Funny Games
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 111 m, 2007
Directed by Michael Haneke. Stars Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, et al.

The agonizingly hardnosed Funny Games, which fixates for two long hours on the torture and killing of a middle-class family in their Long Island vacation home by a couple of preppy psychopaths, is director Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his own controversial 1997 German-language picture of the same name. I can’t help but think that if American moviegoers didn’t have such a silly aversion to subtitles, your poor reviewer might not have had to go through all this again—nor would Haneke have needed to squander a year or so of his life revisiting a topic he had long since plumbed for all it’s worth. But Haneke can’t be in this for the money; he must really think that his message for Yankee audiences is urgent enough to warrant a second telling. Alfred Hitchcock remade his own 1934 British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much for Paramount Pictures in 1956, but that was an opportunity for The Master to apply all the know-how he had acquired in the intervening years. (In one of his legendary interviews with François Truffaut, Hitch said, “Let’s say that the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”) Haneke, on the other hand, must feel that he nailed Funny Games the first time out; aside from hiring English-speaking actors, he hasn’t made any significant adjustments to the source material for his second go at it. Still, I can’t imagine this American-friendly version being any more accessible than the original; audiences are still going to have a hard time figuring out how take it. The title, Funny Games, is an ironic play on words: Haneke is mocking America’s bloodlust and its almost insatiable appetite for splatter pics. That’s something we deserve to be rapped for, but the only thing lovers of torture porn will be carrying on about as the credits roll will be that the carnage wasn’t explicit enough. That’s not Haneke’s fault; he does everything he can to drive his point home, and if we find his tactics rank it’s probably because he’s rubbing our noses in our own shit. But even the most frank and uncompromising treatises on violence—A Clockwork Orange, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Irreversible—are not going to stop the more daft among us from chomping away on their popcorn and having a knee-slapping good time. I refer you to the unfortunate Scott Speedman, who in an interview with Bloody-Disgusting.com to promote his own home invasion opus, The Strangers, said, “I thought Funny Games was hilarious. It’s a satire more than a horror movie. It’s hilarious. I was rooting for the people to get killed.” And then there’s the sad case of The Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who in his review of Funny Games wrote, “Perhaps these victims deserve their fate. One of the movie’s persistent ironies is that the family is a victim on their insistence on bourgeois property rights.” My god, what does a poor filmmaker have to do to help a couple of knuckleheads like these get the ever-loving point? (Maybe some people are just too out of it to be reached. I once knew a fellow who saw George Orwell’s 1984 as a love story, while another acquaintance professed War and Peace to be a “diverting yarn.” I stopped discussing literature with those guys.) Any soul with even the slightest of principles will consider walking out on Funny Games at the halfway mark, and yet the picture is meant for the very people who don’t consider walking out on it. ¡Ay, caramba! What a conundrum! 

Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, who look as incompatible here as Al Pacino and Penelope Ann Miller did in Carlito’s Way, play middle class parents George and Ann. It’s a ludicrous pairing—maybe not as ludicrous as, say, Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda in Copacabana, but Roth and Watts’ lack of chemistry undermines a lot of the scenes where we need to be pulling for them. Roth, who’s sliding into his fifties and beginning to affect a Gérard Depardieu kind of dumpiness, has never been a likeable actor (that may be why he’s often cast as creeps and whiny goofs), so when he tries to play an everyman like George, he doesn’t win us over. George seems a bit pokey; he’s very measured in his reactions to what’s going on around him, and that—like everything else in the film—tried my patience. (God only knows how he won the heart of a hottie tottie like Ann; he doesn’t take what she says seriously until it’s way too late.) But the rest of the performers hold their own, particularly Watts, who is so fearless and unselfconscious here that she allows snot to drip from her nose when her character breaks down. (She let her nose run quite a bit in 21 Grams, too.) Devon Gearhart, who is a complete natural, plays George and Ann’s pre-teen son, Georgie, and an identified golden retriever plays Lucky, the family pooch. The film opens with a bird’s eye view of the family’s car moving down the highway with a sailboat in tow. To pass the time, the family listens to classical music and takes turns guessing the names of the composers. They are such a smiling lot that you know the director is going to put them through the ringer, especially when the title card—done up in huge, blood-red letters—slams into the screen, and the soundtrack booms away with some ugly, screeching grindcore (courtesy of the avant-garde musical group Naked City) that makes you want to put your eardrums out. But it’s a potent metaphor: the scum and villainy that lurks beyond the perimeter of the bourgeoisie’s gated world will eventually break through. Alas, nobody can keep the horrors of the world shut out forever—not even this sweet brood, whose sense of security will be viciously mauled by a couple of smiling dorks from who knows where. 

