV has completely desensitized a generation of young people to violence. Viewed through that lens, I thought the film was pretty facile. Nowadays, however, it’s clear that Haneke’s true target isn’t numbed-out TV-watching young people but the very audience who would pay money to see the kind of movie Funny Games appears to be. 

Why, Haneke asks, do we regard torture and violence as entertainment? What is the nature of the pleasure we derive from certain types of onscreen death, and what happens when those scenes are taken away from us?

I think I understand Haneke’s intentions better this time out, but I still don’t think his point holds any more water. Surely Haneke realizes that onscreen violence in the context of a dramatic story and real-life violence are very different things. Only a psychotic would confuse the two, and yet Haneke seems to regard our taste for onscreen violence as being somehow immoral. 

You don’t have to be some kind of film theorist to be aware on some level that any movie you’re watching is a constructed object that obeys certain established conventions. Everyone who’s ever shouted back at the screen during a clichéd horror movie knows that. And so Pitt’s winks and smirks to the camera aren’t the least bit shocking or daring—they’re just exasperating. (That said, I did laugh when Pitt petulantly remarks that we’re probably rooting for the family, as if it’s exactly the bourgeois reaction he was expecting from us.)

But Haneke’s attitude toward the audience often seems as condescending as Pitt’s. In the final act of No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers also deliberately violated thriller conventions, pulling the rug out from out identification with the apparent main character and denying us the violent catharsis all our years of moviegoing training had led us to expect. But they also gave us a deeper and more profound vision of the world in exchange. In Funny Games, Haneke doesn’t leave us with much more than an arid academic exercise, a stealth experiment in audience manipulation. Let’s hope the subjects don’t riot and tear up the laboratory.