BlackBook Magazine

A horror film and a protest documentary exhibit how not to play by the rules.

Naomi Watts in Funny Games.

Funny Games isn’t funny; it’s horrifying in a way that’s likely to induce frustration, nausea, and a significant percentage of walk-outs. This is just what director Michael Haneke is hoping for.

A provocateur to his fans, a misanthrope to his detractors, Haneke has built his career on this kind of paradox. His films are strategically designed to discomfit and unnerve, each an astringent study in such patently unfunny subjects as bourgeois guilt (Caché, Code Unknown), consumerism (The 7th Continent), and violence in media (Benny’s Video). It’s hard to think of a body of work that’s more serious, or farther away from the Hollywood mold.

So it’s surprising that Hollywood has remade his stomach-turning Funny Games. It’s even more surprising that he’s once again directing, and that changes from the original are negligible. George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), and George Jr. (Devon Gearhart) are a prosperous family who have just arrived at their lake house. When two well-heeled teens (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) show up asking to borrow eggs, Ann invites them in, only to have the boys inexplicably turn violent. They assault George, hold the family hostage, and spend an evening subjecting them to tortures, psychological and physical.

Funny Games is a horror film in the truest sense of the word. But unlike conventional slashers, the graphic violence is played off-screen. It’s the grim aftermath—shock, disbelief, emotional devastation—that Haneke focuses on, typically in long, punishing takes. It’s far more disturbing than any Saw installment could ever be. The villains are also far scarier, not for their menace, but for their insouciance. The boys have no specific motive except to delight in their sadism. When Ann asks them to explain themselves, they jokingly respond: “You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment!”

This, of course, is Haneke’s wry critique of the mainstreaming of screen violence. Funny Games is meant as an antidote to this trend, tempering the gore factor with the tonic of real emotional weight. By directing an English language, star-driven remake, Haneke is now poised to reach the American audience he doubtless thinks most deserving of his scold. The question is whether or not that audience, accustomed to the gruesome likes of Hostel, will acknowledge the lesson behind the violence. They’re sure to be repulsed, but edified? A message during a horror film is like homework during summer vacation.

Also pushing the limits of genre is director Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture), whose Chicago 10 is a documentary-cum-groovy, rainbow-colored cartoon. The film covers the protests and subsequent conspiracy trial (of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, et al) occasioned by the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But don’t expect much sober analysis or the de rigeur talking-head parade. Chicago 10 looks and sounds like a revolution.

To cover the demonstrations, Morgen uses archival footage exclusively, underscored with rousing counterculture anthems (“Kick Out the Jams,” “Wake Up”) that declare his sympathy with the protesters. To cover the trial—of which no footage is available—Morgen substitutes animated sequences based on court transcripts. Awash in vivid colors, Abbie Hoffman appears even more of a spastic firebrand, and Judge Julius Hoffman looks as villainous as Yosemite Sam.

Chicago 10 doesn’t fudge facts, but it does run roughshod over some conventional documentary tropes, and makes no bones about playing favorites. Morgen isn’t worried about docu-piety though—he’s worried about making his subjects, and their activism, seem heroic and cool.

Heroism of a different order is the subject of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of concentration camp inmates forced to turn out false bank notes to fund the Nazi war chest. “Operation Bernhard,” as it was known, printed the startling sum of 130 million pounds sterling. 

What makes The Counterfeiters above the redundancy of other contemporary WWII pictures is the unusually provocative moral axis upon which it turns. Head forger Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) and his colleagues are quite literally saved by their artistry, but their skills, they’re well aware, serve a perfidious end. Are their lives worth perpetuating the Third Reich? Not since The Pianist has the problematic intersection of art and war been more thoughtfully explored.