Scan and Pan
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Funny Games
A wealthy married couple (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts) and their young son (Devon Gearhart) arrive at their lake house for a vacation. Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), two charming young men who initially appear with one of the couple's neighbors, take the family hostage, treating it as a game and betting the family that they won't be alive when the next morning arrives.
Writer/director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) remakes his own earlier production of the same name, but to lesser effect. What seemed daring eleven years ago now seems merely shallow and pretentious, especially when moved to an American setting. Haneke thinks he's being far more clever than he actually is, and the whiff of authorial smugness wafting from the screen is somehow appropriate for a film that offers up such leaden satire.
The subtext about audience enjoyment of cinematic violence has been better explored by a film like The Devil's Rejects, which I find far more subversive than the original Funny Games or this remake. There's such a chasm of emotional detachment in Funny Games that one simply cannot connect with it. If Haneke wants to make us uncomfortable accomplices to torture and murder, then he needs to make us enjoy it and then he needs to make us feel uncomfortable about enjoying it. Boring us, as he does here, defeats his own purpose.
The talents of a gifted cinematographer like Darius Khondji (The City of Lost Children, Se7en) are wasted on a production that the director wants lit in such a flat manner. Production designer Kevin Thompson (Stranger Than Fiction, Michael Clayton) perfectly realizes the bourgeois lifestyle of the family.
The cast is the film's only strong point. Pitt and Corbet perfectly capture the banality of evil in a chilling fashion as a latter day Leopold and Loeb. The performances of the actors playing the family are also quite good: Roth plays against type as the helpless father, Watts is compelling as the traumatized but defiant mother, and Gearhart is believable as the terrified child.
The real torture in Funny Games is that which is visited upon the audience by a filmmaker more intent on wagging his finger in our faces than on telling a compelling story or even making us feel something.
[1.5 out of 5 stars]
A pretentious exercise in satire that has no apparent reason to exist, seeing as how it's a scene-for-scene remake of a 1997 film from Austria by the same filmmaker.
A wealthy married couple (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts) and their young son (Devon Gearhart) arrive at their lake house for a vacation. Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), two charming young men who initially appear with one of the couple's neighbors, take the family hostage, treating it as a game and betting the family that they won't be alive when the next morning arrives.
Writer/director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) remakes his own earlier production of the same name, but to lesser effect. What seemed daring eleven years ago now seems merely shallow and pretentious, especially when moved to an American setting. Haneke thinks he's being far more clever than he actually is, and the whiff of authorial smugness wafting from the screen is somehow appropriate for a film that offers up such leaden satire.
The subtext about audience enjoyment of cinematic violence has been better explored by a film like The Devil's Rejects, which I find far more subversive than the original Funny Games or this remake. There's such a chasm of emotional detachment in Funny Games that one simply cannot connect with it. If Haneke wants to make us uncomfortable accomplices to torture and murder, then he needs to make us enjoy it and then he needs to make us feel uncomfortable about enjoying it. Boring us, as he does here, defeats his own purpose.
The talents of a gifted cinematographer like Darius Khondji (The City of Lost Children, Se7en) are wasted on a production that the director wants lit in such a flat manner. Production designer Kevin Thompson (Stranger Than Fiction, Michael Clayton) perfectly realizes the bourgeois lifestyle of the family.
The cast is the film's only strong point. Pitt and Corbet perfectly capture the banality of evil in a chilling fashion as a latter day Leopold and Loeb. The performances of the actors playing the family are also quite good: Roth plays against type as the helpless father, Watts is compelling as the traumatized but defiant mother, and Gearhart is believable as the terrified child.
The real torture in Funny Games is that which is visited upon the audience by a filmmaker more intent on wagging his finger in our faces than on telling a compelling story or even making us feel something.
[1.5 out of 5 stars]
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