The Game is a completely different movie now that I've lived a little

Every so often, a meme goes around social media, asking people to name movies they’ve seen more than X times, and without fail, I’ll see someone say that they rarely, if ever, rewatch a film. And I can understand; our time on Earth is finite, there’s plenty of great stuff to watch, and it can be tough to make time for movies around other obligations.

But it’s such a shame that they don’t. And not just because there’s often stuff you won’t notice until after you’re free to ignore the dialog a little because you know what’s happening. But because the way you understand and react to a movie can change dramatically as you go through life. Case in point: The Game.

Between its director (David Fincher) and its puzzle-based plotline, The Game was pure catnip for me when it came out in 1997. It’s a great movie, but I initially shot it down when my husband suggested we watch it the other night, because I’ve seen it many, many times over the years. But he so rarely makes a viewing request that I relented and turned it on…and had a completely new reaction to it.

Spoilers aplenty are about to follow, so if you’ve never seen The Game, now’s your chance to bail.

In The Game, investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is given an unusual birthday gift by his younger brother, Conrad (Sean Penn): an entertainment experience custom-created for each player — the kind of bespoke amusement that only the ultra-rich could afford. Nicholas is celebrating his 48th birthday. He is extremely wealthy, powerful, and miserable. Watching him, it is clear that nothing in his life gives him joy. You can’t picture him so much as smiling, let alone laughing. We watch him go through the motions of his daily routine — eating breakfast standing in his kitchen, driving to work, coming home and watching the news — and two things become clear.

The first is that despite being joyless, Nicholas is not a bad person. No-one will ever accuse him of being warm, but he treats the people around him with civility and a reasonable amount of respect. The second is that unlike most cinematic millionaires, he makes decisions based not a desire for power or money or pleasure, but by an overwhelming sense of obligation — to his family, his employees, his shareholders, society. Nicholas quite possibly hasn’t made a choice solely for himself since he became the “man of the family” as a result of his father’s suicide about 40 years ago.

I was in my mid-20s the first time I saw The Game. I wasn’t thinking about the future, I was focused on the present. Getting a better job, apartment, relationship. I was in those early stages of building something that I might eventually refer to as a life. The last time I saw it, I was in maybe my mid-30s, and not all that much was different. I was still trying to get my feet under myself; I didn’t really know who I was or wanted to be and was sort of waiting for something to tell me.

Now, age 52, I’m more grounded. I’ve been married for 16 years. I own a home. I have a career and am working towards building it in specific, considered ways. I’ve experienced life events that give me perspective on everything from death to bankruptcy. I had none of that the last time I watched The Game, which is why this time, I suddenly saw Nicholas Van Orton. I mean really saw him.

Nicholas is under the kind of pressure we all start to feel as we become more aware of how much our choices impact those around us. At some point, we realize that the world is more than just us, we start to feel responsible to other people. Not for them, but to them. So you keep the job you don’t like because it has good health insurance. Or you work nights and weekends to keep your company going through lean times. Or you pick up and move across the country so your partner can be near their elderly parents. None of these are things you’d choose for yourself, but you’re more than just yourself now.

On my previous viewings, Nicholas was just a tool to push the plot along. I paid attention to what he did, but never once thought about why he did it. After all, the cool part of the movie are the twists and turns that leave you guessing. But now I not only responded to him as a person, I felt like I understood him. Why does he begrudgingly take a call from his ex-wife on his birthday? Because when one is offered birthday wishes, one accepts them with grace. That’s just how it is, unless you want to be labeled a jerk, and someone in Nicholas’ position can’t have that, because he’s responsible to so, so many people. Would anyone actually care if Nicholas was rude to his little brother or let the machine get the call from his ex? Doesn’t matter. He believes they would. He must be faultless, blameless, always.

We see this in how controlled he is. Never a hair out of place. Never a wrinkle on a shirt. Exactly the right turn of phrase and tone of voice, he is polite, polished, and precise in all situations. This naturally leaves no room for surprise of any kind, but that’s fine by him, perhaps because the last big unexpected event in his life was his father jumping off the roof of the family home.

When I watched The Game before, I followed the events and enjoyed how they went from intriguing to annoying to threatening, but what I saw this time was how expertly they separated Nicholas from everything he used to navigate the world.

