Spoilers. In his essay on "compensation," which we would nowadays call "immanent justice," (or maybe "karma") Emerson wrote: "Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass." After participating in a theft and murder, Lindsay Crouse returns to her office and the first thing she does is close all the blinds, as if her conscience, indeed the conscience of the whole world, is outside, staring in at her.
This is a fairly intelligent movie, especially considering that it's the first outing as director for David Mamet. He handles the camera quite well. Nothing looks stagy. And he knows when to let the shot linger on the door to "The House of Games" as it swings very slowly closed after Crouse enters for the first time, and we get to hear the latch click shut behind her. The screen is filled with a huge sturdy doorknob and lock, and a somewhat ragged sign reading simply "Games."
It's a story of the long con, meaning a thoroughly planned and time-consuming scenario played for big stakes, like "The Sting". The whole plot, involving a dozen people, is orchestrated down to the smallest move and the placement of props by Joe Montegna and the mark is Crouse, although she doesn't discover this until the end, and then only by accident. Yes, some of the dialog sounds as if it's being read from cue cards, but I take this to be deliberate stylization. Crouse and Montegna have shown in other works that they can be as naturalistic as the next performer.
Here, with Mamet's odd script, they take chances. There is a lot of repetition. Character A says, "I'm going to take you somewhere." B says: "You're going to take me somewhere." This goes on mostly between the two leads. There are many instances, still sounding stylized, of speakers interrupting themselves and beginning a new utterance: "I can't believe that -- How did all this get started?" I think rhetoricians call this "anacoluthia" but I wouldn't bet on it. When the narrative requires it, the dialog moves along with considerable verve. The script is to movies what Hemingway's prose was to literature as far as stylization goes, and it works here. (It doesn't always work: vide "Barfly.")
The film gives us a picture of human nature that isn't very pretty. We are all con men, it says. And we are, in a way, although not always illegally. The sociologist Erving Goffman called our everyday con jobs "impression management." Goffman also wrote a fascinating article called "Cooling Out the Mark," a study of how con men quiet the mark down in order to leave him sufficiently satisfied with himself that he doesn't go to the cops or otherwise seek revenge. Montegna does a splendid job of cooling out Crouse: "You're going to feel a strong need to confess. Don't do it. You had nothing to do with it. It was all an accident. You're completely innocent." (This just after he's relieved her of "eighty large" and is about to beat it to the airport to skip town.)
Lindsay Crouse, as I say, is the mark, but she's hardly an innocent bystander. She has written a best seller, "Driven", about compulsive behavior, but she smokes a lot and steals things and is drawn to the world the con people inhabit. As a psychiatrist, however, she has learned to "forgive herself" (how do you do that?) and after shooting her exploiter full of numerous holes, she takes a vacation, comes back, and with tan and a big smile boosts a gold lighter out of the purse of a woman sitting next to her in a restaurant.
There is so much unwatchable garbage on the screen these days that when something comes along that doesn't insult your intelligence, like this movie, I feel myself heaving a sigh of relief. Definitely worth watching.
This is a fairly intelligent movie, especially considering that it's the first outing as director for David Mamet. He handles the camera quite well. Nothing looks stagy. And he knows when to let the shot linger on the door to "The House of Games" as it swings very slowly closed after Crouse enters for the first time, and we get to hear the latch click shut behind her. The screen is filled with a huge sturdy doorknob and lock, and a somewhat ragged sign reading simply "Games."
It's a story of the long con, meaning a thoroughly planned and time-consuming scenario played for big stakes, like "The Sting". The whole plot, involving a dozen people, is orchestrated down to the smallest move and the placement of props by Joe Montegna and the mark is Crouse, although she doesn't discover this until the end, and then only by accident. Yes, some of the dialog sounds as if it's being read from cue cards, but I take this to be deliberate stylization. Crouse and Montegna have shown in other works that they can be as naturalistic as the next performer.
Here, with Mamet's odd script, they take chances. There is a lot of repetition. Character A says, "I'm going to take you somewhere." B says: "You're going to take me somewhere." This goes on mostly between the two leads. There are many instances, still sounding stylized, of speakers interrupting themselves and beginning a new utterance: "I can't believe that -- How did all this get started?" I think rhetoricians call this "anacoluthia" but I wouldn't bet on it. When the narrative requires it, the dialog moves along with considerable verve. The script is to movies what Hemingway's prose was to literature as far as stylization goes, and it works here. (It doesn't always work: vide "Barfly.")
The film gives us a picture of human nature that isn't very pretty. We are all con men, it says. And we are, in a way, although not always illegally. The sociologist Erving Goffman called our everyday con jobs "impression management." Goffman also wrote a fascinating article called "Cooling Out the Mark," a study of how con men quiet the mark down in order to leave him sufficiently satisfied with himself that he doesn't go to the cops or otherwise seek revenge. Montegna does a splendid job of cooling out Crouse: "You're going to feel a strong need to confess. Don't do it. You had nothing to do with it. It was all an accident. You're completely innocent." (This just after he's relieved her of "eighty large" and is about to beat it to the airport to skip town.)
Lindsay Crouse, as I say, is the mark, but she's hardly an innocent bystander. She has written a best seller, "Driven", about compulsive behavior, but she smokes a lot and steals things and is drawn to the world the con people inhabit. As a psychiatrist, however, she has learned to "forgive herself" (how do you do that?) and after shooting her exploiter full of numerous holes, she takes a vacation, comes back, and with tan and a big smile boosts a gold lighter out of the purse of a woman sitting next to her in a restaurant.
There is so much unwatchable garbage on the screen these days that when something comes along that doesn't insult your intelligence, like this movie, I feel myself heaving a sigh of relief. Definitely worth watching.