“Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film, and anybody who stays does.” — Michael Haneke, on his previous version of Funny Games.



The new Hollywood edition of Funny Games, writer-director Michael Haneke’s clinical re-enactment of his Austrian torture-comedy experiment from 10 years ago, is an attempt to replicate the earlier study under English-language conditions.



You (the lab rat) are placed in a Skinner box (the movie theater) and subjected to random negative stimuli (filmed violence as a substitute for painful electrical jolts). Haneke, whose academic background is in psychology, philosophy and theater, assumes the role of empirical taskmaster. He hypothesizes that his box will shock you into a knee-jerk ethical dilemma. To pass the test, you must reject the false premise of the experiment itself (if only on the grounds of insufferable smugness) and walk out of it.



An even better response, theoretically, would be to storm the booth and rip the film out of the projector, thus symbolically declaring your refusal to swallow the force-fed medicinal doses of synthesized abuse the film is administering. And if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just NOT SEE THE MOVIE. God bless the rat who doesn’t take the bait.



The game’s narrative parameters are as follows: A dubiously American bourgeois family — Ann (Naomi Watts), George (Tim Roth), their pre-teen son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their golden retriever — arrive at their vacation home on Long Island. They are upper-class ciphers who stock soy milk in the refrigerator, feed their dog expensive Wellness brand kibble, and keep a Tivoli radio in the kitchen. The attention paid to the details of their conspicuous consumption may or may not express the film’s attitude: that these cardboard caricatures somehow deserve to be humiliated, tormented and killed for exhibiting Euro-centric yuppie tastes, including implicitly sinful predilections for golf, boating and classical music. Or maybe the movie is simply suggesting that you give yourself permission to feel that way.



Two symbolic young men, Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), show up at the screen door, dressed in shorts, canvas shoes, white sweaters and white gloves. They proceed, politely and methodically, to terrorize, torture and murder their hostages, offering a rigged “bet” in the guise of “entertainment” on behalf of the film that all family members will be dead by a certain hour. There is no reason to anticipate any other outcome. Meanwhile, the victims are bludgeoned into submission and despair. The torturers are blandly passive-aggressive and genteel, their motiveless actions appearing alternately logical and irrational, inexorable and impulsive, sincere and disingenuous, cruel and — even more cruelly — kind. The running time is 1 hour and 52 minutes.



As an academic exercise in learned helplessness, the film flaunts the ultimate power to rewrite its own “rules” whenever it likes, including taking back anything that has already been shown. A movie with no restrictions holds no real suspense and no surprises, so any revelation of plot details in, say, a review, is meaningless. In fact, it’s just another component in the funny games being played on- and off-screen.



Haneke (whose masterworks include Code Unknown and Cache) explains that his distinctively European film is “a reaction to ... the way American cinema toys with human beings ... (so that) violence is made consumable.” This is indisputably true, and it’s what Funny Games sets out to do, but Haneke’s critical essay fails because he hasn’t a clue about what makes American movies tick. Funny Games doesn’t seduce you with conventional storytelling and character development and then turn them around on you — like, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Psycho, or Brian De Palma’s notorious Hi, Mom! Instead, as the press kit so tantalizingly explains, it encourages its viewers “to see their own role through a series of emotional and analytical episodes.” In other words, this isn’t a movie; it’s a thesis.

Funny Games

1/2 Star

Stars: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt

Director: Michael Haneke

Rated: R for terror, violence and some language

Theaters: Regal Martin Village 16