The Definitives
House of Games (1987)
Director: David Mamet
Cast: Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, and Ricky Jay
Rated: R
Runtime: 102 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
9/3/2007
Original Release Date:
10/11/1987
You enter a smoky, dark room and are seated at a poker table. Nothing is visible, apart from an overhead lamp that spotlights cards, chips, and the hands and faces of your opponents. With their blank expressions and rigid posture, hand after losing hand you never realize that your rivals are marionettes, puppeteered from an above-residing gamesmaster. He knows your cards before they are dealt, so every call finds you losing money. And finally, when your money is gone, the lights flick on to reveal the wooden faces of your lifeless competitors.
David Mamet works with illusion, in the dark, gears turning, without benefit of snazzy computer-effects or pyrotechnics (or marionettes). His magic resides in a foundational structure of dialogue and tight scriptwriting, one that operates to infer, telling you what without really telling you what. He meticulously plans how every actor will say each line in his “Mametspeak”, as it has been dubbed, and does not waste a word. We can not take a single detail for granted; when we have collected those details and can reflect on them in total, we can fully understand his work.
Mamet’s 1987 directorial debut House of Games contains motifs used throughout his subsequent films—most notably, the confidence game, or simply “The Con”. Mamet bestows his confidence in the viewer, helping us believe we are smart enough to keep up. We trust that he will take the narrative where it will go impliedly; all at once a turn occurs, changing everything in the movie. Which leads me to another Mametism: giving the viewer the illusion of control when, of course, we have none. We are afforded an apparent respect as members of an audience: Mamet seems to be generous, when really he has given up nothing. Without a doubt, House of Games employs The Con, except here it is but the means to conceal and reveal truths in an entrenched character study.
House of Games veils its main character, Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife at the time), a practicing psychiatrist and author, behind cold ambiguity. The first scene shows Margaret Ford signing her new book, Driven, a psychiatric study of obsessive compulsion, for a fan. From this onset, we can see Mamet demanded that Crouse mute her emotions. He believes there is no need for “feeling” with his dialogue; accordingly, Crouse’s speech is so blank it is almost monotone. Meaning is inferred through words, or lack thereof, as opposed to how they are spoken. Crouse has been criticized for these early scenes, since her acting is pointedly expression-deficient. She barely smiles and speaks like an automaton; her body language is static, signifying neither intro nor extroversion, nor typically male or female traits—Crouse gives an asexual performance. This suggests Dr. Margaret Ford has control over her emotions, unlike her subjects, whom we see range from an insane murderer to a suicidal, habitual gambler.
Margaret meets Mike Manusco (Mamet favorite Joe Mantegna), a gambler of sorts, in an attempt to “save” one of her patients who owes Mike a gambling debt. Cardplayer and “bad boy”, Mike sizes her up before they speak, and he agrees to write off her patient’s debt if she does him a favor. In Mike’s current poker game, his opponent, a Las Vegas card shark (Ricky Jay), has a “Tell” or giveaway. By reading the Tell, Mike can see if the gambler is bluffing, giving Mike the advantage, thus winning him a large pot. Since the gambler knows Mike has seen his Tell, when Mike leaves the room, Margaret can watch for it, inform Mike if it occurred, and assist him in winning the hand. Except, the Tell reads wrong and Mike loses. The Las Vegas card shark wants his victory money, six-thousand dollars, which Mike cannot cover. Margaret offers a check after the card shark pulls a gun and is ready to give this complete stranger her money.
Dr. Ford exists in a kind of limbo where she feels helpless to assist her far-gone patients. She attained success with her compulsion book, but now she realizes that truly helping people is a delusion. Escaping into Manusco’s gambling lair, called “House of Games”, she finds herself enlivened by risk. Awakening into self-revelation, she thrusts herself into a den of thieves. She seems drawn to Mike’s behavior, thrilled by it, and proposes that he be the subject of her next book—a look into the world of bad men.
Mamet carefully constructs Lindsay Crouse’s character, hinting at greater problems often overlooked by audiences preoccupied by aspects of The Con. Reading other critics’ reviews for House of Games, I find it disappointing that few of them mention the subtleties of her performance as described in Mamet’s script, mistaking it as poor acting. Rather, she follows Mamet’s faultless description and direction. Margaret chain smokes, so Mamet shoots several filled ashtrays, relating that she wrote Driven based on personal knowledge. She repeatedly “cracks out of turn” (a Freudian slip), which Crouse verbally underlines—her slippage becomes significant in the climax scene, making Crouse’s emphasis dramatically awkward in its spoken moment, but important later on.
