September 12, 1997
Drama/Mystery/Thriller
R
United States
Director: David Fincher
“I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see.” – John Newton
The amusing aspect of this movie is that the spoiler is in the name itself. The whole plot is about an elaborate game surrounding the life of Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) in a psychological twister of a ride.
Nicholas grew up in a very wealthy family. For all intents and purposes, they seemed very content with their lives. The beginning of the film shows home movies with Nicholas, his parents, and his new baby brother. We see later in a flashback that Nicholas unfortunately witnessed the suicide of his father when he jumped off of the roof of their rather large house. It appears that this event set in motion how both Nicholas and his brother turned out later in life.
Nicholas is an investment banker in Sacramento, California. He has a lot of money, lives in the family home, and is someone who demands respect the second he steps into a room. He’s typically polite, saying “please” and “thank you”, but is obviously a cold and calculated man. He values his work more than anything in his life, which is made clear by the separation of his wife, Elizabeth (Anna Katarina). His brother, Conrad (Sean Penn), is the polar opposite: a meth addict who needs medication for his mental problems, as well as therapy.
It’s Nicholas’ forty-eighth birthday, and Conrad gives him a card that reads “Consumer Recreation Services”, or CRS. He explains that it’s a company who constructs a game for the participants, that he himself has done it, and it changed his life to the point where he no longer needs to take anything or see anyone for his mental health.
Nicholas goes to the local office of CRS and meets with Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn), who has him fill out several surveys. While he’s there, Nicholas also has to go through a physical: hearing tests, visual associations, heart rate tests, and some others. He ends up spending his whole day there, which he’s annoyed by. By the end, Jim tells him that one day soon, The Game would start. When Nicholas asks what The Game is, and all Jim tells him is that it’s different for everyone.
The next day when Nicholas goes home after work, he finds an adult-sized dummy clown in his driveway, in the spot where his father landed when he killed himself. This understandably unnerves Nicholas, but brings the dummy inside, where he finds a key in the clown’s mouth. Also in the clown is a camera, which Nicholas finds out when his TV begins speaking to him, telling him about the steps of The Game, and that the key would be to something he needed, he just needs to keep an eye out for it.
I can’t go into the full details without making this a three-hour-long read, but what I can say is this: in the following days, Nicholas is suspicious of everyone and everything he sees. He even thinks the key is for his briefcase, which he mysteriously can’t open. The Game truly starts at a restaurant he regularly frequents when a waitress named Christine (Deborah Kara Unger) spills a tray of beverages all over him. She apologizes profusely, he rejects it, she calls him an asshole, and promptly gets fired. Nicholas is moved to a different table where a “waiter” drops off a note that tells him to not let Christine get away.
Nicholas catches up with her outside, where she brushes him off, but then a man crossing the street collapses. Christine performs CPR on him while Nicholas hails down a police car. An ambulance shows up, Christine and Nicholas are made to ride in it to the hospital, and when they get there, all the lights in the garage turn off and everyone runs away. Christine is naturally suspicious of this, but Nicholas explains that it’s part of The Game. As they walk through the garage, an elevator door opens , so they get in and push the button for the lobby. When nothing happens, Nicholas takes out the key, turns it in a slot, and the elevator starts to move.
But then it stops, so the two climb through the ceiling and get to the closest floor. Nicholas realizes he forgot his briefcase in the elevator, but the doors have shut, and there’s nothing he can do. They start to head toward a door when Nicholas recognizes the building they’re in: it’s the CRS local headquarters. They trip a laser alarm, which leads to a chase with security, complete with a dog. Ultimately, they get away and go to Nicholas’ office, where he (for some reason) has a shower. Since they got incredibly dirty during the chase, Christine asks if she can wash up while Nicholas calls for a cab.
The next morning, Nicholas wakes up to the sound of his phone. It’s his assistant who’s wondering where he is. He tells her he’ll be there soon, and she lists off calls he’s gotten so far, including from a hotel that has his credit card. He calls the hotel, and they inform him that the flowers have been sent to his room. He goes to the hotel, finds out he somehow already has a key card, and when he gets to his room, there’s an abundance of drugs, porn, and photographs of him and a faceless woman wearing nothing but a red bra, which are surrounding – and in- his briefcase. He does his best to clean up and takes the photographs with him.
After this, he goes back home where he finds the place has been broken into, and there’s graffiti in every room he steps in. At one point, he finds a piece of paper that reads, “Like my father before me, I choose eternal sleep,” and a photo of his father’s suicide. This is what really sends him off the rails. He starts to call the police, but before he can complete it, Conrad shows up in a panic.
They go for a drive and Conrad is on edge, talking about how he screwed up with CRS, that they keep messing with his life, and that he’s even tried to pay them more to make them stop. The car gets a flat tire, and Nicholas moves to get the jack out of the trunk and tells Conrad to get something out of the glove box. When Conrad opens it, dozens of keys labeled “CRS” come falling out, and he accuses Nicholas of being in on the whole thing before running off.
