David Fincher’s Twistiest Film, The Game Is Still His Most Fun
Often lost among David Fincher’s monumental body of work is The Game, a weird little film that turned 25 this month. It released two years after Fincher made his mark in Hollywood with what was arguably his true feature debut, Se7en, and five years after an Alien franchise installment nearly had the already-prolific music video director swearing off movies for the rest of his life. But where Se7en was a hit, The Game—though it generally received positive reviews, including one from Roger Ebert—was not. It brought middling returns at the box office compared to the success of Fincher’s previous film, and made audiences both “hostile and bewildered,” as Fincher explained during the film’s release.
Now, The Game is neither forgotten gem nor cult classic. Fincher himself even writes it off as a film he shouldn’t have made. The director talked about how his wife, producer Ceán Chaffin, had a bad feeling about The Game from the start. Looking back, he believes that the film’s third act wasn’t properly handled. He opted at the time to “keep [his] foot on the throttle” in order to make it “liberating and funny.” But I—and many others, I’m sure—would argue that this isn’t a bad thing. In that same interview, Fincher admits that what initially drew him to the film was his love of an unpredictable plot, going on to begrudge the then-growing discontent among movie audiences to give themselves over to a narrative that isn’t necessarily going to hold their hand. Movies like The Game just don’t get made anymore.
The first time I watched The Game, over two years ago at this point, bringing my Fincher filmography blind spots down from three to two (I’ve still unintentionally neglected Benjamin Button and Panic Room), it surprised me. But if you’ve seen the film, that isn’t very surprising. For one, I didn’t expect the credits roll of the film—Fincher, like David Cronenberg, steadfastly committed to a luxuriating credits sequence which precedes the narrative—to be nearly identical in all except score to that of Succession. I also didn’t expect the film to basically be, well, when you think about it, a far more convoluted version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Instead of being visited by three harmless spirits of past, present and future, this miserly, curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge is taught the error of his ways when his drug addict brother gifts him a game that throws Scrooge into the grips of (what appears to be) a real-life plot against him. This unravels Scrooge/Nick. He questions everyone and everything around him, nearly gets killed, and…kills his brother as well as himself.
Of course, those last two developments were a part of the game all along, which leads me to the endlessly surprising plot of the film itself. It’s so far-fetched and twisty by the very nature of the game that Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas) reluctantly decides to partake in at the urging of his reckless, playboy brother, Conrad “Connie” (Sean Penn) that it oversteps Fincher’s usually perfect bridging of prestige and pulp to become something that transcends either designation. Tailored to each specific player, the game is left ambiguous: What it is and how exactly it may vary from person to person remains elusive. In Nick’s case, it’s a seemingly never-ending series of double-crosses and conspiracies that soften the line between reality and fiction so acutely that the line becomes a smudge. There’s no one Nick can trust, least of all himself, and by the time each narrative Russian nesting doll has finally been uncovered, it’s unclear how the man would not suffer from PTSD for the rest of his life. Instead, the game was simply a way for Connie to let his brother know he was “becoming an asshole.”