Also, notice how when we see Margaret sleep—twice within the film—it is only on couches. Conceivably, this is an indication of claustrophobia; she resists sleeping where she is intended to, as the very idea is confining. We also see that her desk is turned toward the window, her back awkwardly facing her office door. Her claustrophobia demands that she look out a window to see open space, rather than looking up to the confines of her office. Furthermore, in two cases Margaret feels the need to escape: The first instance occurs in the mental institution where she works; she walks down a long corridor of cells, at the end of which an attendant labors to find the correct key to open the barred door. Margaret twitches with unease until it opens. Another case comes about in a hotel room, where a cop pulls his badge and intends to arrest Margaret and Mike. Margaret turns to Mike and says, “I’ve gotta get out of here.” Mike rushes the cop. Margaret dashes for the door on tenterhooks to escape, only in their tussle Mike and the cop block her from getting it fully open. A glint of light shines on her face, over her eye; escape is in sight, yet urgently unattainable.
Crouse’s Margaret also suffers from kleptomania, the symptoms of which become Mamet’s most concentrated sign. Her compulsion is handed-over from Mike, who, after they make love in another man’s hotel room, suggests that when people are fired they should steal something from their place of employment to feel superior. She looks over treats belonging to the room’s occupant: some cash, a comb, cigars and so forth are strewn out on a dresser. She finds a pocket knife and holds it as if it were a wondrous treasure. When Mike reenters the room, she quickly hides it away in her pocket, another compulsion born.
Any power that might have elevated Margaret above her patients, or Mike, is denied by her kleptomaniac guilt. Her psychiatrist friend, Dr. Littauer (Lilia Skala), suggests that when someone has done something awful, they must forgive themselves. In the final scene of House of Games, Margaret has long since forgiven herself for her misdeeds throughout the movie. Self-clemency washes away whatever crimes she may have committed, giving way for a guilt-free, amoral existence.
Mamet’s writerly signature is his dialogue, as it is often the stoppage point from where people can accept or deny his work. Using often untraceable plays on words, his characters speak in amalgamated clichés, but they are manipulated so that their meaning changes given the context. The line, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” in House of Games is both ironic and tragic given its post. Placing weight on a specific word adjusts its meaning, and Mamet acknowledges that in his dialogue. He likes to encircle entire strings of conversation around the meaning of words, such as when Mike explains The Con to Margaret, saying “It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.” Concentration on a word as an idea lends to Mamet’s blatant repetition, which is more like a pulse or musical tempo than reiteration. Filled with half-finished sentences and assumed thoughts, he forces us to consider the power of language. We are meant to deliberate over intended and possible meanings conveyed in Mamet’s lingo, and so his words, more so than visuals or actors, are the most important element in his pictures.
Mamet grew up in Chicago where he began a career writing for the stage. His plays Sexual Perversity in Chicago (later made into the film About Last Night…) and American Buffalo gained him instant acclaim in the late 1970s. Founding the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Company, Mamet was introduced to a number of his later stock company, including frequent players Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy. While in Chicago, Mamet surrounded himself with real-life gamblers, magicians, and sleight-of-hand experts that would later give House of Games unflinching authenticity. Ricky Jay, another of Mamet’s reserve of film actors, is the magic consultant on films like The Prestige and The Illusionist. Jay divulged tricks of the trade—old tricks to him, new to us—for Mamet’s film, particularly the ins and outs of various Short Con strategies.
Mamet began his scriptwriting career in 1981, with an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in a lusty interpretation of the already classic film. The next year, he wrote The Verdict, another adaptation; this time he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1984, the play Glengarry Glenn Ross earned Mamet the Pulitzer Prize for drama, forever making him a credible voice in American cinema and stage. He went on to write essays and give lectures on screenwriting, most notably in the book On Directing Film, taken from Mamet’s lectures at Columbia University, which features some of the best, harsh advice young directors should consider when writing and directing a movie. In his lectures, he talks at length about not necessarily showing the audience actions or time, but rather denoting them with detail. For example, in Mamet’s 2004 film Spartan the camera briefly passes over a broken door frame, cops stand about—this tells us a raid occurred. Showing the raid is a pointless piece of action, unimportant to the story; whatever information derived from the raid—that is the meat, which Mamet is so eager to cut into.
