Playing Hard to Get

Michael Haneke dares us to enjoy Funny Games.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Mar 12, 2008

PUTT HIM DOWN: Michael Pitt shatters Tim Roth's leg with a golf club before torturing his family. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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Although it remakes his 1997 German feature line-for-line and shot-for-shot, Michael Haneke's English-language Funny Games is less an audacious conceptual gag than a straightforward do-over. Haneke is arguably more invested in self-conscious metacinema than any narrative filmmaker alive (and that includes Lars von Trier and Brian De Palma), but the mere fact of the new Funny Games' existence is not itself an art world in-joke. That was Funny Games. So is this.

The movie's plot, then as now, is fiendishly simple. A well-off city family (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and 12-year-old Devon Gearhart) retire to their lakeside house for a restful weekend. Their home is invaded by two clean-cut, polite young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet), who, after a few passive-aggressive exchanges involving the borrowing of eggs, shatter the husband's leg with a golf club and proceed to torture the family, physically and psychologically, for the remainder of the movie's running time.

The torturers, who variously refer to themselves as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head, offer no rationale for their acts, beyond the (apparently) facetious explanation that Corbet's twitchy, vaguely feminine psychopath was scarred by a traumatic childhood. They act out of pure force of will — Haneke's as much as their own.

Although not all of Haneke's features fit the same mold, there is a streak of sadistic purism that runs through movies like Caché, Benny's Video and both versions of Funny Games. Haneke stages violent and often repellent tableaux, and then spins on his heel like a prosecutor who's caught his witness in a lie. You're enjoying this, aren't you?

In Funny Games, Haneke cuts out the middleman. Rather than subverting the form of the thriller, as he did in Caché, he overtly takes the audience into his killers' confidence, whether they like it or not. "You're on their side, aren't you?" Pitt asks the camera, registering more disappointment than disbelief. "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment." Given the gruesome discovery that's just been made, it's doubtful that anyone in the audience is feeling particularly entertained at that moment, but we are riveted, unable to turn away. Haneke has said of the new movie as he did of the original that those who stay until the end need it, and those who walk out do not.

Haneke's argument is compelling as a polemic, less so as a reasoned critique. There are any number of reasons why we might stay, not least the desire to see exactly how far Haneke will push his assault. His movies engage audiences on a self-critical plane, but their embedded criticisms are directed at the viewer's unconscious. A more nuanced version of Haneke's statement might be this: The less you understand what he's up to, the more you need to.

At his worst, Haneke is no better than a scold, a smug intellectual looking down his nose at anyone stupid enough to sit through one of his movies. Is it too crass, too American, to point out that the people who stay to the end are the ones who allow him to keep making films? It's a cliché to chalk his temperament up to his Austrian nationality, but I couldn't help thinking of Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, which she said might have been "the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy." The difference is that you'll never catch Haneke cracking a smile.

And yet, Funny Games works, because no matter how engaged the viewer, there is always a part of us that is just there for the ride. When we watch Watts scream and wail in grief, as we have so many times before, is there not part of us that enjoys the spectacle? Is it possible to watch Pitt's immaculately creepy and unsettlingly boyish performance and not, on some level, enjoy it? Of course, one might ask the same questions of Haneke, who has now contrived to film the same story in two different languages, like a Brechtian impresario seeking out new audiences for his teaching plays. But the traveling caravan has yet to stop at Haneke's doorstep. If the people who sit through Funny Games are the ones who need it, then what of its creator?

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Funny Games

Written and directed by Michael Haneke

A Warner Independent release

 

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