House of Games (1987)

[balthazar_bee]

Originally Posted by thatguamguy

"Precisely crafted" is about the writing. "Poorly delivered" is about the acting/directing. They're not contradictory. While I do like Mamet as a director, I can't argue with anybody who finds the lack of inflection that he deliberately elicits from his actors to be unengaging.

While I won't claim it's to everyone's taste, I still think "poorly delivered" is wildly off-base, particularly in the case of House of Games. Mantegna's performance is probably the best of his career, and even Crouse -- who takes a lot of shit generally, to the extent that anyone knows who she is -- is terrific.

The way she withholds conventional emotional responses makes her

[Show spoiler]final scene with Mantegna a showstopper, because for all the wrong he's done her, his character does understand her. He's done a better job of analyzing what makes her tick than she has with her patients. She's coming to understand that she's capable of terrible actions, and her deadpan delivery of "Beg for your life or I'm going to kill you" is go-straight-to-the-front-of-the-line ownage.