"Revolting" isn't a term I apply to a film lightly, and though Michael Haneke's Funny Games in some sense begs for the label, I refuse to give him the satisfaction. Haneke intends his movie, a remake of his own 1997 German-language feature, as an indictment of cinematic violence and by extension his audience; the images of wanton, senseless barbarity he bombards us with over the course of two hours are designed not to titillate but horrify, and in some sense, castigate. This approach can succeed, and I invite anyone who believes otherwise to consider Sam Peckinpah's soul-killing Straw Dogs an emphatic rejoinder. Yet while Funny Games is "shocking" in the sense that any film that involves nasty things being visited on undeserving, unsuspecting people for no apparent reason is shocking - it reminds me of George Lucas' quip that if he wanted to reach his audience emotionally he would wring a kitten's neck on-screen - it is difficult to discern why we should consider Haneke's movie exempt from its own implicit critique. Consider his cherubic torturers, Peter (Brady Corbett) and Paul (Michael Pitt), each lifted from the same Mephistophelean sketch pad as A Clockwork Orange's Alex; the increasingly obnoxious acknowledgments of the audience; and the arbitrary and capricious nature of the "games" that give the movie its title: each of these represents a building block in a film destined to find its cult among sniggering post-adolescents who, to their credit, know that a movie is a movie is a movie, no matter how severely smug and condescending.
Funny Games, though brutal, isn't a bad movie, necessarily. Once I set aside the idea that I was supposed to be learning some kind of lesson about what a bad person I am, I found the film to be an effective thriller, expertly leavening the tension with spasmodic episodes of violence. The premise is simple enough: two boys, late teens to early twenties, hold a young family hostage at their lakeside retreat, and bet them that they won't be alive by 9:00 A.M. the following morning. Sadism ensues; to go any farther would both spoil the movie and be irrelevant. Should you want to see Naomi Watts and Tim Roth physically and psychologically brutalized for two hours, but consider Hostel too graphic and The Strangers too juvenile, Funny Games is the movie for you, the discerning torture porn connoisseur. Yet if you do see the film, please, please, please don't surrender to Haneke's browbeating and feel bad about yourself: after all, I'm pretty sure that all involved were compensated for their participation and suffered no actual injury because of it. Even the dog.
