Funny Games
Directed by Michael Haneke
Slasher movie fans exhibit better taste and higher standards when they scream or cheer at horror fare than Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke does. By transferring the setting of his 1997 film Funny Games to the United States, Haneke makes a tasteless and revolting miscalculation.
It’s the story of a well-to-do nuclear family, George (Tim Roth), Anna (Naomi Watts) and their 10-year-old son, George Jr. (Devon Gearhart), who are besieged in their lakeside summer home by two blond, gay serial killers, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet)—and it's conceived to raise hackles. As art, it's Haneke’s comment on the inevitable (or deserved) violence in upper-class life. As entertainment, its scenes of the family’s dehumanization come to a literal dead-end. Haneke confirms he is a Eurotrash art fraud.
It is this new American context that vitiates any family or class critique Haneke intended to make. The obscenity of what happens to George, Anna and their son goes far beyond political rhetoric or moral satisfaction. Although derived from the siege situations memorably played out in The Desperate Hours, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, or John Brahms’ agreeably hokey 1967 feature Hot Rods to Hell, Haneke’s film refuses the cathartic release of those earlier movies. The particular greatness of Straw Dogs was in Peckinpah exercising recognizable social tensions surrounding sex, imperialism and machismo. Straw Dogs triggered the American appetite for justice or kick-ass resolution and then—masterfully—scrutinized it. Only people without Peckinpah memories will buy Haneke’s specious claim to modern sophistication.
When the psychotic Paul occasionally looks into the camera and addresses the audience—as if asking its permission to continue his malicious assault—the postmodern routine doesn’t work as a critique of bloodlust. It’s just deconstructionism for art-house pseuds. The spectacle of watching a family pointlessly violated (George is wounded, Anna is forced to strip, the son is suffocated—and that’s only the midpoint) is a sadistic endeavor that says nothing about Western cultural habits. It’s merely Haneke’s twisted idea of art. Imagine Neil LaBute with film craft—yet that still doesn’t justify Funny Games.
From the first tense, deliberate shots of a car pulling a boat along a tree-lined highway seen overhead (like De Palma? Kubrick? O.J.?), it’s clear that things will not turn out well. We’re being set up for some kind of portentous massacre. If Haneke was the genius social critic he’s been celebrated as, this remake would have been re-titled as “Fun and Games”—wittily mocking his own misanthropy. But the dreadfully unfunny events Haneke indulges don’t even relate to Socialist schadenfraude. Haneke’s previous film, Cache, an exploitation of media naiveté and French racism, was typically hailed for “Scrape[ing] away at the surface of polite European affluence to lay bare the moral rot beneath.” But that hoary cliché ignores Haneke’s offensive methods, which brings us back to the matter of his arty Eurotrash techniques.
Restaging Funny Games in America reveals the snobbery in Haneke’s thinking. He tries to subvert the film-going niceties of identifiable characters and traditional morality—standards that today’s critics perversely denounce in favor of frankly unwatchable films. Here, Haneke even employs the help of American indie director Lodge Kerrigan whose deadened style (Clean, Shaven; Claire Dolan) lacks the energy of Saw, Hostel or even Last House on the Left—vulgar entertainments that facilitate catharsis.
Suppressing the audience’s emotional outlet is an illegitimate tactic that Haneke links to his specious artistic purpose. When Anna cries out, “Why don’t you just kill us?” Paul answers, “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” Paul’s shallow irony is Haneke’s odious attempt at cultural commentary. It goes against the grindhouse reflex. If you’ve lost the confidence to reject Haneke’s highbrow European sadism, you’re left to endure a repellent relay of atrocities: The father fumbles with a dead cell phone. Anna briefly runs off but finds no help. George, Jr. momentarily escapes only to wander to an unfamiliar estate; then he to defend himself with an unloaded shotgun. Instead of pulling a rug from under your expectations, Haneke continuously slams a door in your face.
