October 11, 1987 | Dr. Margaret Ford is a renowned psychiatrist, author of the best-selling Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life. She knows whereof she writes: A single-minded, chain-smoking workaholic, she keeps her distance as she takes information from patients. Severe in appearance — her coiffure and clothing could be described as mannish — she seems only slightly less intense than a clenched fist.
Still, despite her best efforts to hide the fact, she’s only human. Her conversation is studded with inconvenient Freudian slips. And her curiosity, personal as well as professional, is insatiable. When Dr. Ford visits a back-street poolroom, looking for the smarmy gambler who’s harassing one of her patients, she finds herself in a conclave of smooth-talking confidence men. Intrigued by their methods, and perhaps aroused by their slickly charming leader, she sticks around to learn what she can. This is a mistake.
There is more one can say about House of Games, the first feature film written and directed by David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. But one cannot say too much more about the plot. True, a dedicated mystery fan might figure out the scam long before Dr. Ford. Even so, it wouldn’t be fair to spill the beans. Therefore, a review of this eccentric and savagely clever film must be as evasive as the confidence men who operate on and with Dr. Ford.
So just trust me: Even though I cannot tell you all the reasons why, this is a good, gripping thriller. Really. Have I ever lied to you?
House of Games looks conventionally realistic, but sounds like something not of this world. Mamet creates a slightly off-kilter parallel universe in some unnamed big city — the movie was shot in Seattle — where both low-rent and high-toned characters speak in the same cryptic, colloquial dialect.
“I think you’re just a bully,” says Dr. Ford to Mike, leader of the con men, as she faces him down in the first meeting.
“Just a bully,” Mike repeats, oozing sarcasm and oily bravado. “What, and you’re not gonna let me carry your books? Aren’t you a caution.”
“Let’s talk turkey, pal,” Dr. Ford interrupts, impatient and yet slightly turned on.
Much to her surprise, Dr. Ford warms to Mike. She wants to learn more about his confidence game, instinctively realizing he may know more about human nature than she could learn in her research books. Mike is a good teacher: “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” And that, Mike adds as the first lesson continues, is why “everybody gets something out of every transaction.” The conned man winds up feeling good, because he has done a favor for the con man.
Right from the start, Mike knows what Dr. Ford needs from their transaction: “Someone to come along, to take you into a new thing.” And he’s right. Dr. Ford gets a rosy glow, and a more feminine wardrobe, as she blisses out on the dirty thrill of being allowed to share the secrets of the naughty boys. They give her their confidence. And she knows that, as she helps them use other people, they would never use her. Right?
Mamet, working in concert with cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia, vividly defines the line between the harshly lit night world of Mike’s dark schemes and the safer, sunnier world where Dr. Ford believes she is master of her own fate. But, in the grand tradition of confidence tricks, nothing is what it seems.
As a first-time filmmaker, Mamet still has a lot to learn about sustaining a pace that gives an audience no time to consider the possibility of treachery. But House of Games is satisfying in ways that even better-constructed movies seldom manage. And not the least of its pleasures is its sly use of the confidence game as a metaphor for all human relationships. Drop your guard, and you can get taken. Or, as Rod Stewart used to sing: “Once in love, you’re never out of danger . . .”
To support his chilly House of Games, Mamet has called on the services of two actors who have served him extremely well on stage. Joe Mantegna is mesmerizing as Mike, smoothly daubing a coat of urgent sincerity over his transparently phony charm. Mike is a man who believes in nothing but the power of his own cynicism. Mantegna (a Tony Award-winner for Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross) makes the character a most persuasive spokesman for his godless religion.
Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife and frequent collaborator, has a more difficult time of it as Dr. Ford. The character is self-controlled to the point of self-parody at the beginning, and Crouse runs a considerable risk of appearing silly in her stylized line readings. As the film proceeds, however, her reawakening passion and coruscating rage are extremely compelling.
The final scene of House of Games recalls the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange — a movie which it in no other way resembles — where the bloody-minded Alex rejoices in his recovery. Like Alex, Dr. Ford also breaks through behavioral restraints. And she could echo Alex’s claim of a dubious triumph: “I was cured, all right.”
