Sandwiched between the electrifying, envelope-pushing nihilism of Seven and Fight Club, The Game generally gets lumped alongside Panic Room as an example of what it looks like when David Fincher chooses to coast a little. Reviews at the time ranged from mildly respectful to kindly dismissive, with no critic really breaking a sweat on either end of the continuum. The esteemed Criterion Collection did release the film on laserdisc, just as that format was swan-diving into oblivion… but the company also released Armageddon around the same time, so I don’t know how seriously we can take that ostensible honor. My sense is that even The Game’s most ardent fans would concede that it’s at best a stylish, ingenious thriller, thoroughly entertaining, but fundamentally hollow. As opposed to, oh let’s just say for the sake of argument, one of the most emotionally devastating films they’ve ever seen, capable of reducing them to a sobbing, quivering wreck.
No, I’m not kidding.
What destroys me, to be more specific, is the ending, which is precisely the point where a lot of people wish they could somehow reach out and smack the film upside the head. The Game concentrates the entirety of its dramatic power into its climactic surprise twist, which functions simultaneously as world-class mindfuck and personal exorcism; the sticking point seems to be that said twist is completely ludicrous, as frustrated viewers’ futile (and misguided) attempts to suspend disbelief obscure the intended catharsis. There’s no way to tackle this movie in any depth without massive, ruinous spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it, best steer clear until you get hold of the DVD.
Speaking of which, it actually pained me to watch this gorgeous, magnificently directed film in standard-definition, non-anamorphic Defunct-O-Vision, which is the only way it’s been released on video in the U.S. (There were rumors of a Criterion Blu-ray a couple years back, but they’ve made no announcement to date.) Even if you find the story too ridiculous to swallow, there’s no denying the burnished elegance evident in every frame. Fincher brings uncommon vividness to even perfunctory transitional shots, like Michael Douglas’ luxury sedan cruising down moneyed San Francisco streets, and there are purely visual flourishes throughout that I’d happily pit against any favorite moment from his more celebrated pictures. When Douglas realizes where the camera in his mansion must be located, for example, Fincher (with editor James Haygood) gives us a chilling match cut from Douglas as seen on his TV set—stooping, badly distorted, toward the lens—to the reverse, “live” angle of his left shoulder dropping to reveal the clown doll and its mocking stare. That’s how you do a reveal.
Another possible stumbling block for some is Douglas’ deliberately cold, off-putting performance, though to my mind it ranks among the best work he’s ever done. In essence, The Game is a conversion tale, not unlike Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: selfish, nearly inhuman kazillionaire gets put through the wringer, finally emerges into society. Unlike your typical Scrooge, however, Douglas’ Nicholas Van Orton isn’t a miserly caricature, nor does he visibly soften over the course of the movie. He’s just kind of a standoffish prick, and Douglas commits wholeheartedly to the character’s unsympathetic nature, beautifully capturing fussy details like the way he stands at his kitchen’s prep table for breakfast, necktie flipped over one shoulder so it doesn’t get stained, politely ignoring the housekeeper (Carroll Baker!) who’s worked for him his entire life. And I love his initial interview at CRS, the company that runs the game, when he motions at the entire office and asks “What is this? What are you… selling?” That brief pause hits the perfect note of contempt mixed with grudging respect.
But let’s talk about the game itself. Douglas receives a gift card from his brother (Sean Penn), signs up with Consumer Recreation Services, takes their battery of invasive tests, is told his application has been rejected (a brilliant touch), and then nonetheless winds up in an involuntary mystery-adventure that turns increasingly dangerous and even deadly. There’s a beautiful woman (Deborah Kara Unger) who may or may not be an innocent bystander; various objects (key, door handle) he’ll need to make use of at unexpected moments; a hotel room reserved and trashed in his name. Penn shows up again mid-film in adenoidal hysterics, claiming CRS won’t leave him alone, either. Douglas inadvertently reveals the passwords to all his bank accounts, gets drugged by the femme fatale, awakens in a coffin in Mexico, embarks upon the usual revenge.
Up to this point, The Game is every bit the conventional, enjoyably absurd Hollywood entertainment everybody believes it to be. There’s one evocative scene early on, right after the game commences, in which Douglas walks through an airport terminal in slow motion, preternaturally aware of every person, doorway, and object within view, clearly wondering if they might be the next square on the board. And we get repeated references, starting with faded 8mm home-movie footage at the outset, to the suicide of Douglas’ father, though even these seem less like emotional backstory than like a generic challenge for the hero to overcome—“Dad might have given up, but I’ll make these fuckers pay!” Other than that, the screenplay, written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris (with a rumored, uncredited revision by Seven’s Andrew Kevin Walker), runs like a smoothly oiled plot machine, and as the now-ruined Douglas begs and bums his way home from Mexico, viewers happily wait for the inevitable moment when he’ll turn the tables.
Whereupon he accidentally kills his brother, discovers the game was really an elaborate invitation to his 48th birthday party, deliberately leaps to his death from the roof of the building, crashes through skylights, lands in a gigantic airbag, and discovers for the second time that the game was really an elaborate invitation to his 48th birthday party.
Now. First of all. Could CRS actually do anything remotely like this in the real world? Of course not. It’s absurd. And it’s deliberately absurd. Far and away the film’s best joke is a quick pan down the invitation, which specifies that the party will take place “somewhere between eight seventeen and eight thirty eight in the evening,” implying that CRS did the number-crunching days earlier, before the game even started, and determined that Douglas would throw himself off the building during a specific 21-minute window. On top of which—and I don’t think I recognized this at the time—CRS’ corporate logo is the Penrose Triangle, an “impossible object” that can be drawn but never constructed. (Yes, I know you can construct an apparent Penrose triangle, to be viewed from one angle only.) So it’s not as if the filmmakers think they’re snowing us. They know it’s make-believe.