'House of Games' Question

[TaylorTRoom]

***Spoiler Warning****

This is going to have a lot of spoilers.


The ending...I was left thinking that there was a lot more to Lindsay Crouse's character than Mantegna ever guessed. He correctly figured out that she got off on the cons, but I don't think he realized that she was much more in touch with her darker side than he could have guessed.

When I think about how it began, and ended, I get the feeling that her character had maybe killed before.

"You're a bad pony, and I'm not betting on you!"

Thoughts?

 

[HenryGandorf]

um, so what's your question? has she killed before? no. he helped her explore a side she always had tucked away. she lived sometimes vicariously through her patients and their problems, but that's all.

 

[TaylorTRoom]

I think in a David Mamet story, you just can't make the assumptions about characters that you can in other stories (Hitchcock once said that he liked to have Cary Grant in his movies because it saved a reel of character establishment; the audience knew he would be an independent, roguish charmer). Mamet likes to play games with the audience.

You think you have her pegged as a naive, mousy psychiatrist, because that's what Mantegna thinks she is, and she does nothing to go against that archetype until she shoots Mantegna. I guess that's my point. You spend the whole movie hoping she doesn't get entangled into something that could hurt her, wondering whether she should give her confidence to Mantegna and in the last scene you realize that Mantegna was the one in danger the whole time, and he should never have given her his confidence.

So you think back to the beginning- an attractive woman, working as a psychiatrist, but alone, and you project a life onto her- shy, sensitive, maybe lonely. Her enjoyment of the cons supports that idea- maybe it's the first risks she's taken in her life. By the end of the movie, knowing what she is capable of, you wonder if she was a psychopath the whole time, because that now seems like the most likely explanation.

 

[HenryGandorf]

perhaps, but unfortunately, that was more likely the part that was movied up.

in a real story like that, it likely ends with her getting played, and never overhearing about it at the meet for the splits.

she didn't get into her inner demons until she needed revenge. movies end up with the bad guy getting shot more than real life does. this is a movie.