Metcalf's DVD Screening Room: "Funny Games"

Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on "Funny Games."

FUNNY GAMES (2007)

Michael Haneke made a film called "Cache" that I haven't seen for two years, and yet entire scenes and images from it keep recurring to me when I least expect it and that seldom happens to me. I am afraid "Funny Games" will haunt me in a much more violent way.

The violence happens off stage, the way it does in Shakespeare, but I don't think I have ever experienced a film where, from very early on, the potential for violence, very personal violence, is so palpable. And Haneke creates this feeling in very casual ways.

A couple and their son, arriving by car at their summer home, talk through the gate of their neighbor's house about a game of golf the following day. The neighbors answer every question. You only see the neighbors in long shot. They are standing on their very expansive lawn, with two other unidentified people. Simply in the timing of their answers and the matter of factness of them, you sense that something is wrong.

The couple in the car realizes it, too, but they are coming to their summer home. It is gated, as are all the homes on this lake. They are wealthy. They listen to Vivaldi and play guessing games about classical music in the car as they drive to their vacation. They are intelligent and comfortable and self involved. Nothing bad could happen to them. They are insulated from the ugly and the poor and the angry and the shocking. They are safe.

Next, a very nicely dressed and polite young man stops to borrow four eggs. From every indication he is from their class of people, lacking only a sweater thrown over his shoulders he could just as easily have said, "Tennis, anyone?" as borrow four eggs.

Again, we know instantly that something is wrong. But Ann, the lead character played by Naomi Watts, knows something is wrong, also. She doesn't know what. There is no way she could possibly imagine how wrong things are. Neither can we, no matter how many movies of this type -- movies that ride on the tension of potential violence -- we have seen. What happens is horrendous. And it happens unexpectedly. And it keeps happening. But, you never have to look at it. You have to look at the people who do it and to whom it is done, and you have to live with their reactions. It's not that it is relentless, but it becomes so horribly inevitable, that you can neither turn away nor watch. But you must.

I guess it's a horror movie. Naomi Watts stars and I thought a few times of other horror movies that she made called "The Ring" and "The Ring II." There is nothing supernatural about "Funny Games." It is all very real, very natural. People do exactly what you would think they would do. No one is capable of being a hero. Home invasions happen occasionally everywhere. And the "bad guys" are so polite and disarming.

Haneke does something so unexpected at one point that it nearly takes you out of the film. Paul, the leader of the two young men, turns to the camera and asks the audience what they think. It is called direct address. It removes you from watching the film in the traditional way. It happens quickly, and so matter of factly, that you actually begin to answer his question. It does two things that seem to be in opposition to each other. It quite suddenly makes you aware that you are watching a film, so you can't live in that fuzzy, romantic, safe zone of suspending your disbelief and coasting along terrified but safe in the dream state that most films induce in us. It also makes you participate in the action, at least in a cerebral way.

There is another moment, when the woman, Naomi Watts, takes a gun away from one of the young men and shoots the other one. Finally, the film is giving you what you want, a hero, some extraordinary bravery, the woman fighting back, the expected tension of what will happen next, not the gut-tearing tension of when will the inevitable and the most horrible happen.

But Paul, the leader of the two men, immediately searches for the remote control for the television, finds it and punches rewind. The film we are watching rewinds a few minutes to before the woman took the gun away, then plays forward and this time Paul seizes the gun before she can do any damage. As I re-read that sentence, it almost sounds comical.

Again, you have the dual response of being removed from the typical movie-watching experience and told you are watching a film, nothing more, but you are also made to face the kind of relief you felt when a character acted in the typical movie way and blew the bad guy away, but now you have to face the falseness of that relief, and again live with the horrible inevitability of the sweet, polite, yet irrational violence that has invaded your home and your consciousness.

If there is a metaphor here, and I think there always is with an artist like Michael Haneke, it has something to do with the fact that the insulated, safe, protected world we seek and that some live in is not immune to it's own insidious plague of violence and it goes door to door. It looks like you and me.