FUNNY GAMES • WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL HANEKE WITH NAOMI WATTS, TIM ROTH, MICHAEL PITT, BRADY CORBETT, AND DEVON GEARHART
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Other directors have remade their own films later in life, including Leo McCarey (Love Affair as An Affair to Remember), Frank Capra (Lady for a Day as A Pocketful of Miracles), Tod Browning (London After Midnight as Mark of the Vampire), and Yasujiro Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds as Floating Weeds). But usually they take advantage of the opportunity to address aspects they found wanting in the original. When Alfred Hitchcock transposed his British thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) to the U.S. two decades later, he tried to increase the emotional resonance of a couple losing their son to kidnappers. William Wyler directed These Three (1936), a bowdlerized adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, then returned to the story 25 years later when its lesbian elements could be broached more directly. And Cecil B. De Mille couldn’t resist taking another crack at his silent epic The Ten Commandments (1923) in the 50s, when he could stage the parting of the Red Sea with sound, Technicolor, and VistaVision.
The closest antecedent for Haneke’s new Funny Games might be Gus Van Sant’s widely panned 1998 color remake of Psycho, which almost completely replicates the script and shot sequence of Hithcock’s black-and-white original. Yet even that project has more integrity than Haneke’s: Van Sant managed to create something daring, a double-headed coin that functioned as both a crude commercial gambit and an experimental assessment of Hitchcock’s cinema. Whenever I come across it on TV, it hooks me just like the original, which seems to be the point. There’s no Janet Leigh, no Tony Perkins, and no Martin Balsam, and telling the story in color is just plain wrong. But I’ll be damned if I can turn it off.
Opens Fri 3/14 at Landmark’s Century Centre.
