Who Dealt This Mess?

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2003)

SPOILERS.
I think it was Chuang Dz who is supposed to have asked: "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. Today, am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?"
The question, like this movie and many others before it, deals with the problem of distinguishing what is real from what is illusory. An old philosophical question. But this movie does a pretty good job of exploring the issue.
The plot, basically is this. Sean Penn enrolls his brother Michael Douglas in something called "the game." Douglas enrolls in this program, a birthday present, without having any idea of what it's all about. Douglas is an extremely wealthy control freak who lives a life encased in ice. He's brutal to subordinates, frosty to friends, and lives alone and likes it. Then things begin to go wrong. First little things. His pen leaks and stains his shirt at the airport. A waitress spills wine all over him at his favorite restaurant. A man seems to drop dead in front of him. Then things spin wildly out of control. People shoot at him. His bank accounts are emptied by the people running the game. A wild taxi ride ends up with him trapped in the car at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. He's drugged by someone he trusts and wakes up dressed in rags, his nose bloodied, with no ID and no money, in a rubbish-strewn Mexican graveyard. This has happened to me once or twice and I can tell you -- it's discomfiting.
It's like an episode from The Twilight Zone or John Fowles' novel "The Magus". Or, citing cinematic history, like the pod people or Carpenter's "The Thing" or Steve Railsback in "The Stuntman." Who belongs to the conspiracy and who doesn't. Or does ANYBODY not belong? And, as a birthday present, this "game" is like one of those really ugly ties that somebody gives you, that you know you'll never wear, but you can't take it back either.
Douglas gives a surprisingly good performance. He has greater range than I'd previously given him credit for. He shows the same disdain for others that he did as Gordon Gekko but he brings a fragility to the character as well. When he sees mouth-to-mouth resuscitation being given to someone he displays what could easily pass for real disgust. And when he cuts his hand on a sliver of glass, he grimaces with pain while he rinses it and wraps it in a handkerchief, the way the adventurer of "Romancing the Stone" would never do. And there is none of the comfortable matter-of-fact laid back quality he showed as a doctor and boy friend in "Coma." The other performers are competent but Douglas has the only role that stands out.
Interesting use of location shooting too. San Francisco doesn't look like an urban theme park here. Almost all the scenes take place at night on depopulated streets and they make San Francisco look about as ugly as it's possible to make the city look. The dialog doesn't leap out at you but it does have its quiet wit, which I'm not sure is always appropriate. Douglas loses a shoe to an attack dog. "There goes a thousand dollars," he remarks to his companion. "Your shoes cost a thousand dollars?" she asks. "That one did."
At the movie's end, just when you think the game is over, there's yet another twist coming, the last one leading Douglas to suicide by jumping off the roof of a high-rise hotel, only to land safely on an air bag judiciously placed below in what looks like the lounge of the Sheraton Palace. The movie is entirely implausible. As explained at the end, there isn't a believable moment in it. But it has the kind of illogic that a real nightmare has. The viewer may realize afterward that what has happened is impossible but Douglas has no way of finding that out. Everything seems askew to him as it does to us while we watch. Even Daniel Schorr on CNN has an interactive exchange with him. "This is impossible," says Douglas. "That's right," replies Schorr. "It's impossible. You're having a conversation with your TV set." If you can't trust Daniel Schorr something is seriously screwed up.
Alas, the denouement does flunk the believability test, and badly. Douglas has been put through hell, and it all turns out for the best -- all those dangerous pranks, the living nightmare, the humiliation, the druggings, the action movie clichÃ©s, all have made him "a better man." He's grateful. Whereas a lot of fairly normal people, myself included, would try to track down every soul involved in this scam and beat the living crap out of them. I'd make a particular point of celebrating my brother Sean Penn's next birthday by crowning him with a crowbar -- a real one.