Haneke’s cruelest, chicest ploy comes when Paul taunts Anna to pray. She doesn’t know how, but the serial killer does; rigging her in a pathetic, supplicating position so that Haneke can dare a God-is-dead provocation. This hopeless message is now fashionable among the movie-culture elite. That explains the critics’ dismissal of Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, which explored human connection and the nature of vengeance in the post-9/11, post-feminist world. It’s also why the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is willfully trivialized as a horror-comedy; critics misinterpret the ending as nihilistic, deliberately overlooking the spiritual hope expressed in Tommy Lee Jones’ wry concluding dream. Paul’s demand that Anna and George gamble on their fate recalls the Coens’ superior moment when Kelly Mcdonald rejects Anton Chigurh’s wager as phony existentialism. Haneke’s two-hour gambit is similarly perverse.
Even the actors are sickening. Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet’s smiling creeps seem spawned from their previous repugnant movies Bully and Mysterious Skin—still blurring the line between gay and homicidal. Young Gearhart’s abused trembling is unsettling to watch. Tim Roth and Naomi Watts prove their skill by vivifying their characters’ limited emotional scale (the shocking range between distraught and terrified). Watts’ participation as the film’s producer is especially troubling. Cultural critic Richard Torres cited political bias in the non-American family and American killers casting; it suggests political reasons why Watts would commit herself to a project no more serious than The Ring even more repulsive. But we also need to question a culture that encourages such degradation.
What was the purpose of Haneke doing his own shot-by-shot remake? A genuine artist would rethink his material (like John Ford developing Judge Priest into The Sun Shines Bright), but Haneke polishes the same old crap: blond Nazi boys in white gloves and tennis shorts. Emphasis on the banality of TV noise. Off-screen violence with hyped-up sound effects. And a repeat of the much-discussed remote-control effect where Paul rewinds then replays the film itself, apparently to ensure viewers the degradation Haneke thinks they desire. There’s no outwitting the villain, no restoration of social order. In toto: It’s the ugliest movie experience since Twentynine Palms—another misjudged, American-set Euro-debauch. The only ambiguity in Funny Games lies in who’s most abused here, the characters or the audience?
Directed by Michael Haneke
Slasher movie fans exhibit better taste and higher standards when they scream or cheer at horror fare than Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke does. By transferring the setting of his 1997 film Funny Games to the United States, Haneke makes a tasteless and revolting miscalculation.
It’s the story of a well-to-do nuclear family, George (Tim Roth), Anna (Naomi Watts) and their 10-year-old son, George Jr. (Devon Gearhart), who are besieged in their lakeside summer home by two blond, gay serial killers, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet)—and it's conceived to raise hackles. As art, it's Haneke’s comment on the inevitable (or deserved) violence in upper-class life. As entertainment, its scenes of the family’s dehumanization come to a literal dead-end. Haneke confirms he is a Eurotrash art fraud.
It is this new American context that vitiates any family or class critique Haneke intended to make. The obscenity of what happens to George, Anna and their son goes far beyond political rhetoric or moral satisfaction. Although derived from the siege situations memorably played out in The Desperate Hours, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, or John Brahms’ agreeably hokey 1967 feature Hot Rods to Hell, Haneke’s film refuses the cathartic release of those earlier movies. The particular greatness of Straw Dogs was in Peckinpah exercising recognizable social tensions surrounding sex, imperialism and machismo. Straw Dogs triggered the American appetite for justice or kick-ass resolution and then—masterfully—scrutinized it. Only people without Peckinpah memories will buy Haneke’s specious claim to modern sophistication.
When the psychotic Paul occasionally looks into the camera and addresses the audience—as if asking its permission to continue his malicious assault—the postmodern routine doesn’t work as a critique of bloodlust. It’s just deconstructionism for art-house pseuds. The spectacle of watching a family pointlessly violated (George is wounded, Anna is forced to strip, the son is suffocated—and that’s only the midpoint) is a sadistic endeavor that says nothing about Western cultural habits. It’s merely Haneke’s twisted idea of art. Imagine Neil LaBute with film craft—yet that still doesn’t justify Funny Games.
