Directed by David Mamet. Written by Jonathan Katz and David Mamet
Man of words David Mamet’s first go at sitting in the director’s chair is a resounding success, and a pitch-perfect genre exercise. A modern noir, oozing the required cool, but infused with a twisty, teasing exploration of human compulsion that is a pleasure to listen to as much as it is to look at.
Lindsay Crouse is Margaret Ford, a psychiatrist and author getting her first taste of success. For lunch, she enjoys a cigarette and the admiration of others with little time for anything else. She’s already restless, however, and takes it upon herself to settle a patient’s gambling debt. It’s not obvious why, but one senses she feels helpless in actually making a difference for patients.
It takes her downtown to a smoky pool hall called House of Games where a card game’s taking place in the back. Out steps Mike, fast-talking and sharply dressed. A volley of dialogue that smacks of 1940s pretend gangland (“Let’s talk turkey!”) sees Margaret and Mike establish a report, and soon she’s sold. Mike’s a self-admitted con man, and how he manipulates human nature to ply his trade is professionally fascinating to Margaret, but their interplay doesn’t stay professional for long, and you don’t need to be hip to all the angles to know where it’s headed.
Even if the big hoodwink never happens, it doesn’t matter, because House of Games has already earned your confidence. Mamet was a Pulitzer prize winning playwright at this point, so I don’t need to tell you how good his dialogue is in this script, its greatness as obvious and matter-of-fact as the sun rising every day. The back-and-forth of Mike and his cronies is symphonic fencing with both grace and weight behind every word.
Joe Mantegna, who’d frequent Mamet’s call sheet through the years, stars as Mike, and you see why he’d become Mamet’s go-to. Smooth when need be, sardonic, and darkly alluring, Mantegna stuns in how he takes otherwise stylized writing and makes it natural. Anyone who can talk like that, with charisma and confidence, saying what he does, deserves to steal your watch while you’re wearing it.
Ricky Jay, an actual con man, and Mike Nussbaum flank Mantegna as his cronies, and their chemistry should be criminal. While not as effortless as Mantegna, they still have the rhythm down, and they form some kind of verbal jazz trio. In a vacuum you might not notice how well they play, but Lindsay Crouse’s performance as the lead singer is an unwitting control case, her lack of feel for the same dialogue glaringly obvious. Her adding her piece to a scene doesn’t so much break the spell as it pulls open the airplane door, causing the cabin to depressurize with a screech of air.
It’s to the credit of everyone around her that Crouse’s clanger of a performance doesn’t become an albatross around the neck of House of Games, and you wonder what went wrong between Mamet and Crouse, since they were married at the time.
If it was just Mantegna, Jay, and Nussbaum reading lines to each other in an empty sound stage, it’d be enough. To fill the gaps between lines, however, you have a silky smooth score by Alaric Jans where a xylophone’s tumbling notes make everything seem like it’s falling into place, and cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía’s work behind the camera makes you wish your eyesight was better so you could appreciate it more.
He even throws in some bland day time shots to show you how good his nighttime cinematography actually is, where his stellar use of light produces some real stunners while adding drama to even mundane setting shots. In short: everything looks and sounds incredible.
House of Games the rare, ready-made debut, where Mamet shows himself evidently capable. Immediate and overwhelming proof that Mamet is no con, even if every character in House of Games is.
Mikkel Frederiksen 