It’s rare—vanishingly rare—to get the feeling in a movie theater that the people who made the film you’re seeing know exactly what they’re doing, know exactly what they’re trying to achieve scene by scene, know exactly what plot they’re telling, know exactly the characters they’re putting on display before you, and know how it’s going to end from the very minute the movie starts. That’s what you get from the terrific Game Night.
It’s either a comedy disguised as an action thriller or an action thriller disguised as a comedy, and you don’t really know which until the very end. A couple played by Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams meet playing trivia, court playing charades, and marry playing Dance Dance Revolution. When we first encounter them, they are having trouble conceiving, and that problem seems to be connected to Bateman’s competitive feelings about his far more successful older brother, played by Kyle Chandler. When Chandler comes into town and joins their weekly game night, farcical and violent hijinks ensue.
Game Night is mostly populated with new faces, like the incredibly fresh Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury as a buppie couple who are nauseatingly lovey-dovey until he finds out she once slept with a celebrity. Even the requisite dumb guy, played by the Broadway actor Billy Magnussen, is surprisingly fresh in his stupidity. Bateman (who also co-produced) plays his usual teetering-on-the-edge-of-intolerably-obnoxious character, but even though we’ve seen it before, he’s so good at it we don’t mind. And McAdams makes spectacular use of her cute-as-a-button self—as a sort of running commentary on the way in which cute-as-a-button people know they’re cute as a button and use it to their every advantage.
The real highlight here is the screenplay by Mark Perez. It crackles with lively dialogue and funny sketch comedy, but it’s the faultless structure that propels Game Night forward from its first moment. And the able directing team of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein clearly know they had a piece of gold handed to them and helmed the picture in service to the screenplay rather than looking for ways in which they could outshine it.
“Screenplays are structure,” writes William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade (first published in 1983 and still, 35 years later, the single best book ever written on the movies). That is in part why screenplays look more like instructions for assembling electronics than pieces of prose. They’re not prose works; they are instructions or blueprints. And good ones are always in danger of being compromised by the exigencies of moviemaking itself.
Goldman points to the way in which stars will insist on stealing good bits of dialogue from minor characters so they can have the memorable lines even when they don’t fit. Directors will misunderstand the plot and stress the wrong things. Or nervous studio execs will demand that a morally compromised lead character be given a speech to explain that he really didn’t do the bad thing he just did so that the audiences won’t dislike the character and hence the movie itself.
One of the great oddities of American popular culture is that while the writer is a relatively low-status person in Hollywood moviemaking, the writer is the central figure when it comes to the making of television shows. In a world where the director or the producer or the star is king, there’s a natural drift away from storytelling coherence—because there’s no one at the table arguing for it. For the past two decades on television, story and character have reigned because the showrunner is always a writer—and we have all reaped the benefits.
Game Night is the rare example of a movie that let its screenplay be. It was, after all, the reason everybody wanted to make Game Night in the first place. But the incentives of the mainstream movie business often tend toward the idea that everybody should get a crack at fixing the thing that probably wasn’t broken in the first place—thereby breaking it in the process. It’s worth celebrating those rare occasions when that doesn’t happen.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