From the first tense, deliberate shots of a car pulling a boat along a tree-lined highway seen overhead (like De Palma? Kubrick? O.J.?), it’s clear that things will not turn out well. We’re being set up for some kind of portentous massacre. If Haneke was the genius social critic he’s been celebrated as, this remake would have been re-titled as “Fun and Games”—wittily mocking his own misanthropy. But the dreadfully unfunny events Haneke indulges don’t even relate to Socialist schadenfraude. Haneke’s previous film, Cache, an exploitation of media naiveté and French racism, was typically hailed for “Scrape[ing] away at the surface of polite European affluence to lay bare the moral rot beneath.” But that hoary cliché ignores Haneke’s offensive methods, which brings us back to the matter of his arty Eurotrash techniques.
Restaging Funny Games in America reveals the snobbery in Haneke’s thinking. He tries to subvert the film-going niceties of identifiable characters and traditional morality—standards that today’s critics perversely denounce in favor of frankly unwatchable films. Here, Haneke even employs the help of American indie director Lodge Kerrigan whose deadened style (Clean, Shaven; Claire Dolan) lacks the energy of Saw, Hostel or even Last House on the Left—vulgar entertainments that facilitate catharsis.
Suppressing the audience’s emotional outlet is an illegitimate tactic that Haneke links to his specious artistic purpose. When Anna cries out, “Why don’t you just kill us?” Paul answers, “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” Paul’s shallow irony is Haneke’s odious attempt at cultural commentary. It goes against the grindhouse reflex. If you’ve lost the confidence to reject Haneke’s highbrow European sadism, you’re left to endure a repellent relay of atrocities: The father fumbles with a dead cell phone. Anna briefly runs off but finds no help. George, Jr. momentarily escapes only to wander to an unfamiliar estate; then he to defend himself with an unloaded shotgun. Instead of pulling a rug from under your expectations, Haneke continuously slams a door in your face.
Haneke’s cruelest, chicest ploy comes when Paul taunts Anna to pray. She doesn’t know how, but the serial killer does; rigging her in a pathetic, supplicating position so that Haneke can dare a God-is-dead provocation. This hopeless message is now fashionable among the movie-culture elite. That explains the critics’ dismissal of Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, which explored human connection and the nature of vengeance in the post-9/11, post-feminist world. It’s also why the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is willfully trivialized as a horror-comedy; critics misinterpret the ending as nihilistic, deliberately overlooking the spiritual hope expressed in Tommy Lee Jones’ wry concluding dream. Paul’s demand that Anna and George gamble on their fate recalls the Coens’ superior moment when Kelly Mcdonald rejects Anton Chigurh’s wager as phony existentialism. Haneke’s two-hour gambit is similarly perverse.
Even the actors are sickening. Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet’s smiling creeps seem spawned from their previous repugnant movies Bully and Mysterious Skin—still blurring the line between gay and homicidal. Young Gearhart’s abused trembling is unsettling to watch. Tim Roth and Naomi Watts prove their skill by vivifying their characters’ limited emotional scale (the shocking range between distraught and terrified). Watts’ participation as the film’s producer is especially troubling. Cultural critic Richard Torres cited political bias in the non-American family and American killers casting; it suggests political reasons why Watts would commit herself to a project no more serious than The Ring even more repulsive. But we also need to question a culture that encourages such degradation.
What was the purpose of Haneke doing his own shot-by-shot remake? A genuine artist would rethink his material (like John Ford developing Judge Priest into The Sun Shines Bright), but Haneke polishes the same old crap: blond Nazi boys in white gloves and tennis shorts. Emphasis on the banality of TV noise. Off-screen violence with hyped-up sound effects. And a repeat of the much-discussed remote-control effect where Paul rewinds then replays the film itself, apparently to ensure viewers the degradation Haneke thinks they desire. There’s no outwitting the villain, no restoration of social order. In toto: It’s the ugliest movie experience since Twentynine Palms—another misjudged, American-set Euro-debauch. The only ambiguity in Funny Games lies in who’s most abused here, the characters or the audience?
anonymous
