Funny Games (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

Among the worst few hours I've ever spent in front of a TV set.

And that includes the time in 1957 my mother insisted I watch an episode of "As the World Turns."

Sitting through 2007's repellant, semi-comedic "Funny Games" is not so much a matter of viewing a visual experience for pleasure or enlightenment as it is trying not to get up and leave while the filmmaker lectures you on how to watch violent movies. Presumably, German-born writer-director Michael Haneke takes exception to the way people, especially Americans, glorify violence in the media, so in 1997 he made a violent, German-language film treatise on the subject called "Funny Games." Ten years later, for reasons of his own choosing (possibly involving money), he remade what I understand is virtually the same film in English, which we have here. I never saw the first one, but if it's anywhere near as unpleasant as this one, I must be better off.

The idea of "Funny Games" is that two psychopathic killers terrorize families they do not know, all the while stopping to address the audience on what they are seeing and how they should react to it. "Funny Games" is a low-budget thriller (with a big-name cast) that has an ostensibly intellectual bent, apparently aiming for what people used to call the art-house crowd. But a highbrow horror flick by any other name is still a lurid piece of business, this one made all the more offensive for its apparent higher aspirations.

OK, I'm sure Haneke meant at least a part of this thing as a joke--a dark, really dark, teasing comedy. Yet it's done so realistically most of the time (except when the actors break the wall separating their fantasy world from our actual one) that it's hard not to find it simply exploitative. Although the movie will no doubt leave some viewers talking about how thoughtful and insightful it is about our voyeuristic culture, it left me only more than ready to walk away early and never come back. If that is the kind of ambiguous reaction Haneke expected to evoke in his audience, I suppose he succeeded. I just wonder if he couldn't have accomplished his purpose in some other way. I mean, Oliver Stone already covered much this same territory in "Natural Born Killers" (1994) several years before Haneke's first film, and Stone did it with a lot more gleeful, gruesome panache.

"Funny Games" grinds on interminably as we watch a polite, soft-spoken, clean-cut pair of young monsters torment, torture, and murder people from house to house. The particular setting is an idyllic vacation home in an affluent bay-side community. Two maniacs, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), insinuate their way into the home of Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), and their ten-year-old son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and proceed to have their inevitable way with them.

That's it. That's the whole plot. For almost two hours the film subjects its audience to the needless cruelty the killers inflict upon their victims with golf clubs and shotguns. Meanwhile, Haneke demonstrates his mastery of film art by eliciting slick photography from his cinematographer, fine acting from his stars, and ironies at every corner.

My question is, Why?

Apparently, as I've said, it's Haneke's attempt not to interest his audience in the plot but to interest them in his thesis: that people become too wrapped up in the vicarious thrills of death and destruction they see in the media. I guess according to him it's why people stop to gawk at the scene of accidents or why they watch "reality" TV or tune in for the grisly details of murder cases on documentary channels. Accordingly, Heneke has his two murderers stop during the film, look at the camera, and speak directly to the viewer, asking them what they think of the goings on. He even has one of the characters stop and rewind the picture at one point to show how the media can alter and manipulate our perceptions.

To reinforce the ironies of life--people saying they deplore violence while reveling in it second-hand--Haneke gives us villains who are the epitome of sweetness and light, dressed in white polo shirts and white gloves, with the names Peter and Paul to further emphasize their angelic sainthood. We get opera-loving heroes to symbolize their civilized behavior, and hard-metal-rock-loving baddies to symbolize their evil. It's all pretty blatant.