After settling in, George and his son go down to the dock to launch the boat, while Ann stays behind to prepare the evening meal. As she carves up a hunk of bossy, a goofy-looking kid bedecked in golfing apparel and white gloves comes to the door. His name is Peter (Brady Corbett), and he’s been sent by Fred’s wife to borrow some eggs. (A necessary side dish when you’re noshing on lomticks of toast and lovely steakiwegs.) Ann, ever the gracious neighbor, is happy to oblige, but as Peter goes to leave, he drops the eggs. He now needs to borrow a few more. Ann starts to feel a little agitated; it’s getting harder to maintain a pleasant visage in this dope’s presence—especially after he ruins her cell phone by knocking it into the kitchen sink. Now at her wits’ end, the former Lady Kong gives Peter his eggs and scoots him out the door. But the boy soon returns sans eggs and with a chum, Paul. They tell Ann some cockamamie story about Lucky attacking Peter, which caused the already ham-fisted lad to drop his second batch of eggiwegs. So, of course, they need to borrow some more, meaning that Ann will have to surrender the last four in the carton. Sensing her annoyance, Paul quickly changes the subject to George’s golf clubs. I don’t know what makes the set so choice, but it sure seems to give Paul a boner, so he turns on the charm and asks Ann if he can swing the driver around outside. She begrudgingly agrees. So Paul goes off to make believe he’s Tiger Woods, leaving Peter to hang back and continue pestering the missus.

Down on the boat, George and his son begin to notice that Lucky’s woofing is taking on a more and more desperate quality. All of a sudden, the dog lets forth a pitiful yelp. A bone-chilling silence follows. George and his son rush back to the house too see what is going on and discover that Paul has used George’s club to bludgeon Lucky to death. Paul then turns the club on George, smashing his kneecap to Smithereens. With George incapacitated, Peter and Paul are able to hold the family hostage, which means we have go on listening to Paul’s seemingly endless string of bullshit. Eventually he gets around to the purpose of his visit, which is to bet the family that they’ll all be “kaput” by morning. (This rather queer turn of phrase becomes positively chilling when we see the look of terror on Georgie’s face.) The first half hour or so of Funny Games contains some of the most brilliantly sustained suspense I’ve seen all year, but once Peter and Paul officially take the family hostage, the picture reaches an ugly stagnation, and the only thing we feel is a mounting sense of dread. As the film goes on, Peter and Paul come up with a series of progressively dehumanizing acts for the family to partake in. Highlights include a game of “cat in the bag,” in which Paul shoves a pillowcase over Georgie’s head and abuses him (we’re not shown how, which makes it only more disturbing) until Ann agrees to strip down to her birthday suit. As she bares her body to her leering captors, George weeps and George, Jr. soils his pants. I hated, hated, hated this scene; it is so vile and degrading that I felt trashy just for watching it. But things only get worse: after Paul discovers a shotgun, he decides which one of the family will be the first to take a bullet by playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe. Sadly, Georgie is made “it,” and his mother is powerless to save him for her hands and feet have been bound with duct tape. As Paul heads for the kitchen to fix a bite to eat, Peter blows the little boy’s head to pieces, splattering the family’s idiot box with gore. This unholy display makes Alex’s surprise visit in A Clockwork Orange look like a visit from the Avon Lady, and yet Haneke can’t be accused of exploitation for he never shows us the carnage; he cuts away to some other piece of business while a victim is being shot, stabbed or beaten. Our imaginations fill in the blanks, which serves to make the proceedings even more harrowing. Funny Games feels a lot more gruesome than the Saw or Hostel series, even though it doesn’t offer one-hundredth of one-percent of the blood and guts on display in those films. Funny Games forces us to feel the victims’ pain, making the bedlam that much more difficult to shake off. 

At first, Funny Games reminded me a bit of the 1956 Humphrey Bogart thriller, The Desperate Hours (which was remade in 1991 with Mickey Rourke), but when Bogart and his motley crew of escaped convicts took over an upper-middle-class household, it was to hide out from Johnny Law. In Funny Games, the bad guys force their way into suburban homes just to fuck with people, which may represent Haneke taking over a time-tested sub-genre just to fuck with moviegoers. And ultimately that’s all Funny Games is: two hours of being savagely skull-fucked. Don’t get me wrong, the film is brilliantly structured (and sans the flashy cutting that ruins most modern horror shows), but it is a cheerless, almost demeaning experience. 

