Sometimes a movie can be enjoyed, irrespective of its merits as a piece of filmmaking, for how it makes us feel. Such is David Mamet’s House of Games, firmly rooted in the late 1980s, and evoking a nostalgia for that era which is almost touchingly at cross purposes with the film’s hardboiled message: “don’t trust anybody.”
The film has all of the Mamet tendencies: profanity-laced, circular, writerly dialogue, and a lead character who needs to be led into adopting the skeptical bitterness requisite for survival in the Mamet universe.