Already dead: The Hit

The mystery at the heart of The Killers—whether we refer to the version starring Burt Lancaster (1946) or the radically reconfigured too-violent-for-TV version with Lee Marvin (64)—concerns a marked man’s resignation to death. What would make an ostensibly vital young man accept his executioners without a fight? Why wouldn’t he run when he knows they’re coming to snuff out his life? The special genius of the 1964 version is that, good to its title, it’s actually about the killers, allowing them to ponder openly the psychological state of the person they’ve disposed of—something hired killers aren’t supposed to do. Half the point of hiring a killer is to place murder in the hands of someone with no personal investment in the victim. But the movies have been telling us over and over that killing’s rarely so simple a task, and killers, for all their repugnancy, can feel strangely close to us. They can help us sort through big questions that stories about far noble people have a harder time addressing.

British director Stephen Frears’ The Hit (84), written by Peter Prince, returns to the muddy existential stream of The Killers, though it’s not directly related to either previous film or to the Ernest Hemingway story upon which those films were very loosely based. It follows London mobster-turned-supergrass Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp) from his testifying against his cronies in court to his idyllic life in hiding in Spain, a life that, ten years after his betrayal, is about to end. He’s abducted by a thin, funereal figure in a pale suit named Braddock (John Hurt) and a flamboyantly unseasoned thug of an apprentice named Myron (Tim Roth). They are to drive Willie over the border to Paris where they’ll finish the job in the presence of their employer. But what begins to eat at the voluble Myron, and perhaps even at the stoic Braddock, is how detached Parker seems about the whole thing. He’s positively serene, explaining, with a shrug and a smile, that dying’s no big deal. “It’s as natural as breathing.” Why isn’t he nervous, groveling, wriggling away? He must have something up his sleeve.

As with The Killers, there’ll come a point in The Hit where the nature of this resignation will be exposed. Well, kind of. Unlike the victims in The Killers, Willie’s interior logic doesn’t seem to be dictated by frustrated romance or unconscious desires for suicide. What’s especially interesting is how The Hit, which may very well not have been written with The Killers in mind at all, seems to have learned a little something from both Killers. It initially has us identify with Willie, who may be a dirty snitch, but whose desire to escape the London underworld for the Costa del sol is hardly tough to relate to. He’s also handsome, charming, and utterly watchable. Which is to say he’s Terrence Stamp, who would bring a similar flair to a not dissimilar character many years later in The Limey (99), which itself appropriated images of Stamp playing yet another sympathetic criminal in Poor Cow (67).

But then something deliciously odd happens, something the classicists say you’re not to do. The Hit switches protagonists, gradually abandoning Willie in favour of Braddock, the least forthcoming guy in the movie, a man whose true identity is so elusive that the final words spoken are questions put to him about which of many men he might actually be. Hurt is at his most fascinatingly blank. He doesn’t answer. And this blurring of identities, along with the burrowing into a new life while shedding the old one, along with the Spanish landscape and the beautiful young woman along for the ride (Laura del Sol), recalls yet another movie about unspoken desperation and the complicated assimilation of roles and duties: Antonioni’s The Passenger (75). So besides helping us to rediscover a forgotten gem of 1980s British cinema, a movie that’s smart, artful, strange, often gorgeous and entertaining enough to recommend to just about anyone, not to say brilliantly acted, Criterion’s new DVD release is also a fascinating little piece in a larger cinematic lineage, pointing both backward and forward toward a number of history’s more interesting movies that deal with the psychic geometries of death, assassination, secrets, and surrender.

Among Criterion’s typically superb special features, there’s a terrific essay by Graham Fuller and an audio commentary that finds Frears, Prince, Hurt, Roth and editor Mick Audsley recalling in relaxed, accessible language the thrill of moving into features after years in British television, the challenges of making a road movie in a foreign country with very little money, and how awesome is Spanish legend Fernando Rey, who plays a key supporting role. I especially appreciated Roth’s personal musings on the diversity of performance styles on display. The Hit was one of Roth’s first major roles, and, while watching a shot that features he, Hurt and Stamp seated together in the car, he draws our attention to how elegantly distinct acting sensibilities can harmonize, all of them playfully rubbing up against one another for the camera to simply soak up. All in all, a treat.

Know what? Not that funny...

Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of studied, robotic idea of politeness, seem to spread through the isolated world of the film like some chillingly disaffected infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time seeking to exact a more or less identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They begin by penetrating the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour. They then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants' favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those who’ve followed the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable, perhaps undesirable, déjà vu. Haneke is not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house and surroundings where it all takes place, everything has been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication is so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail. (Hey, there’s soymilk in the fridge this time!)

With regard to the performances, as someone who doesn’t speak German it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. While the characters are virtually unrecognizable as human beings, even sociopathic human beings, Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and little Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror/fantasy remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, and begins the film with a bit more vulnerability than Susanne Lothar, her 1997 counterpart. Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games, in both versions, is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence in movies. The critique filters into the film through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us all of these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are the sort of winky alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or, in the film’s most tiresome scene, pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no identifiable rules, no interior logic, to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.

Let me be clear: I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all seem to succeed where both versions of Funny Games fail: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold certain pieces of what would normally be crucial information as a way to coerce our more active participation with the narrative and the many layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review of the film, Robert Koehler suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” I agree that you do indeed need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate the ideas it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a thriller or horror film need to be so loftily schematic and relentlessly cold in order to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters?