Pseudo Review: Funny Games (U.S.)

Are you sick of people telling you that you’re too happy? Want to do something about it? Watch Funny Games and any feelings of wellness will be battered away with golf club like efficiency. This tale of an innocent family terrorized by two seemingly polite and well dressed young psychopaths is so depressing (how depressing is it) it makes the ending of The Mist seem like the ending to Rocky II. Suffice to say, Funny Games is quite, ironically, un-funny.

Typically I’m down for a good nihilistic flick. If a movie can’t be entertaining, it can at least be enthralling. The problem with Funny Games is that it was neither. It’s too bad because the set up is simple and effective and the movie boasts an excellent cast with performances to match. Naomi Watts, Timothy Roth and Devon Gearhart are superb as the family in peril and our villains are played to wicked perfection by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet (polite and well dressed on the outside, evil psychos on the inside). So what the heck went wrong?

My main gripe with the flick is that it’s too damn pretentious. I get what director Michael Haneke (remaking his own Austrian film for American audiences) is doing. He’s making a film about violence in society and violence as entertainment. We, the audience, are responsible for the carnage that happens to this family because we’re watching it. We love to watch but do we even care? Hey, I’m hip to what your saying, no reason to hit me over the head with it. But getting hit over the head is exactly what happens. In fact, I think the weapon I was bludgeoned with was the Art House Movies 101 text book. There are several 4th wall breaking moments that I feel take the viewer out of the movie and dull its impact, hence weakening the film’s message overall. There are several times when the villains talk directly to the audience (as if mocking us for not being able to turn away). I think the film would have been better served to have saved these scenes for the end of the film instead of peppered through out. Trust the audience enough to understand what the film is truly saying instead of forcing it down our throats. Haneke really should have studied the tag line to Last House on the Left; the audience is the one that needs to tell itself it’s only a movie, not the director.

I really think that if the movie had nixed some of the art house wankery, it would have been a much more powerful film and still conveyed the same message. The funny thing (no pun intended) is that at times the flick teetered on the edge of being powerfully brilliant but kept falling over in to “just plain depressing” and that gets boring pretty quick. I admit that this is a movie I may re-visit later on with a different perspective and perhaps end up with a different view on it. Like I said, there’s good stuff in here for sure, I just wasn’t in to the execution. The movie has spurred a lot of interesting debate (and a lot of “your opinion sucks” silliness) on internet message boards, so the movie definitely has had an impact on viewers. I do recommend giving the film a look, but your opinions will vary.