Nicholas finds out where Christine lives by looking up the address where the cab dropped her off. When he goes to her house, she lets him in and says that they can talk. She had been sleeping when he showed up, so says she’ll get dressed. While she’s gone, Nicholas notices that one of her lamps has smoke rising from it. When he looks inside the shade, he sees a sales tag still attached and smoldering from the bulb. He removes it, but burns himself in the process, so goes to the sink to run water over it. However, the water won’t turn on. He gets the feeling of suspicion and looks in the refrigerator, only to find it empty. The books on the shelves are props. The photos in frames are cutouts from magazines. When she returns and he asks her about it, she whispers to him that there’s a camera in the fire alarm. He gets angry, breaks it, and all hell breaks loose.
People from CRS show up in full SWAT gear and begin shooting up the house. Christine and Nicholas escape, and as they drive away, she tells him that she’s an employee for CRS, but is scared of them, and that Nicholas has been conned.
He drives them to a cabin, one that his family clearly owns based on the family photos inside, and Christine makes them tea. He drinks it while Christine explains how CRS is able to scam people by draining their accounts, and Nicholas calls up one of the banks himself to check, but finds that it’s been emptied. He then calls his lawyer, Sam Sutherland (Peter Donat), who has also checked the accounts and assures him that everything is fine. Christine tells Nicholas that Sam is in on it, so Nicholas hangs up. But when he does, his vision starts to blur, and he realizes that Christine has drugged him through the tea.
He wakes up in a coffin-like box in some sort of tunnel. When he breaks out, he finds himself in a cemetery in Mexico. He has no money on him, no passport, and no ID, so he smuggles himself back into America and hitchhikes to Sacramento. When he gets there, he goes to his house and sees that it’s been foreclosed and almost completely emptied. However, there’s one thing that had been left: a book titled “To Kill A Mockingbird”. He takes it and goes to Elizabeth’s house.
Though divorced, Elizabeth never stopped caring about Nicholas, so when he says that he needs to borrow her car, she lets him. There’s a TV playing and a commercial comes on where he recognizes the face of Jim. It’s at this point he figures out that Jim is an actor, so has him tracked down. Inside the book is actually a gun, and he uses it to get Jim to take him to CRS. When they arrive, almost every person Nicholas had come into contact with is there, including the police. Christine is also there, and he tells her to go with him. As he guides her to a door, the SWAT look-a-likes burst in and start firing, shooting Jim as they aim for Nicholas, who’s running outside.
When he gets Christine out and locks the door, he has the gun on her. She asks him where he got it, and when he says it’s his, she tells him that they searched his house. When he says they obviously missed it, she panics and gets on a radio to call for help. All the while, she’s telling him that it’s all part of The Game: that Jim isn’t really dead, all the bullets are blanks, and that Conrad is on the other side of the door with a bottle of champagne to celebrate Nicholas’ birthday. Nicholas isn’t buying any of it, and when the door opens, Christine screams out to them to stop because of the gun, but they come through, and Nicholas fires. The bullet shatters the champagne bottle and hits Conrad in the middle of his chest.
Christine rushes over, where Jim is already trying to help, and Nicholas is trying to wrap his mind around everything. When Jim tells him that Conrad is dead, Nicholas goes over to the side and jumps off. He crashes through two ceilings of glass and lands on a large, inflatable mat. A few men from CRS explain that he needs to be careful: the glass was breakaway, but he could still get cut. Then they help him up and he sees the room full of people in his life: Ilsa, Elizabeth, Sam, and more. Then Conrad comes up to him to tell him “happy birthday” and gives him a shirt that reads, “I was drugged and left for dead in Mexico – and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”.
When Nicholas sees that everything, even Conrad’s “death”, was all part of The Game, he breaks down and hugs his brother. The lesson he learned was that there was more to life than his job, his money, and his father’s suicide. Now, I don’t know how I would feel about being psychologically tortured like that, but it worked for him.
This movie is gripping from beginning to end. Nicholas’ mind is toyed with to the point where he loses sight of what’s real, and believes that The Game is actually a scam to take him for everything he’s worth. As a result, the viewer believes it, too. What we find out is what Nicholas finds out: that The Game is planned down to the very last detail. Jim even tells Nicholas that he was glad Nicholas jumped, because if he hadn’t, Jim was supposed to throw him off the building.
Even though the title of the movie gives away what it’s about, it’s one of those that has the audience guessing right up until the very end. We don’t know what’s actually going on until Nicholas finds out, and it’s a rather unique take on how twists are done. I first saw this movie years ago, but haven’t watched it since, and I have to say, I’m not sure why. It really is a fantastic film, and for anyone who likes thriller dramas, I very much recommend this.
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