'The Game': 20 Years Later

"Does this thing end?"

This is a valid question posed by cold, shrewd investment banker, Nicholas Van Orton, played memorably by Michael Douglas as he's in the middle of a litmus test in the main offices of Consumer Recreation Services (CRS); a company that specializes in interactive life "games" that either test the endurance of the participant, or unravel them to the brink of insanity or death.

How it's set up is as a present at a birthday dinner by his ne'er-do-well younger brother, Conrad, played by the always brilliant Sean Penn who has a quiet, malevolent glint in his eye as he hints that there's a much darker purpose behind his "gift." "What do you get for the man who has everything?" he says with a sense of bitter jealousy. There's clear tension between the two as their bitter family history is for all of us to see.

Nicholas Van Orton is a brutally cold and angry man who lives, breathes, and wallows in his work to avoid people, intimacy, and the whole world. As the film opens with a home-movie montage of images from his painful and sad youth, we get a sense of where this psychological bubble comes from. As a boy, he witnessed the suicide of his own despondent father. While it never openly admits it, it's clear he's headed down that path himself.

After the initial gift is received, Van Orton decides to NOT fit it into his schedule. But, that's when the nightmare officially begins. Is the game an actual game...or something far more sinister? Van Orton's insulated, pampered life is soon crumbling down around him and his sense of complete control is now disappearing at lightning speed. Complicating the matter is a waitress, played by Deborah Kara Unger, who is dragged into the labyrinth with Van Orton, but who may also be the key to solving the mystery, or who may be leading him to his very demise.

The Game was released in September of 1997; I was a mere lad of 25 who ate up every movie release since the advent of celluloid. It was director David Fincher's follow-up to his monster 1995 hit Se7en with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt and his third film since his debut, Alien3 with Sigourney Weaver. While there were mixed-to-positive reviews, many praising the overall technical skill and the terrific performances by Douglas, Penn, and Unger, the film's box-office performance was surprisingly weaker than his last efforts. Having cut his teeth as a music video director who helmed some of the most popular videos for artists as diverse as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Justin Timberlake (who starred in his 2010 masterpiece The Social Network), his style was always distinct in his use of dark shadows and the raising of awareness of the beaten and tortured. His list of films includes Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Gone Girl (2014).

I remember enjoying the film for its thriller trappings, plot twists, and its scary notions about life's X-Factor — which is still the film's strongest asset. I recently watched it again for my birthday; another asset since there are not many thrillers with a birthday story arch, i.e. Happy Birthday to Me from 1981 to name at least one. This, thankfully, wasn't a slasher film, but a well-constructed, albeit non-linear psychological thriller that invited the viewer as Alice Cooper once observed and paraphrasing to "Welcome to your nightmare," but one viewing wasn't enough, and over the years I watched it repeatedly and haven't seen it since 2010.

Seven years later, I turned 45 this year. I revisited the film. Here's me with a fresh pair of eyes giving it a proper assessment.

It's clear that two pieces of classic literature are the sources of inspiration: Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol; both of whom take their characters on journeys that change them forever. Alice, the innocent girl, forced to deal with human atrocities through a very surreal universe and Ebenezer Scrooge, a rich miser who is forced to rejoin humanity after three spirits visit him and show him the error of his ways. In this case, his younger brother, Conrad is the Jacob Marley of the story, buying him a "gift" where the end prize is either making his soul over — or his undoing and eventually, death.

I believe in the story, CRS, the company who is controlling the game is also a metaphor for God. God sees all. God rewards, and in this case, most definitely punishes. What makes Michael Douglas' Van Orton character so compelling and somewhat worthy of redemption (unlike his Oscar-winning Gordon Gekko character in Wall Street) is that he is a wayward soul marred by bad experiences in life, not to mention the trauma of losing his father to suicide.

Another theory that I offer is that it deals with The Law of Attraction. What you put out is always what you get back. The Biblical addage of "You reap what you sow" is ever present. Van Orton's view of perfection is the perfect catalyst for the catastrophic events that unfold and all the people in his life, including his own brother, are all players in his descent into madness. The only people who are seemingly not in on the prank are his ex-wife (Anna Katarina) and his maid (Carroll Baker), but are indeed, all part of that Master Plan. The hell Van Orton experiences are the horrors that he willfully invites due to his callousness and unwillingness to budge his heart and humanity. Conrad observes this with, "I had to do something, you were becoming such an asshole."

****SPOILER ALERT****

In the climactic finale, Nicholas Van Orton indeed attempts to take his own life by jumping off a building to his death. Clearly, the film pushes us to this point as well as we see Van Orton defeated by his demons and his loss of control when he's led to believe that he shot his own brother by accident. I offer a bizarre theory in that he did succeed; never surviving the fall and that his birthday was celebrated in HIS afterlife. True, all of the players and the real motives of the game were finally revealed, I offer this observation. Anyone in a disoriented state about to take his/her own life is NOT going to know where to jump off and land safely in order to supposedly "make an entrance." A pretty obvious MacGuffin if you ask me.

Still, it's a film I enjoyed revisiting, and if I'm still around will revisit in another seven or more years.