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Mar
14
2008

Canfield Talks Funny Games US

Posted by Canfield at 10:49am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews .

I present to you one of the braver choices a filmmaker has made in recent memory and a film that, while far from commercial- I don’t think this will make a dime- is more urgent than a hundred other recent “thoughtful” horror films. Director Michael Haneke understands not only that we are being played with by those who promise safety and security that isn’t theirs to give but that those who threaten that security look an awful lot like us and our children. 

Michael Hanekes English remake of Funny Games marks the latest in a series of recent horror releases that just may spell a significant upswing in quality for the American Horror Film. Fans of international horror cinema will tell you (and they are probably right) that there hasn’t been a significant quality dip worldwide but the remake of all those Japanese and Thai films (see Shutter, The Eye, etc., etc. ad nausea) bad recutting/dubbing of French efforts ala’ Haute Tension, and the constant sins of Hollywood against its own horror history through stultifying remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, Halloween, When A Stranger Calls, The Amityville Horror and countless others has meant slim pickings stateside unless you’re willing to dip into the notoriously unreliable direct to video pool. But if all Funny Games the remake were was a solidly done remake it would hardly qualify for inclusion with other well above average recent horror efforts like, Cloverfield, The Signal, and Diary of the Dead

Instead Haneke has gone back to the story with an English cast specifically to address the film’s intended audience, an audience that increasingly embraced violent movies for the visceral thrills they provide while ignoring the larger contexts, themes and ideas that make some of those movies worth watching more than once. Critics will argue back and forth over whether Haneke has done anything to improve the film but the plain truth is, even though this film is a virtually shot for shot remake of the original it is still one of the most relevant films of the last decade in the way it addresses film violence.

The story centers on an average upper middle class family whose gated vacation home seems like the safest place on earth. Together with the family pet they arrive expecting a quiet idyll only to find themselves at the mercy of two upper middle class teen sociopaths who may or may not be idling around the lake killing families just like themselves. The more the hostage family tries to placate them the farther the two spoiled thugs take things making it clear they have no intention of the family getting out of this alive though they do plan to play plenty of ‘funny games’.. And through it all, the killers take opportunities to speak directly to us the audience looking into the camera , breaking the so called fourth wall and even waiting a bit so that we can process what has just happened.

Just as Diary of the Dead recently observed that we don’t slow down at car accidents so that we can help the victims, but only so that we can look, Funny Games offers us a tragedy to look at with the understanding that a price of some type may be exacted. Do we have any relation to anyone in this story above and beyond our desire to be entertained according to the rules of the genre? It is a question that is so pertinent to our culture and our time in the US that I can only applaud Haneke for having the guts to make this film instead of capitalizing on the critical mass praise for Cache by going more commercial. This is an artist who has earned the right to help us continue this important discussion not just about film violence but what our obsession with it is really all about.  What draws us in? What keeps us there?

I’ll readily admit the film doesn’t go much deeper than that because that’s the point. Most viewers aren’t ready to go any deeper because most viewers aren’t thinking much in the first place. The amazing thing about Haneke is he’s managed to make a gripping suspense film with a foregone conclusion. Like the person who slows down at the accident knowing that they will see (or are hoping to see) blood, hair, bones, teeth, brains, etc. we are captivated but do no personal inventory, we are on no of the moment moral journey, we are existentially static. It is as if our car, our conscience, has crashed and we are staring at our own humanity dead and bleeding on the pavement struck dumb by our complicity in our own permanently arrested development. In Haneke’s universe it is not the extremist idealogically motivated terrorist who may sneak into our city that we should fear the most but the perfect stranger with no motive at all.

I can almost hear Haneke chuckling about how quickly most viewers miss the point when they say the characters and situations are all stock. Of course the characters are no more unimaginative than any of us. Far from being faceless clones lifted from other films Haneke’s young thugs show the masquerade of polite society is not in the effort we make to be polite but in the belief that that effort is a sufficient antidote for evil. School shootings? Suburban gangs and rampant drug use? One out of four teens carrying around STDs? The problems of our failure to pass morality and civility to our proceeding generations is indeed so huge as to be best represented by facelessness.

Evil shocks by its very banality, Hanekes refusal to make the evil in Funny Games submit to reason or genre conventions right at the moment when the story would seem to demand it is incredibly insightful. The same can be said about the goodness of the victims in this story. They are not victims for any reason whatsoever. Neither are they especially enobled by their suffering. This is the thing Haneke wrestles with, the thing we wrestle with. People suffer everyday and we cannot see the reason. Yet we wonder at the violation of something good by what is clearly evil. The two modes exist and demand contemplation. But that’s something we don’t do anymore in American genre cinema or at least something people like Eli Roth and Adam Green and others who make bad horror movies don’t do well. I’d rather watch this a hundred times than Saw IV, Hatchet II, Hostel III or any of the other dreadful horrors guaranteed to come out in the next year.

And I would say something else to the critics of this film. Every single one of you that I’ve spoken to has roundly praised the performances of the film. What you mean by that I can’t say since you dismiss the film as hack work, slumming by an otherwise gifted social critic and storyteller. Perhaps you mean you were momentarily moved. My argument is we all need to examine why it takes so much to move us. Michael Hanekes Funny Games US moves me because entirely similar events take place in real life everyday with no regard for entertaining anyone, or satisfying the ‘convention expectations’ of anyone except those who perpetrate funny games on the innocent.

