The Game (1997)

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"Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all.”
- Vera Nazarian
When I was 16, my friend's parents designed an elaborate scavenger hunt that took place through our hometown in western Pennsylvania. We split up into a bunch of teams - about 4-5 people per - with one of those people serving as driver. The first year, my team was made up of myself, two of my good friends, and two of the children of our "organizers." We had almost reached our time limit and couldn't find one of the clues. With ten minutes to spare, we learned where it was, hopped into my Ford Taurus in very rainy weather and flew out of the driveway to get it. On the route to the clue, I had to navigate an almost 90 degree turn on a curbed road and took it a little too fast, causing us to hydroplane, and we ended up facing the opposite direction. We didn't win. I wasn't allowed to drive the following year.


In The Game, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is an extremely successful investment banker, living a sheltered life where his employees, clients, and family all stay at an arm's length. Even worse for his solitary psyche, he is approaching his 48th birthday - the age his father took his own life. Nicholas's erratic brother Conrad (Sean Penn) visits him with a birthday gift: a live action experience from a company called CRS that Conrad claims will change his life. Out of sheer morbid curiosity, Nicholas contacts CRS to do some research. The game begins.

Plot can't be revealed for this film or it will ruin the one major device that makes this wholly unimaginable film work. Throughout the film, Nicholas deals with people he knows, meets people he doesn't, and explores places he's never been. At the beginning, you assume everything is part of the game. Then, you aren't sure. By the end, the yarn has become so tangled that you can't even remember the majority of the characters and their place in his life or if this could just be an epic role playing exercise.

Director David Fincher has become one of the best directors of our current generation. The Game was Fincher's third film, following one of early masterpieces, Se7en. He has since made other brilliant films touching on the psychological side of success and conformity (Fight Club, The Social Network). Here, you can see Fincher tweaking his work, but following similar patterns as he has been known to take. The lighting is dark; the score is always present, but fades into the background; the cinematography is inventive, with a number of shots of Douglas from below. The screenplay from John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris is convoluted and meandering at moments, but Fincher's direction pulls it back from levels of unbelievability that would have made it a complete failure.

At the heart of The Game is the bigger question of family and coming to terms with your past. Interestingly (though not deliberately), this makes a good companion film to the last film I watched before The Game, Michael Haneke's Caché, which tackles similar themes of trust and personal history, but in a much more personal, controlled manner. Nicholas essentially distances himself from the world atop his ivory tower. His ex-wife left him due to his emotional absence in their marriage. His brother is, by all accounts, a bit of a disappointment, especially since Nicholas felt forced into the paternal role for him after their father's suicide. His acquaintances are only such because of his job and his power: he doesn't have any real friends and has an inability to connect with anyone on a basic level, ever the guarded individual. The Game isn't about giving Nicholas a thrill - it's about making him a better man by forcing him to trust people, getting people to trust him, and abandon all pride and arrogance by removing his throne.

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Very little in this film is feasible. As Nicholas navigates San Francisco, most of the time with a waitress (Deborah Kara Unger) he's not sure is even aware of CRS, it becomes less and less about a psychological game and more about whether or not you believe all of this can even be orchestrated by an organization. This isn't just a simple hunting game like, say, The Running Man or Surviving the Game. This game would take a level of control unlike anything ever conceived, taking into account way too many assumptions about your player. Nicholas makes one decision they didn't see coming and it all goes up in smoke. These realizations don't drag the movie down so much as they make you question the writing process after the film.

There are a number of ways this film could end and I won't go into the choice that is made, but it left me a little cold. We spend the entire film understanding how Nicholas handles himself and others and, though every person is entitled to a major epiphany in their lives, it's a bold attempt to drive Nicholas in the direction he shifts and make it feel genuine. I'm not entirely sure Nicholas ever changes, so much as he loosens up.

The Game is an imaginative puzzle that keeps you guessing the whole way through and, though it has more than a few missing pieces, is still a satisfying experience. Douglas does well with what he's given, Penn isn't used enough, and Unger serves her purpose as a "female companion." I'd like to see the movie where they dive deeper into CRS and explain why these people do what they do. Manipulation is very rarely a winning pursuit.

SHOULD YOU SEE IT: Possibly