Speaking of violence...

I finally got around to seeing the movie Funny Games.

It was... Hmm. It was... different.

Note: there are spoilers here. Though I'm not sure this is the kind of movie that can be spoiled, per se.

For anyone who may not know, the story is basically of an amazingly wholesome and rich looking family of three (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, some kid) who head out to their vacation house. Once there, they are visited by two amazingly-wholesome-looking young men who proceed to force them into playing a series of sadistic and torturous games that culminate with the death of the entire family.

The critical reception was interestingly mixed. The critics seemed to fall into two camps: one which felt the movie was a triumph as it is technically wonderful and they felt the writer/director Michael Haneke (Austrian fellow, in fact the American version is a shot-for-shot remake of the Austrian original) was making a statement about the rise of voyeuristic thrill-seeking in recent uber-violent cinema (Saw, Hostel, Touristas, we're looking in your direction); the other camp felt that the movie was an uber-violent, voyeuristic thrill-ride and as such was no more redeeming than the Saws, Hostels, Toursistas et al, any cinematographic excellence aside.

First off, the movie is beautifully shot. Just amazing. The things the director does with camera angles alone were quietly phenomenal. Also the acting was, I felt, v. solid. Well done all around.

The violence -- which is significant and wholly unreedeming in the sense that there is no comeuppance and absolutely no reason or explanation for it of any kind -- is largely kept off screen in the strictest sense. That is, the worst things happen out of sight of the audience, sometimes only just, but out of sight nonetheless. Not having seen any of the Saws, Hostels, etc. I don't know if they handle their extreme violence the same way, but my sense is that they do not. That is, in those movies, you watch the actual violent acts; here you mostly watch the results of the torture.

I think that makes a difference. I don't know if the director was trying to make a statement about the audience's complicity in the rise of uber-violent cinema. V. probably he was: the main antagonist repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to confer with the audience about what they'd like to see happen next. But ultimately, I'm not sure that it matters if this was his intention or not. If it works on that level, it works on that level. If it has redeeming qualities, if it is, in a word, Art, then it is Art regardless of the intent of the director, yes? Perhaps not, I've never given a tremendous amount of thought to the philosophy of art.

Anyways, I thought it worked. On whatever level. It was engrossing and not in a visceral, I-like to-watch-people-get-tortured-way. More in an intellectual, these-characters-are-tremendously-disturbing, unlike-your-average-character, and-this-difference-makes-them-interesting kind of way. Their interactions were interesting.

So, in a nutshell, I thought the movie fell much more into the "triumph" bucket than the "travesty" bucket. But I can see how others might be too disturbed or uncomfortable with the ambiguity of the message to feel the same.

On a related note, I feel there's been a rise in the nihilistic antagonist in recent years. These two were of a piece with Heath Ledger's incarnation of the Joker: they are violent, they twist and destroy societal norms and there is no reason why, they just do. It makes one wonder what the Dark Knight folks could have done if they had the freedom to stray further from the comic-book template they were working with. Clearly, the Joker was not going to win. Funny Games, by contrast, was under no such constraint.