Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 10:32 pm 
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Puncturing the balloon

A wealthy couple, Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) with a young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), drive to their lakeside vacation house. Two young men in shorts and white gloves appear (as it were Walt Disney ghouls), seeming to be friends with their neighbors. They come over, and, beginning with disputes over some eggs and a golf club, in a short while reveal themselves to be homicidal psychopaths bent on tormenting the little family along the way to exterminating them.

I am told that this film, which (I am also told) is a scene-by-scene remake of one Haneke did a decade ago in German (before, incidentally, his international fame and his best work), is designed to prod us Americans for our delight in making and consuming and distributing movies full of violence.

See? Haneke is saying, inflicted on people like you, violence isn't fun at all. The movie isn't designed to give payoffs. Most of the violence is delivered off-screen. The victims don't get any revenge and their attempts to call for help or to escape are pathetic failures. Not only that, but the evil pair have already killed neighbors and are on their way to kill others after this. We're caught in one depressing segment of a seemingly endless loop.

The bad boys, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), are like a blond Leopold and Loeb, apparently children of priviledge themselves without a moral sense. Their torments never get very far as "games" but they keep up a chilling pretense of politeness and "fun". Needless to say, none of this is "funny." Peter and Paul act put upon by their victims' hatred and resentment. At first, when they're being merely annoying and forward, Anne tries to push one of them out and then George slaps the other on the face. That's when Paul gets really hostile and nasty, doing grave injury with a golf club, and then the serious "fun" begins. Haneke is clever at gradually upping the danger and horror levels while never ceasing to confound us with the victimizers' bland politeness, horrific playfulness, and complaints that their captives aren't following the "game." It's not awfully hard to see Peter and Paul as stand-ins for Mr. Hanake himself, playing bad boy and lecturing us all the while.

The justification for Haneke's remaking his own movie is that if he wanted to direct it at Americans, he'd best do it over with American actors, in English. However, this repetition and the idea for the film itself show Haneke's worst side--his self-important, hectoring aspect, combined with his need to punish viewers so they may prove themselves as serious as he. That works with his 2001 La Pianiste. It's a mysterious, disturbing, intense expereience with considerable psychological depth. Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel give amazing, brave performances to enact this complexity. Their sadomasochistic relationship is a horrific thing to watch played out, but it seems worth it. Code Unknown and The Hour of the Wolf and Caché are various and challenging works that show Haneke at the top of his game, emerging unquestionably as one of the most significant European directors.

Funny Games is a regression on the director's part to ideas that are clever but facile; it's a smaller, more purely pernicious piece of work. What it's trying to do is simpler--and constantly risks failure, behind the mask of technical polish and good acting. I don't object as some do that Paul addresses the audience and at one point "rewinds" the action (which "recalls") Caché's confusion of a remote-rewindable tape and "reality"). Why not? He's obviously playing with us, Haneke is, with how we can be disturbed even when we know it's "only a movie." He needs to remind us of the illusion to alert us to his point that when stuff like this is for real, it's truly nasty, so we should think twice about playing with it. The masking-tape restraints on Ann and the bag over the boy's head recall Bagram and Abu Ghraib--things much worse than a movie that America's responsible for. But I don't think Haneke deserves credit for that. He's really just creating a horror show, a high-class auteur playing at cheap genre tricks and pretending that because he does it, it will improve us--by not entertaining us.

Peter and Paul are repulsively detached, smug young sadists, but an irony of Funny Games is that their characters are more interesting and more fully explored than those of Ann, George, and Georgie. Watching them, if you can (and half the small audience walked out when I was watching), can induce something like the Stockholm Syndrome. The stronger characters being Peter and Paul, you may start to identify with them, and feel contempt for the small, mousey-haired George, who never finds an opportunity to counterattack. All the victims really get a chance to do is whimper. They are cyphers. It seems Haneke wants to take revenge on the rich--except that this family's tormentors are self-declared spoiled brats themselves.

This version obviously adds a few wrinkles--a drenched cell phone; Naomi Watts in underclothes, adding titillation. Isn't Haneke playing the game he wants to accuse Americans of? That is the problem throughout. And some of the old tricks--the use of thrash metal for shock value, for instance--now seem old hat.

Haneke can leave a powerfully unpleasant impression. His 1989 Seventh Continent, about an Austrian family that commits collective suicide, demonstrated that. But he had learned to do so much more since then. Yet Funny Games, this unfortunate throwback, succeeds simply in being not a very good movie. It is well made, effectively unpleasant, but as shallow as any horror movie. Why was its predecessor in German better reviewed in the US than this (Metacritic's 74 vs. a vindictive 40?) Do we make allowances for foreign films? Evidently we do. Sometimes when you understand the language the balloon is punctured.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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