Mamet works as Hollywood’s go-to script doctor, sometimes taking uncredited work, such as rewriting John Frankenheimer’s last great film Ronin under the name “Richard Weisz”. His impressive body of work as screenwriter has been his most significant contribution to film (when not in a director’s chair). With his scripts for The Untouchables, Hoffa, The Edge, and Wag the Dog, we see signs of Mamet’s dialogue guiding other directors to focus on words, rather than the action responding to them.
Glengarry Glen Ross was eventually adapted to film in 1992 with James Foley directing. Mamet wrote the screenplay, which is for the most part verbatim from the play, save for a scathing scene Mamet included where a bigwig salesman, played to perfection by Alec Baldwin, gives a “motivational” speech to two-bit real estate salesman in a crummy boiler room. Here we see the pinnacle of Mamet’s reputation, as he is widely known for harsh, abusive dialogue. His 150-plus uses of the word “fuck” in the film never lose their potency. Baldwin’s character tells the shabby salesman, “What’s my name? Fuck You, that’s my name.”
Mantegna, though he won a Tony Award for his stage performance of Glengarry Glen Ross’ Ricky Roma, was not asked to reprise the role on film. Instead, Al Pacino, who originally turned down the part for the stage, agreed to it for the movie and was ultimately nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Foley may not have Mamet’s consistent filmography (in fact, Foley subsequently failed when attempting his own Mamet-styled movie about The Con, called Confidence), but directs Glengarry Glen Ross with a fluid camera and heavily stylized uses of rain and washes of color. It is the best film to be associated with Mamet that he did not direct.
The Con has become a common subgenre, greeting classics like The Sting with an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1974. Mamet’s films involve all kinds of cons and never are they limited to just poker, heists, double-cross, et cetera. In Mamet’s State and Main, we see a Hollywood film crew tempt an idealistic writer, swindling the writer with words, promises, and fame—a moral con—until his ideals match their own. With Homicide, perhaps Mamet’s most underappreciated masterpiece, a detective’s lawful ideals are shattered by his dedication to Judaism. Or take Spartan, where Mamet resists revealing the name of his “McGuffin” throughout most of the picture.
Both House of Games and its younger brother, Mamet’s 1997 film The Spanish Prisoner, refrain from disclosure, admit nothing forthright, and yet tell us everything we need to know. We pick up clues along the way, thinking we know where Mamet is going—we never do, though. For every revelation there is another lie, so confessions seem temporary at best, even when they are true. I have watched The Spanish Prisoner a handful of times, and at each instance I go back and forth about the ending. Conceivably there is another, assumed turn beyond where the narrative leaves it—I cannot say with any certainty where the twists stop.
People mistake House of Games as a movie about The Con. The director’s cinematic sleight-of-hand proposes that we focus on trickery and twisting intentions, when the film’s Dr. Margaret Ford-bookends describe its true intention. We are not following money; we follow a character. The film’s con setup consumes us in Lindsay Crouse’s role as the victim and eventual self-assured kleptomaniac, though its façade speaks heartily in terms of conmen and their practices.
Mamet’s filmconvinces us that its narrative surrounds The Con, whereas its turning plot instead presents a metaphor for Dr. Margaret Ford’s occupational angst. The Con relies on giving trust, which is ultimately abused; or in Margaret’s case, providing her patients with the impression that her psychiatry will help when she knows it will not. She deceives her patients daily in persuading them that they need her. After being conned herself, Margaret realizes that she too is a conman, thus can later accept her own kleptomania and her daily swindling of patients via counsel.
Mamet’s actors are conduits for his language, which more than camerawork, costumes, or minimalist art direction, is the apex of his films. Within cinema’s pointedly visual medium, a small number of directors have commanded audiences to focus on words rather than pictures. Mamet’s wordsmithing chimes like visceral poetry, keeping tempo as the film’s percussion, making his voice one of the most pronounced in modern film.