After Georgie is killed, Peter and Paul take off for a spell, leaving Ann and George to wallow in the aftermath of their son’s murder. There is a very, very long take of Ann—who is obviously in shock—trying to wriggle her way out of her binds while the blood of her dead son drips off the television screen. The scene seems to go on forever, and the emotions you experience during this torturous ten minutes range from shock to frustration to outright anger. It was at this point that I was halfway tempted to turn the blasted thing off (a feeling I also had when Haneke subjected me to that pig snuff film over and over again in Benny’s Video), but my duty to this column kept me planted with my hands clenched in fists of rage. You know, I can put up with a crap in movies, but the murder of a child (or the murder of a woman that’s heavy with child) is something I have trouble dealing with. (It’s even more maddening when it doesn’t serve the plot in any defensible way, such as in Planet Terror, and downright inexcusable when it’s done for laughs, like in Andy Warhol’s Bad and Automaton Transfusion.) Everybody has a line, and that’s mine—though placing kids in sexually explicit situations (think Bully, Happiness or Thirteen) also gets my dander up. Becoming a father has only lowered my threshold for stuff like that, and Funny Games, with its emphasis on the slaughter of the innocent, wore me out. But Haneke isn’t content to leave the audience tuckered; he wants to shame it. And just when you think Haneke can’t go any farther, or when he might be offering us a reprieve from all the nasty goings-on, he yanks the rug out from beneath us. Haneke won’t permit us any catharsis: there’s a moment where the family gains the upper hand, which had me leaping to my feet and cheering, but then the director took the moment back by literally rewinding the action and then presenting an alternate outcome where the bad guys are still in charge. It’s a cruel trick, but it works to give us a small taste of the mental anguish the family must be experiencing. 

Corbett and Pitt are both effectual in their respective roles as Peter and Paul. Corbett’s chunky and slow-witted Peter reminded me a lot of Dim from A Clockwork Orange, a film that appears to have also inspired Pitt’s character, Paul, who shares more than a few of Alex’s antisocial traits. Pitt looks a bit like and acts an awful lot like Leonardo DiCaprio, though he’s not nearly as handsome or charismatic. In fact, I came to find him rather ugly, which is a testament to Pitt’s ability to dig so deep into the psychology of an amoral scumbag that the actor himself becomes almost repellent. Haneke breaks down the film’s fourth wall by having Paul address the audience a couple of times, and you may find yourself wanting to bop the screen when he sticks his babyish mug into the camera’s lens. Pitt (no relation to Brad, whom I loved in Fight Club, but could easily go the rest of my life without watching in anything again) played one of the sexually ambiguous psycho boys in Murder by Numbers, and there’s a similar gayness to the relationship he shares with his partner in crime here in Funny Games. Both films recall the homoerotic relationship between the prep school killers, Brandon and Philip, in Hitchcock’s Rope. Like Hitchcock, Haneke knows the difference between a shock and suspense, and without ever resorting to explicit depictions of violence or bloodletting, he plays us like a piano. 

Thankfully, Haneke doesn’t try to explain why Peter and Paul do what they do; they are two-dimensional characters without a back-story and lacking any identifiable motivation. Judging by the movie’s bookending sequences, George and Ann’s crib is just one of several that the WASPy whack jobs have invaded within the neighborhood over the last several days. We don’t know if they’re part of the bourgeoisie or if they just don its garb to blend in, but such ambiguities serve to make the villains even creepier. 

It’s easy to hate Funny Games; it chastises its audience for wanting to watch it. But as much as we’d like to have Haneke’s head on a stick, we can’t blame him for delivering an upsetting message. (He’s occupying the moral high ground here, though I wish he wasn’t so damned condescending in his approach.) This utterly depraved exercise is the director’s response to the blood-soaked junk being served up to young, impressionable audiences by socially irresponsible provocateurs on the order of Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino. (Tarantino came off as a total ignoramus when he said that using violence as a literary device is no different than using tap dancing. What’s curious about ol’ banana chin is that the older he gets the more flippant about violence he becomes. Most directors become more sensitive to the subject as they advance in years.) True, most of those guys’ films were nowhere in sight when the first Funny Games came out, but I think their output of late is what inspired this redo. Funny Games is saying that violence and murder is not all fun and games, but since most of us already know that, what purpose does this thing really serve? Those who are sensitive to the topic will be made to feel even more miserable than usual, and those with a sadistic streak will be asking for seconds. It’s clear that Mr. Speedman is a member of that latter crowd. I don’t know what it will take to awaken an idiot like that, but if Funny Games can’t do it, nothing can. 

June 14, 2008 

“Funny Games” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.