Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is the man who has everything. A powerful investment banker in San Francisco, he has risen to a position of prominence within his firm by working overtime to make money for his clients. He lives in a gated mansion, drives a luxury sedan, eats at the finest restaurants, and has connections in high society the world over. As long as the share prices rise, and no one wishes him a happy birthday, Nick is satisfied.
The same cannot be said for his younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn), who lives a carefree, bohemian lifestyle the exact opposite of Nick's. The two obviously don't see eye to eye: Conrad believes his brother needs to loosen up and have a little fun, while Nicholas sees Conrad as the younger sibling who squandered everything their parents sacrificed to provide for them.
It's Nick's 48th birthday, and Conrad has a quandary: what do you get the man who has everything? He thinks he's found the solution though: an invitation to Consumer Recreation Services. CRS runs a real-life program that exists to make their users' lives "fun". Intrigued at the notion, Nicholas signs up for his own personal game, with the understanding that if he's unsatisfied, he can cancel it at any time and walk away from it all.
"The Game", however, soon proves to be something else entirely, as CRS uses all of its considerable resources, not to mention Nicholas's own psychiatric evaluations and other personal information he provided during the initial consult, to worm its way into every aspect of his life. What was supposed to be a simple experience to add some zest to Nick's existence soon becomes an unstoppable onslaught of psychological manipulation and real-world harassment which sweeps up close associates and innocent bystanders alike, everyone from his own brother to a waitress (Deborah Kara Unger) who accidentally spills a drinks tray on him. Eventually escalating to attempts on Nicholas's life, it becomes clear there is no one whom he can trust. Everyone is seemingly in on the Game, and the only way it's going to end is when Nicholas Van Orton is pushed to the breaking point.
The con is on.
The Game is director David Fincher's 1997 follow-up to 1995's Se7en, and the second of his movies to get the Criterion treatment with this 1998 release. What we have in this movie is something akin to A Christmas Carol (where the lead character goes through an emotional, soul-searching journey and emerges a different person at the end) smashed together with a Kafka-esque nightmare in which everyone in the world seems to be in on some joke to which the protagonist is not privy. It's also a complete reversal of similar stories where the main character finds himself or herself embroiled in a scheme larger than they could have imagined, like in Clifton & Dwayne Holmes' indie production of Richard Laymon's In The Dark. In most stories of this type, the protagonist is someone down on his luck, who is offered larger and larger amounts of money in exchange for increasingly dangerous behavior. In The Game, Michael Douglas's Van Orton instead starts out with everything and has it all systematically stripped away from him, piece by piece, person by person. It's no coincidence the cover artwork features a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and scattered.
Van Orton is stymied at every move because CRS seems aware of his every action. It quickly becomes clear there are no lengths to which the group will not go in order to break Nicholas and get what they want, and the way they accomplish this is supremely sinister. Instead of pulling a gun on him or threatening him in some other way, they instead slowly peel off every layer of armor he's built up to navigate successfully in the high-stakes, high-stress world he inhabits. Despite Conrad's promise that CRS will make Nick's life fun, nothing that happens to Nick is at all entertaining. Van Orton's Josef K nightmare is one where no one is on his side, and everything he does to extricate himself from the titular Game only buries him deeper.
So, potential down sides? Well, unless you're hip to the con, it's impossible to guess the ending. What's more, every time you think you've wised up to what's going on, there's another twist to prove you aren't as insightful as you thought. The Game deliberately does not play fair with its audience, as there is no information doled out to us except what Michael Douglas experiences. The focus is extremely narrow in this regard: we only see what Nicholas Van Orton sees, we only hear what he hears, we only know what he knows. There are no clues the viewer can piece together to figure out where where the plot is heading in advance. If you like playing amateur sleuth, The Game stymies you at every turn. If you arrive at the truth before the climax, it's because you took a wild guess, because there's certainly no evidence to support such a conclusion before the big reveal.
Regardless of Fincher's feelings (he has expressed regret in making the film because he felt the third act was weak compared to the rest of the picture), I still think he was the perfect choice to make this movie. The dark atmosphere of San Francisco at night is where he's most at home. In fact, Se7en plays exactly the same trick on the audience by keeping the focus on Detectives Mills and Sommerset throughout its story as well. Just as the viewer cannot deduce the identity of John Doe, nor the reason behind his crime spree in that movie, neither can the truth be teased out from any of the major or minor players in The Game until the film is ready to reveal it. This is a movie, and a story, which plays entirely to his strengths as a director and its worthy of a Criterion edition.
Sadly, the treatment given to The Game isn't as extensive as that given to Fincher's earlier film. The Game ships in a two-disc, gatefold sleeve, not the glorious boxed set we got with Se7en. The transfer, of course, is beautiful and personally supervised by Fincher to ensure the look he wanted, at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Despite sides 1 and 2 using the CLV standard and sides 3 and 4 using the higher-quality CAV standard, the difference in video quality between the two is barely imperceptible. The audio is remixed to THX standards for a Dolby Digital discrete 5.1 in uncompressed AC3 on the Analog track, and a Dolby Surround mix for the Digital track. Both sound phenomenal.
Of course it's not a Criterion release without the special features, including scene-specific commentary by director Fincher, star Michael Douglas, screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris, production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug, digital animation supervisor Richard Baily, and director of photography Harris Savides.
On top of that, we get a nice behind-the-scenes feature, storyboards, a slightly alternate ending (which I'm glad they decided not to go with), the original theatrical teaser and trailer, and the full-length psychological test film Douglas watches during his evaluation at CRS for those who were curious what they missed when the camera panned away. There are also a set of color bars on the last track of side 4 which you can use to calibrate your set and ensure you have the proper brightness, contrast, and color settings for optimal viewing.
That said, the Criterion LaserDisc will run you $50 or more on the second-hand market, while the Blu-Ray which was released in 2012 is substantially less expensive, and both looks and sounds phenomenal. While I can easily make the argument that Se7en's Criterion LD release is superior to any other format, I cannot do so for The Game unless you're comparing it to the bare-bones 2002 standard DVD release (which is a compression-artifact-ridden, feature-impoverished joke). While it's a movie which was shot mostly at night, The Game is still a much 'brighter' film than the likes of Se7en and Alien 3, so while the luscious analog black levels of the LD are nice, they're not as important as they are in Fincher's previous work. I therefore recommend this particular 'disc only for collectors. It's nice, it's gorgeous, and it looks great in a frame or on your shelf, but there are cheaper options that deliver just as well or better on the presentation.
Regardless of the medium (assuming you avoid the sub-optimal VHS or '02 DVD releases), The Game is a superb thriller, well worthy of your attention, and a re-watch if you haven't done so for a while. This is a Game perpetrated on the audience as well as the protagonist, so half the fun is playing along.
What did you think of the movie the first time you saw it? Do you think it still holds up, or would you like to see someone else take a crack at remaking it or updating it for the 21st century? Let me know down below.