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- Verified Buyer
There are films that are just plain nasty, like almost anything involving Quentin Tarantino. And there are films that are just plain perfect of their kind. And there are films that are just nasty enough to be genuinely disturbing, yet perfect of their kind. 'House of Games' is in this category for me, and I put it loosely in the same shoebox with 'The Usual Suspects' despite enormous differences of style and tone.House of Games is a terrific exploration of deception, detachment, and control in human interaction. What's the difference between a clinical psychologist who's a best selling self-help author, and a professional con artist? Not much, apparently. This film would be less disturbing if I were able to disagree more with this basic premise :-)The con artist and the psychologist both stand at a distance from their "patients" and analyze them; both watch for the "tell," the giveaway, the crack through which they gain an advantage and peer into the other person's secrets. Both have an agenda; the con artist is going to let you hang yourself by giving you a nice bit of silken rope, and the psychiatrist is going to "help" you, or at least pretend to help you, find peace or resolution. Both are guiding, nudging, pushing, tricking their "client" along, with deliberation, towards a goal. Both trade on the confessional urge in people, the need for connection, the hunger for sympathy. Both make their living off the unhappy, the desperate, the lonely -- and a good living it is, too.There is so much going on in this film that I felt rather tired after watching it. There's the truism that psychiatrists are seldom very healthy people themselves -- it takes a rather cold and calculating personality to survive this kind of work, and that's a personality that peeps out from behind the surface respectability and professional pseudo-warmth of our female protagonist. It's hard to forget the deadpan, affectless authority with which she instructs a disturbed patient to "put the gun down"; there is not a trace of fear in her eyes, no indication that she is not in perfect control of him and of the situation. Already the viewer must be wondering what kind of person this is.There's a truism that street smarts will always beat rich-kid smarts; and this cliche' plays out at first predictably, but then gets overturned. Who's outwitting whom here? At first, our con man is calling all the shots. But his victim is also his protege'e -- in fact, his pretence of making her his apprentice and showing her how it's done, has caught up with him. She really *has* learned, as he finds out to his cost; she started out ignorant, but she's smart and she learns fast.Mamet surprised me several times in the course of the film; by the time when, considerably later, the red convertible drives away leaving our protagonist desolate by the side of the road, I knew what was up. But up until that point I had the fun of being surprised more than once; this is not a one-trick film with a slow buildup like U.S., but a magic show with one card trick after another.This film was recommended to me highly by a feminist friend despite the obvious "problem" plot: strong, competent, successful professional woman makes idiot of self over masochistic, romantic obsession with wily, low-class grifter. The "rich independent woman is really a needy, pathetic little girl yearning to be dominated by lower class stud" theme is boring as well as offensive, and if that were all there was here, it would be a flick to miss.What rescues this film from being another 'Swept Away' (or any other D.H. Lawrence dittohead effort) is that our female anti-hero is in fact not pathetic, and not really needy. She may be temporarily dazzled by body chemistry and the promise of adventure and romance, and there's a lingering longing in her heart for the love and approval of a (hinted) brutal father. But there's a cool sociopathic core to her personality which makes her a match for the hardened criminal she's keeping company with. People have criticized L.C.'s acting, and she is a bit wooden, but I think in this case her woodenness works: it expresses the fatal flaw in her character's personality, a lack of affect, an emptiness, a coldness at the heart.This is imho a lovely, nasty sendup of the genre theme "protagonist undergoes adventure and discovers True Self." Our protagonist has a wild adventure and she does indeed discover her True Self. And what a self it is. Perhaps Mamet's suggesting that it would be just as well if some of us never discover our inner nature :-) In fact, I don't know exactly what Mamet's suggesting here; rather than a message, a moral, or a motto, this film is a character study, a candid portrait of two characters locked in a power struggle from which only one can walk away.In general I don't enjoy movies about characters who are all dislikeable. Perhaps it's a tribute to that genius which everyone ascribes to Mamet, that this film about two very amoral, quite unpleasant people is so fascinating; it isn't just the clever matryoshka plot that kept me glued to it, it's the dreadful unravelling of a character which at the beginning was apparently integrated with the world, positively engaged, even beneficial; and by the end has reverted, *happily*, to pure predator.The most powerful scene in the film, for me, was the moment when our damp, bedraggled anti-heroine sneaks into the House of Games one last time, to see the whole cast assembled and reviewing the con. On the table you can see her "file" scattered -- her book, reviews, newspaper clippings, all the research they did on her to discover who she was and how to play her. Just like her files on her patients... As she glimpses this, she hears her quondam lover quip lightly that sleeping with her was "a small price to pay" for the cash they tricked out of her; and with this casual cruelty you can see her education is complete.I could describe House of Games as a brutal variation on the Pygmalion story; in fact the play 'Pygmalion' by GBS has a somewhat similar, though less noir, ending; the girl educated (and bullied) by a condescending and patronizing master profits by her education to defy him and leave him behind. In House of Games, chilly and very noir indeed, he's left behind dead, and unmourned either by the viewer or our anti-heroine.Perhaps the greatest riddle of this film is why it's so damned fascinating. One can make a film about evil people easily enough, and most such efforts are merely unpleasant or outright revolting ('Very Bad Things' comes to mind as something I would never voluntarily sit through again). But in House of Games, Mamet has managed to fascinate the viewer with the same promise his con man uses to lure in the prey: come on in, and we'll let you see behind the scenes. We'll show you how it's done, and you'll be in the know instead of just one of the damn-fool public. And you know, it works. We really do want to know which one of these smart, amoral, predatory people is going to win in the end.Think of it as "Survivor" for intelligent audiences. And perhaps worry a little, about how captivating it really is.
