Funny Games

With their beautifully crafted wooden sailboat hitched to their shiny Range Rover, Ann and George Farber (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth), along with their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and their golden retriever Lucky, are en route to their gated waterfront home for a two-week summer vacation. How bourgeois are they? They're so bourgeois they play "Name That Classical Tune" in the car, a game interrupted by a rude blast of John Zorn's hardcore skronk, which accompanies the blood-red title credits in a none-too-subtle intimation of the brutality to come. They're so bourgeois that when they spot their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons, on the front lawn with two white-clad young men neither Ann nor George recognizes, they shout a friendly reminder about an upcoming game of golf. When George asks if Fred Thompson (Boyd Gaines) wouldn't mind stopping by later to help launch his sloop, Ann can't help but notice how nervous Fred seems. When he arrives a short while later, he's accompanied by one of his guests, a disconcertingly polite young man whom he introduces as Paul (Michael Pitt), the son of a business associate. With his angelic face, neatly parted blond hair and immaculate tennis whites, Paul could have stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad, except for one small detail: those weird, white cotton gloves he never takes off. Meanwhile up at the house, Ann opens the front door to Peter (MYSTERIOUS SKIN's Brady Corbet), a stranger who could be Paul's more slovenly younger brother, right down to the gloves. Peter claims Mrs. Thompson sent him to borrow four eggs for something she's baking, but after he drops them in the front hallway, then "accidentally" knocks Ann's cell phone into the sink, rendering it useless (a major inconvenience when you don't have a land line), she gets the feeling this strange young man is toying with her. When Paul shows up, calls Peter "Tom" and then asks to take one of George's expensive golf clubs outside for a few practice swings (he does, and that's the last we hear of Lucky), Ann tries to get them both out of her house. They won't leave, Ann's respectable veneer finally cracks and when George returns to the house demanding to know what's going on, all hell breaks loose. Peter and Paul are hardly the nice boys one might unthinkingly invite into one's home -- they're sadistic thrill-killers up for a bit of fun. Suddenly everything designed to keep the Farber family safe -- the front gate, the security fence, the motion-triggered floodlights -- turns their luxuriously isolated home into a death trap.

No thinking person ever came away from Wes Craven's brilliantly savage LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT with less of an understanding of his or her role as a spectator than the one Haneke spells out with a heavy hand, and Craven didn't resort to such obvious devices as having a character directly address the camera and mock the audience's perverse expectations. It is the viewers, whom Haneke invites in and then condemns if they don't walk out, who bear the full brunt of his contempt; filmmakers, not to mention distributors who attractively package and market violent spectacles, get off scot-free. That said, the film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance. But it's awfully hard to see what the film does right on account of that giant Austrian finger wagging in your dumb American face. leave a comment --Ken Fox