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Reader Comments

  1. aphanisis 03/14/2008 @ 11:54am

    very well written.  i saw a screening at sundance - the film became the spine in our spectrum of critique out of the 20-odd films my friends and i viewed.  the film is brilliant.  i haven’t been urged(bullied) into feeling the way that film made me fell in a LONG time, if ever.  and i understand what a close debate this is; when critics have hated on it, i kinda understand, but they should also equally try to understand why people are compelled by Heneke’s slap-your-face subtext achievement. 

    i think it’s more simple to break down the yay & nay camps as such:
    some audiences don’t like being teased, taunted, or fucked with - aka nearly half the people in said screening left within the first half hour (hell, some even left when the batshit crazy metal song blared up with the main title!)...Their idea of a great film could very well be “the bucket list”.  so, it’s almost as if their vote doesn’t count. 

    they are missing the point, and if they miss it, how can they comment on it???????

    i hate to draw a line in the sand (Canfield -it’s great your article commented on those who apparently detest the film yet praise the acting - i’ve heard much of this).  Simply, i think there are people out the who don’t know how to watch a film like this.  never had the eyes for it.....their loss.  important film.

  2. Kurt Halfyard 03/14/2008 @ 12:03pm

    Bravo Canfield. 

    I’ve not had a chance to actually catch the remake yet (soon).  I think you have hit some of the niggling that gets under some people skin with the construction of this film.

    I have no idea why I’m looking forward to see a film of masochistic intent that is a remake of the same film I’ve seen several times before, only in English.  But I absolutely am.  I’m probably Biased going in.

  3. guitarbrother 03/14/2008 @ 9:29pm

    It’s like critics are getting upset (which is what Haneke wanted, it’s not like he intended to make people happy) and lashing out at him like it was a mistake.  Truth is, if you look at most of the films in the imdb top 250 or any critics list they have killing in them.  As a society we not only want it, we need it.  If the film industry did away with onscreen murder no one would see hardly films anymore, me included.  So why is Haneke not allowed to observe this?  I think it’s a pretty valid point and it definitely makes one think.  But unfortunately I think people hate anything that doesn’t validate their already established opinions.  It’s like when I saw Re-Cycle with an audience, and there is a moment when the filmmakers make an opinion that obviously didn’t fair well with the majority of the audience, and people around me actually got upset.  Isn’t one of the reasons we view cinema is to hear other people’s opinions and views, and not just to have our own validated? 
    Anyway, great critique.  I have a feeling that no matter how much critics bash this one, much like the original, people will still be watching it for a long, long time.  Plus, I know everyone calls this a thesis rather than a story, but I and everyone I know were completely engrossed with the story and liked the characters very much.  I thought it worked as a film as well.

  4. guitarbrother 03/14/2008 @ 9:36pm

    Sorry, wanted to add one more point that I think is why this works well as an American film.  I think in North America more than anywhere else we watch ritualized violence.  That is, where the bad guy does awful things and kills folks around him/her and then good guy kills them.  We watch this again and again under different titles, with different actors and different set pieces, but it’s the same ritual we need repeated.  That’s why a lot of time in another form of entertainment, like comics, the bad guys are seldom killed, but in the adaptations they almost always need to die.  I think Haneke, whether it’s viewed as judgemental or not, is not just forcing the viewer to wallow in filth like a dog that’s made a mess on the carpet, which some critics would have you believe, but asking you to think about violence in cinema and what it actually means to us.  Sorry once again for the long rant, but even though I knew critics were going to bash this to hell, it’s still a little upsetting just how much they’re attacking it.

  5. Kurt Halfyard 03/14/2008 @ 9:52pm

    What a great double bill Funny Games US would be with Doomsday.  It’d be like back in 2004 and hopping from a multiplex screening of The Passion of the Christ to Kill Bill…

  6. goweftus 03/16/2008 @ 7:48pm

    I saw this film last night, having seen the original.  My only regret is that most of the people who need to see this film will not see it, and most of the people who do see this film will not think about it.  Haneke is preaching to the converted, but that is always the fate of serious artists who refuse to compromise a vision which is out-of-step with social norms.  This is a brilliant, serious, deep film, supported by deeply-felt and moving performances.  I don’t believe there is “a message” to this film—it’s bigger than that.  There are as many messages as there are thoughtful people to watch it.  There will be common threads in the thoughts of these viewers, having to do with why the film is so riveting, why the urge to look away is overcome by the urge to look, why images, thoughts, and feelings from the film stay with us so strongly after the film is over.  I applaud Michael Haneke and the entire cast and crew (and especially Naomi Watts) for giving this to us.  I will be thinking about it for a long time, and seeing it again.

  7. Kurt Halfyard 03/18/2008 @ 8:27pm

    While Canfield says things quite brilliantly above, I figured I’ll just link along to a previous Podcast conversation recorded with other film-bloggers in regards to the 1997 version:

    The Twitch/FilmJunk/RowThree/MoviePatron “Movie Club” podcast on the 1997 Funny Games (recorded January 2008) is here for those interested in digging deeper into the film (*with lots of spoilers*):

    http://movieclubpodcast.blogspot.com/2008/01/movie-club-4-lady-in-water-and-funny.html

    and here is 15 minutes of podcast (*again, spoilers*) on the US Version:

    http://www.rowthree.com/2008/03/18/cinecast-81-unholy-levels-of-brilliance/

  8. goweftus 03/19/2008 @ 7:15am

    While I didn’t expect this film to do well in the American market (understatement of the year) and I knew a lot of critics would hate it, I wasn’t quite prepared for the critical trashing it’s had (with a few exceptions, like here on Twitch).  The worst piece of dreck passing for a review of this film can be seen here

    http://www.observer.com/2008/watts-naomi-beauty-frumps-fright-flick

    where the inimitable Rex Reed gives us his usual ignorant and self-indulgent performance.  My comment can be seen toward the bottom under byline Terry King.  Any other notable reviews, one way or the other?  Once again, kudos to Canfield.

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