The Game
With Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger
Directed by David Fincher
by William Ham
The big problem with the cinematic access the video revolution has accorded us is that we, the home viewers, have become smarter than the people running the Hollywood sausage – uh, I mean, dream – factory. (What other explanation do we have for people like Quentin Tarantino, a semi-literate high-school dropout whose minimum-wage video store gig has given him what it took Scorsese and Stone exorbitant film-school loan payments to achieve?) We’ve become a nation of armchair cinephiles, so learnéd in the ways of plot, structure, and character development that we’ve killed most of which is presented as suspense or surprise – y’know, truisms like the villain always dies two or three times at the end, it’s always the ill-defined best-friend character who ends up being the murderer, and the gay guy’s always funnier than the alleged romantic hero(ine). An entire subgenre of films has popped up recently, trading on our knowledge of movie conventions and genre clichés (Scream, The Player, any movie put together by male siblings) or using that same knowledge to trip us up (The Usual Suspects), but even that subgenre’s starting to grow stale (Scream 2), so we have to take our shocks where we can get them. You can’t count on indie films to give you that frisson anymore (oh, look, Parker Posey’s in it. Didn’t see that coming), and a too-steady diet of loony auteurs like Lynch and Cronenberg can conceivably cause brain seizures. So it falls to dark denizens of the mainstream, like David Fincher, to give you a decent brain-bop, and his third picture, The Game, despite failing to strike a chord with most critics or audiences upon release, is as slyly subversive as you could hope for.
First, consider the casting: Michael Douglas, our reigning icon of Tortured Male Machismo, as Nicholas Van Orton, sort of the photonegative version of his Oscar-winning Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, a fabulously wealthy but deeply haunted corporate raider-type; Sean Penn as his brother Conrad, the patented Penn ne’er-do-well who gives Nicholas a gift certificate to a mysterious, interactive “game” designed to fuck with the head of whoever plays it (or whoever it plays); and Deborah Kara Unger as the enigmatic femme fatale, a chilly blonde Hitchcock (or DePalma) would be happy to cast. So far, so standard, right? You pretty much get the idea from the get-go that Douglas will get his Kafkaesque comeuppance in a hundred different ways before the fade-out. The variable in the equation, in this case, is Fincher, who demonstrated (with Seven) that what seems dark and forbidding is just that, that good doesn’t always (doesn’t usually) triumph over evil, and that feel-good cop-outs aren’t in his repertoire. But The Game is a big-budget, big-studio flick, with big names and a big buzz, right? All the ambiguities will end up straightened out in the end, won’t they? Won’t they?
Yeah, like I’m gonna tell you. This ain’t no Gene Siskel “the-chick’s-got-a-penis” Crying Game kind of review. What I will say is that The Game plugs into the endless-nightmare socket with more visual/conceptual flair than any recent flick of its ilk, that its lapses into illogic are therefore excused by the giddy bleakness of the concept, and that the ending, while seeming to wrap everything up a little too neatly, will leave you more troubled the more you think about it. I like a movie that sticks in your head for no other reason than to obsess about whether it added up to anything or not. In these jaded times, that’s about as thrilling as it gets.