Last week, I told you about the best film of 2008. Today, I'll tell you about the worst.
This particular stinker has the distiction of being on several critics' year-end Best Of lists (including both Adam and Matty from my beloved Filmspotting) and of earning a score of zero on the Metacritic score from the honorable A.O. Scott of the New York Times, thereby placing it in the ranks of the worst of all time. The film is cloaked as a high-brow commentary, meant to inspire dialogue strumming up the brilliance of its writer/director. It is also a shot-by-shot remake of the German original from 10 years ago, translated to English so that the original target audience can experience the message without subtitles. And it is a huge failure. The film is Funny Games.
A film isn’t brilliant because it tells viewers that it’s brilliant. Audiences should not allow a filmmaker to convince them that a film is masterful, that it’s meant to challenge them and the conventions of Hollywood by playing with their emotions and viewpoints on violence. Writer/director Michael Haneke is a talented filmmaker, but it's excruciating to see worthy issues of cinema and audience preconceptions invalidated by patronizing.
A startling creepiness factor is noticeably present in the film's opening half hour or so, in which two young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet), dressed in white complete with white gloves, terrorize a wealthy family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Devon Gearhart) at their lakeside vacation home. But when the violence begins, the audience is in for a forced lesson so telling in style that it robs itself of any legitimacy.
Haneke plays with suspense-film standards that audiences have come to accept. Instead of graphic scenes of violence, all such scenes take place off camera and are replaced with long, close-up reactionary shots of the survivors; Pitt's character talks directly to the audience multiple times, ironically checking in on their natural responses; A scene runs beyond its tolerable length, thereby drawing attention to itself; When the payoff of good defeating evil occurs, a scene so satisfying that the audience is nearly salivating for it, Haneke provides that gratification and then immediately erases it. Haneke has been banking on the audience's thirst for justice from the first scene of discomfort, and though the message is effective, it is immediately lost in the filmmaker's out-of-control ego.
All of Haneke's devices are noteworthy in theory, but his execution is beyond heavyhanded. Contrastingly, Stanley Kubrick (with the help of Anthony Burgess' novel) achieves true brilliance with his handling of ultra-violence in A Clockwork Orange. In that film, the institutional dismantling of protagonist Alex's sadistic past through prolonged exposure to drugs and that very same ultra-violence pulls the audience along through the treatment. These scenes are intense and difficult, but the film up to that point has meticulously prepared the audience for such a redemption by fire. Kubrick is inviting the audience, after enduring some of the most brutal scenes they've ever seen, to decide whether the transformation is effective. Based on the resulting heartbreak of the rehabilitated Alex, the film stands a giant success without being preachy. In Funny Games, the audience is given no such freedom, leaving to question whether Haneke respects his viewers' intelligence at all.
Additionally, instead of an intelligent meditation on film audiences' perception of violence and thrillers, the brutal, pointless cruelty evoked by the torturers is the primary message to shine through. Haneke is working with the above brand of terror that rivals that of The Dark Knight, yet he fails to provide any accompanying thought or escapism. This is full-throttle malice with no parachute, and though such safe refuge is not required in film (see The Bicycle Thief or most classic European cinema), Haneke's approach comes off as pointlessly damaging. Combined with the filmmaker's overstated contrivances, the film overall provides nothing other than frustration.
There is an authentic feeling of wasted time and empty manipulation felt at the conclusion of Funny Games, and that gut reaction is what the film deserves. The abundant cruelty, however depicted, is the film's legacy along with the ever-present strings of a puppetteer. The tools for brilliance are there, but Haneke is just too damn smart to make the film work.