[ Golden Gater Online - September 11, 1997 ]
Hollywood has always served as a scapegoat for America's perverse obsession with success, stardom, sex, and greed. Every year moviegoers are bombarded with trite characters that treat life as if it's one big, beautiful joke. Money is rarely an object that Hollywood heroes have to deal with unless they're spending it or killing somebody for more of it. In "The Game," the latest film from visionary director David Fincher, wealth and power aren't celebrated and glamorized. They're downright terrifying.
Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, a successful San Francisco investment banker who's also an eccentric, solitary man. He lives alone in a desolate mansion big enough to house a family of 12 and is emotionally haunted by his father's suicide, which happened to take place in the front yard when Nicholas was a boy.
On his 48th birthday, Nicholas is given an enigmatic gift by his younger brother Conrad, giddily played by Sean Penn. It's obvious when the two meet they have little in common. Nicholas is as stiff as the suits he wears, while Conrad is flamboyant and charmingly immature.
"What do you get a man that has everything?," smirks Conrad as he hands Nicholas a gift certificate for Consumer Recreational Services. Conrad says nothing about CRS except he's played their game and it's a life-changing experience.
Intrigued, Nicholas signs up for the game at the CRS office -- located in a plush Embarcadero high-rise in San Francisco -- the next day. After taking part in a psychological evaluation, he is told the game will come to him. It's just a question of when?
It's here the story takes on a disturbing, genius dimension that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Nicholas' life is torn apart in ways as painful as slicing somebody's Achilles tendon in mid-stride, and all of a sudden "The Game" is no longer the story of a rich bastard getting a dose of uncertainty in his life.
Instead, the film acts as a game itself where the viewer is manipulated and abused just as much as Nicholas. The film is as confusing as real life, for if its deeply layered meanings and social implications had to be forced into an obvious, visceral image they would look something like a room packed with thousands of slithering, venomous snakes
Fincher knows how to bring an audience to their knees, and -- unlike the disappointingly predictable ending of "Seven," -- the audience is blindsided with dangerous detours as Nicholas is propelled into a world where his money suddenly means zilch, and survival is everything.
Douglas has proven to be brilliant in roles that demand enormous mental stealth and gives Nicholas the perfect balance of masculinity and naivetè needed to make Nicholas grow and adapt to his surroundings without becoming an "ordinary man turns hero" clichè.
Now everybody's wondering about 34-year-old director Fincher. The man hit mass recognition with his crime drama "Seven" in 1995. Fincher's unique, meat grinder style exhibited in "Seven" and "Alien 3" sent cinema junkies drooling over the frames Fincher filled with pasty browns and richly black pastels.
Sorry, this film doesn't hide inside a cow carcass. "The Game" was photographed by Harris Savides, who successfully brought out the beauty of the South in the otherwise miserable 1995 Alec Baldwin vehicle "Heaven's Prisoners." Savides brings across the visual brilliancy of San Francisco (the film was shot almost entirely on location here) and captured the city magnificently.
"The Game" is a film that will change many pre-existing opinions of Fincher's work. Although Fincher incorporates a taste of his quick, jumpy cuts and hauntingly lighted sets, they're neither as blatantly suggestive as a cocaine-caked razor blade, nor as violent as the wrist it could slit.
[ Golden Gater - September 11, 1997 ]