'Funny Games'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

March 14, 2008

Unless you harbor universal contempt for anyone with the good fortune to own a waterfront vacation home, you should bear no ill will toward Ann and George, the besieged couple of Michael Haneke's punishing thriller "Funny Games." They are good-humored, warmly affectionate toward each other and their amiable son Georgie, and, as played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, seem like folks you'd be pleased to welcome into your home for dinner.

There are countless other reasons to despair at the fate that awaits this model family unit when two devils in angelic disguise commandeer their holiday and submit them to a night of a thousand horrors.

Haneke, the Austrian director of "Cache," is no friend to bourgeois complacency or the facile manipulations of Hollywood filmmaking. He goes after both in this shot-by-shot English-language remake of his 1997 "Funny Games," which recreates the original film down to the battering John Zorn rock music and the physical dimensions of the victims' home.

"Funny Games" sends up queasy red flags well before two blond, choir-boyish young men named Paul and Peter (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) insinuate their way onto Ann and George's gated property, dressed in summer whites. The ruse is to borrow eggs for the neighbors, but the eggs are promptly broken, followed by legs, spirits and all laws of civility and justice.

Haneke is launching a two-pronged attack at the simplistic codes of moral reckoning that govern criminality in the movies and the blood lust of audiences that beg for more and more violence. "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment," says Paul to his wretched victims, one of several self-conscious gestures intended to make the viewer feel complicit in the pair's sadistic ploys. Haneke ends with a freeze-frame shot of Paul staring out at us conspiratorially, as if to say, "Well, you asked for it, didn't you?"

"Funny Games" is about as hostile a jest as has ever been aimed at American audiences by a foreign director. The joke wouldn't be half as galling were it not so expertly written and executed; Haneke plays the audience and its expectations like a master fiddler (albeit a merciless one).

The film was shot in the scenic Long Island enclaves of Head of the Harbor, Southhampton and Shelter Island, which may make the whole experience hit closer to home than any local moviegoer could have bargained for.

FUNNY GAMES (R). Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play a vacationing couple held hostage by a pair of sadistic young men. Michael Haneke's English-language remake of his 1997 thriller is guaranteed to work you into a lather. Don't say you weren't warned. 1:50 (terror, violence and some language). At area theaters.