FILM REVIEW: A vicious attack on an innocent public

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It is customary to describe film directors who keep a tight rein on their audience’s responses, who coldly and meticulously manipulate emotion, as sadists. Not necessarily in a bad way; filmmaking is to a large degree an art of control. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg can all, with some justice, be accused of sadism, a charge that hardly detracts from — indeed, that helps to explain — the way they provide entertainment.

Michael Haneke, an Austrian auteur who has worked for many years in France, has always been more interested in punishing his audience than in entertaining it. His scrupulously constructed, skillfully made films, many of which have won prizes at leading international festivals, are excruciatingly suspenseful and also, more often than not, clammy and repellent.

It is likely that Haneke would take the last two adjectives as praise — it’s fine with me if they show up in advertisements — or at least as the acknowledgment of fulfilled intentions. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

Funny Games, Haneke’s first English-language film — and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title — subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality. So, of course, do countless other movies, though few of them can claim this one’s artistic pedigree or aesthetic prestige. And indeed, the conceit of Funny Games is that it offers a harsh, exacting critique of vulgar, violent amusements, a kind of homeopathic treatment for a public numbed and besotted by the casual consumption of images of suffering. That the new version takes place in America is part of the point, since Americans — to a European intellectual this almost goes without saying — are especially deserving of the kind of moral correction Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.

Our problem is that we think violence is fun. Well, the fun stops here, people. Ann and George (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) drive out to the country with their young son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), towing their lovely wooden sailboat behind their Land Rover and listening to opera CDs. As they settle into their tasteful, gated vacation home, the family is confronted by two well-spoken young sociopaths, who in the course of the following night torment them with a knife, a gun, a golf club and impeccable prep school manners. These fellows variously address each other as Peter and Paul, Tom and Jerry and Beavis and Butt-Head (Leopold and Loeb would have given the game away), and they are played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet.

Pitt, blue-eyed and baby-faced, appears to be the calm, ironical alpha predator, while Corbet, acting skittish and high-strung, looks like the weaker, crazier one. But that might just be part of the game they and Haneke are playing, since the whole point of Peter and Paul is that they function without identifiable motive or affect.

When asked by George — his leg smashed, his hands tied, his eyes wide with terror — “Why are you doing this?,” Pitt’s character responds with answers that parody the kind of facile backstory usually applied in cases like this: unhappy childhood; sexual instability; class resentment; bad education. All of it is facetious, and none of it explains anything.