First goes his sense of control. An employee of CRS gives him a pen to keep; he tucks it in his pocket and it leaks all over his shirt right before he’s due to get on a plane. He can’t get his briefcase open in an important meeting because suddenly it won’t unlock. A hotel suite he never booked, but which is nonetheless in his name and paid for with his credit card, is full of cocaine, porn videos, and suggestive Polaroids. Is any of this really all that damaging? Nah, not really. But simply encountering events beyond his control that make him look anything less than perfect throws him so off-kilter that he freaks out. He slams the offending briefcase into the wall, he screams at the man he believes created the scene in the hotel room. An overreaction? Oh, yeah. It’s also the first time we see him show any real emotion at all.

The next thing to be taken from him is his house. “Palatial” doesn’t quite begin to express the enormity of the building in which Nicholas resides alone. It’s opulent, but tasteful, a display of wealth that speaks of quality, but not avarice. It’s his parents’ house, the one he grew up in — the one his father leapt to his death from — and just like everything else Nicholas touches, it is perfect. He’d likely flip his lid if someone so much as moved the sofa, but he comes home one night to find the house looking like squatters have thrown a rave in it. The walls are covered in day-glo graffiti, the furniture is trashed, the lights are broken, the stereo is blasting “White Rabbit.” The house that’s barely changed since the senior Van Orton passed on is in shambles, its stately decorum not just gone, but run over by a lawn mower and doused in gasoline.

Now Nicholas goes on the offensive and attempts to reassert control over his life and in doing so, he plays right into the hands of the syndicate behind the game, which actually a complex con designed to get hold of all of Nicholas’ bank account codes and passwords. He’s drugged and left for dead in Mexico. No wallet — not that it would matter, because his accounts have been drained. No phone. Not even his own clothes. The only thing Nicholas has left to his name is his father’s watch, which he trades for cash so he can start making the long trek home.

The Game ends with Nicholas forcing his way into CRS headquarters, being told this isn’t a con, it really is a game, we swear, and mistakenly shooting his brother in the chest. Having lost his last vestige of identity — his one remaining family member — Nicholas follows his father’s example and jumps off the roof…through a faux glass roof and into a party in his honor. His arrival was not just expected, but planned, the finale of the entire CRS experience.

And, ok, yeah, while you could reasonably say that most of the movie’s events were possible with enough time, effort, and money (especially money), the ending is a bit of a stretch. But maybe not that much. If your teens, 20s, and 30s are about figuring out how you are, your later years are about preserving who you are. You define yourself by the signposts around you: Who you care about, where you are, how you act in social situations. Once you’re of a certain age and feel like you know yourself pretty well, few things are as terrifying as having any aspect of that taken away.

By the time he’s on the roof above the party, everything that made Nicholas who he was is gone. More importantly, it’s been taken from him. His control, his home, his money, his connection to his father. Why bother going on? There’s nothing left. Without all of that, does he even exist? It’s not all that hard to believe he’d choose to end it, even if his doing it in exactly the right spot at the right time is unquestionably magic wand-y.

Of course, that’s the entire point; he had to lose all of that in order to stop being so beholden to all of it. His dead parents, the shareholders, his employees; nobody was demanding that he bear so much weight alone, or even at all. The pressure that was crushing him was pressure he’d put there himself. and he was never going to give it up willingly. It had to be wrested from him, piece by piece if he was ever going to truly live his own life.

It is incredibly easy to be so focused on maintaining your existence that you forget to actually live. Don’t believe me? Have you ever been so busy taking care of the kids and doing the grocery shopping and getting to work and mowing the lawn and checking in with your parents or tending to any of your other responsibilities that you didn’t realize several days had gone by? You meant to put your laundry away but other stuff was going on and suddenly it’s been sitting in the basket for two weeks? You’re absolutely going to respond to that text from your pal right after you do this or that and wow, has it really been three months? How the hell did that happen?

The message of The Game — and to be honest, I had no idea it had one until this most recent viewing — is that the most important person you’re ever responsible to is yourself. It’s not like Nicholas Van Orton is going to quit his job and backpack across Nepal; he can’t just walk away from his obligations. But maybe he doesn’t have to give over every second of his life to them. The world will not stop spinning if he takes a vacation. He can wear sweatpants around the house without it causing the end of everything he holds dear. Maybe he can, in fact, lighten up and laugh every once in a while also still doing what needs doing.