David Fincher had already made Seven when The Game arrived in 1997, and the two films share a mood if not a body count. The Game stars Michael Douglas as Nicholas Van Orton, a San Francisco investment banker who gets a birthday voucher from his younger brother, Conrad, played by Sean Penn. The voucher is for a game run by a company called Consumer Recreation Services.
Nicholas takes the tests. He is told he has been rejected. Then a wooden clown shows up in his driveway and a news anchor starts talking to him through his television. The film runs 129 minutes and wants you to spend most of them unsure what is real.
Trailer, via UniversalMoviesINTL.
A Wooden Clown in the Driveway
The premise is clean. Nicholas is a cold, divorced loner, and he is haunted by his father, who killed himself by jumping off the roof of the family mansion on his 48th birthday. Nicholas is turning 48. Conrad, who is estranged from him, hands over the CRS voucher as a gift. Nicholas goes to the CRS office and submits to a series of examinations. The company then tells him his application has been rejected. He goes home to the clown.
That is where the film’s engine starts. The clown has a camera in its head. The news anchor on Nicholas’s TV screen tells him he is being watched through it and gives him a number for a CRS 24-hour emergency hotline. He also warns Nicholas not to call the hotline to ask what the object of the game is, because “figuring that out is the object.” It is a good rule for a movie to set for itself, and Fincher follows it further than most directors would.
Christine, the Ambulance, and the Dogs
Nicholas gets a note telling him to follow a waitress named Christine, played by Deborah Kara Unger. She helps a sick man in the street, and the two of them ride in the ambulance with him. In the parking lot afterward, the power is cut and everyone leaves at once. Nicholas and Christine escape the building and are chased through the streets by dogs. Later she tells him she was bribed to attract his attention.
Conrad then shows up at Nicholas’s home, panicked, and apologizes. He claims CRS attacked him. When he finds CRS keys in Nicholas’s car, he accuses Nicholas of working for the company and runs off. Nicholas abandons the car and gets into a taxi. The driver locks the doors, jumps out, and sends the car into San Francisco Bay. Nicholas escapes using a tool that was left for him a day earlier. He goes to the police. They find the CRS office abandoned.
Inside Christine’s Fabricated Home
The abandoned office is the detail that does the most work in The Game. It tells you the company can erase itself faster than Nicholas can report it, and it makes every ordinary space in the film feel like it might be a set. Nicholas finds Christine’s home and discovers that everything inside it is fabricated. She tells him they are being watched.
The film keeps raising the stakes by taking away the ground under Nicholas’s feet rather than by adding new villains. James Rebhorn plays Jim Feingold. Peter Donat plays Samuel Sutherland. Carroll Baker plays Ilsa. Armin Mueller-Stahl plays Anson Baer. Each of them passes through Nicholas’s life with an air of having been placed there, and the film never quite tells you whether that is true.
The Casting Fight Over Conrad
The production history of The Game is its own kind of puzzle. Fincher had wanted to make The Game before Seven, but when Brad Pitt became available for Seven, that film took priority. The success of Seven helped the producers of The Game land a larger budget. They approached Douglas to star. He hesitated at first because he doubted PolyGram was a big enough company to distribute the film. Once he agreed, his name helped push the film into production.
At the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, PolyGram announced that Jodie Foster would star alongside Douglas. Fincher was uncomfortable putting an actor of her stature in a supporting part. After speaking with her, he considered rewriting Conrad as Nicholas’s daughter so Foster could play the role. Douglas did not like that idea and asked for the character to be changed to his sister. Foster found the request peculiar, given that Douglas is nearly 20 years her senior and had appeared with her in Napoleon and Samantha when she was 9 and he was 28. Scheduling conflicts with Robert Zemeckis’s Contact kept her out of the film.
Once Foster left, the role of Conrad was offered to Jeff Bridges, who declined. Sean Penn was eventually cast. Foster later filed a $54.5 million lawsuit against PolyGram over the part, alleging an oral agreement. The source material does not say how that case ended. Fincher and Foster would go on to work together on Panic Room in 2002.
A Test Reel From Crash
Deborah Kara Unger’s audition for Christine was a test reel made from a two-minute sex scene in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Douglas initially thought it was a joke. When he and Fincher met her in person, they cast her.
That story says something about how the film was assembled: on instinct, and on the strength of a single tape. It also says something about what the film asks of Unger, which is to be the one person in Nicholas’s life whose motives stay unclear from her first scene to her last.
What the Game Is Actually About
The Game is a film about a rich man learning that he cannot control anything, made by a director who controls every frame. That tension is the best thing in it and also the thing that wears thin. Fincher’s camera is precise, the San Francisco locations are well chosen, and Douglas is convincing as a man whose competence is the only thing he has ever trusted. The problem is that the film’s rules are deliberately vague, and vagueness is a hard engine to run for 129 minutes. Once you understand that CRS can do anything, nothing CRS does is surprising.
The middle stretch is the strongest. The clown, the hotline warning, the ambulance, the dogs, the taxi in the bay — these are set pieces built on ordinary objects turning hostile. The film is less interested in explaining CRS than in making Nicholas feel the floor move, and for a long while that is enough.
The ending is where the film divides people. It resolves the question of what the game is, and it does so in a way that asks you to accept a very large coincidence as a plan. That is a legitimate choice for a movie about a company that can stage anything, but it also means the film spends its last act asking for trust it has spent two hours teaching you to withhold.
The Game was well received by critics including Roger Ebert and by major periodicals like The New York Times, but its box-office returns were middling next to Seven. It later found a following among Fincher’s fans, some of whom call it one of his best films. That reputation is generous. The film is a well-made puzzle with a hollow center, and the hollow center is not a flaw Fincher intended.
| Year | Film | Director | Box office standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Seven | David Fincher | Strong |
| 1997 | The Game | David Fincher | Middling |
| 2002 | Panic Room | David Fincher | — |
The part worth watching is not the twist. It is the stretch before it, when the film still believes its own rules and Douglas still believes he can outthink them. That is where The Game earns its keep, and it is why the film remains worth a look even when its ending does not hold up.
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