THE GAME (58)

Directed by: David Fincher

Starring: Michael Douglas, Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Penn

The Pitch: Nicholas van Orton, a cold and alienated millionaire banker, is given a strange birthday present by his brother Conrad : "the Game", an adventure designed to provide "whatever's lacking" in each player's life.

Theo Sez: Gorgeous image-making : stunning shots, like the wraith-like figure of our hero's father perched atop the house a moment before plunging to his death, Gothic menace in the garish hues of a Super-8 home movie ; even the early scenes have a wonderfully lustrous sleekness, setting up Nicholas's life of empty luxury, and the later ones use total darkness more daringly and creatively than any film since - well, SE7EN. You can really feel the gradual slide into a malevolent underworld - which is just as well, for it certainly doesn't bear thinking about. It actually works less well on second viewing, as it becomes clear that (unlike, say, HOUSE OF GAMES) it won't work on a literal level - our hero's actions are too dependent on chance (seeing Feingold on TV, for example - which he would've missed had he even been sitting in a different chair) to be controllable by any Higher Power ; none of which necessarily negates the idea of an invisible, omnipotent Them, simply demands a certain irrationality - you can't tell how They know, but you can still enjoy it if you accept that They "somehow" know. It probably works best for those viewers with an already sceptical view of the world - who believe, like Mel Gibson in the eponymous movie, that Conspiracy Theories are by definition unprovable ; problem is, there's not enough going on in the film, dramatically or emotionally, for others to suspend disbelief in the same way. Though some people (well okay, one person) find (s) the ending overwhelmingly moving, our hero's inner demons are actually very sketchily detailed, even his brother a remarkably marginal figure : the crucial flashbacks are mostly bunched together in the early stages (when nothing is riding on them) and bear no relation to the action - it might've been different if Nicholas kept running into situations from his childhood, as with the wooden clown that reminds him of his father's prone body, but in fact his troubles are either minor irritations (burning his fingers, getting soup on his shirt) or generic paranoia. By the end, whatever makes him special has been virtually forgotten - he's just a victim. Intriguing and unusual, but you can't help feeling it'll be remembered, twenty years from now, as a very minor work in this talented director's oeuvre.