HOUSE OF GAMES (1987) A Film Review by Ted Prigge Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge
Director: David Mamet Writer: David Mamet (story by Mamet and Jonathan Katz) Starring: Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, Lilia Skala, Ricky Jay, J. T. Walsh, Steven Goldstein, Jack Wallace, Meshach Taylor, William H. Macy
"House of Games" recognizes a distinct human weakness that we all suffer from: the need to feel like you're smarter than everyone else. I remember not too long ago being in a chinese restaurant with a friend, and she told me she was going to steal the ash tray at our table when the cooks weren't looking. I asked her why she wanted to that; she didn't even smoke. She just gave me a bad look and shoved the thing in her bag, and then cooly left the building. Hmm...
This film deals with people who do this kind of stuff for a living, and on a much more dramatic scale. The main characters in this film are the infamous people known as confidence men, who are all flawless actors who fool people out of something, whether it be money or just their wits. The writer and director of this film, David Mamet, one of the world's great playwrights, is himself a magician, another form of the confidence man, who just loves to play with people, and here has made a downright fascinating magic trick that cons the audience perfectly with such an incredible illusion that it soon opens the film up to even more incredible depths that few suspense films have ever tread upon.
"House of Games" deals with a psychiatrist, Margaret Ford (Mamet's then-wife, Lindsay Crouse), who deals primarily with compulsions, and has just had a book published when she discovers that one of her patients, a compulsive gambler, has just gotten himself in a big trap: he owes 25 grand to a man who says that if he doesn't pay by the next day, he will murder him. Margaret journeys across town to the place where the man hangs out, called "The House of Games," where she meets this man, Mike (a brilliant Joe Mantegna), and sees if she can get him to help her friend out.
Mike, who has never heard something like this, decides to cut her a deal: she helps him find the "tell" on a man he is playing poker with in the next room, and if he wins, her friend's marker is torn up. From here on out, it would be totally unfair to reveal anymore of what happens plot-wise, but let's just say she gets sucked into the world of conning and deceiving, where the whole idea is that you con someone out of their money in the most elaborate way possible so that they have little or no doubt that they were duped. After all, what use is stealing money from someone if they know they were tricked?
Basically, this film is one big con from start to finish because nothing that it shows us is real and it knows it. It leads us through what seems to be high drama, then pulls the rug out from under us and shows us that we were totally duped, which shouldn't be a real shock to anyone who's seen his latest film, "The Spanish Prisoner," and has yet to see this film (which was me up to a couple of hours ago). Both films feature elaborate con games that fool the protagonist with twist upon twist upon twist, and in turn, probably also fool the audience as well.
Yet this film is still remarkably intelligent and fresh and a whole lot better than most films that try to do what this film does. Why is it so intelligent and fresh? Well, it's intelligent because it never takes us for morons, and instead sets up such a lavish ploy that anyone of any kind of intelligence can be easily duped by it. Everything we see seems totally real and there's really no proof of fraud until you see everything for what it really is. That's why it's such a smart movie.
And it's fresh because it's not just always thinking about what it will do next and stays two steps ahead of the audience, but also because it's remarkably deep for any film. Basically, "House of Games" is about watching movies, making this a subtlely self-reflexive film. There's a scene towards the end that has to be one of the most kafkaesque scenes I have witnessed (later sorta copied for a later scene in "The Game," another ingenius con game), and is basically saying that this is all an act we are watching, and none of this is real, which sets it up for the finale which could be seen as cheap if it weren't so intelligent and deep. It's pretty much one of the reactions someone could have to this film, basically because it can be seen as manipulative.
"House of Games" is brilliant, though, because it can easily and almost effortlessly con the viewers into thinking like the psychiatrist protagonist, and because it's practically a tragedy of two types of people in the world. The chief con man of the film, Mike, is one of the saddest characters to ever populate a movie because he's all an illusion and he has no delusions about what he is (or isn't). And the second tragic figure is Margaret, the woman who tries to delude herself about a simple human folly, and tries to make herself out to be something better than everyone else is, even in the final frame of the film. "House of Games" is electrifying because it's so refreshingly smart, and so enigmatically deep about humanity. And what a con.
MY RATING (out of 4): ****
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