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it didn’t exactly kill at the box office and isn’t part of anyone’s twentieth-century film canon, though it pulled down a handful of foreign awards. But most moviegoers probably have a film or two filed away in the “hated it but can’t stop thinking about it” category, catalogued thus not because of any intrinsic merits or demerits, but because it cuts too close to home. It tells you something about yourself you’d rather not know, or something about the world you don’t want to accept. If I say that the storyline of House of Games involves an overly cerebral woman spying on a bunch of sleazy but sexy men and then getting her comeuppance, possibly you can see why House of Games would be a movie that makes me nervous.
    A deeply repressed psychiatrist, Margaret Ford is the author of a pop-psychology bestseller, Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life . There’s something off-putting about her from the minute she strides into the frame: with her barbershop coif, stubby nails, no-nonsense gait, and boring businesslike suits, she’s denuded of all the conventional attributes of femininity—asexual or mannish, take your pick. Worse, she’s so humorless—when she smiles, only her mouth moves; the rest of her face is immobile. As played by Lindsay Crouse in a stiff, stagy, mannered performance, it’s like watching an articulate piece of wood. (As it happens, Crouse was married to writer-director Mamet at the time the movie was made; they divorced three years later. If the way he directed her in this role wasn’t one of the grounds, it should have been.) Dr. Ford needs you to be aware of her elevated place in the world—you see it in the hoity-toity way she brandishes her professional competence, which is irritating. Then there are the small hypocrisies: supposedly an expert on compulsion, she’s a workaholic and a chain smoker herself, obsessively scribbling data about her patients in notebooks while trailing Freudian slips behind her like a piece of toilet paper stuck to a shoe. “Physician, hear yourself,” you want to say.
    But it wouldn’t help. This lady shrink is such a stranger to her own desires that she’s lured into acting out her own humiliation in an elaborate con game orchestrated by an ensemble of charismatic con men whose perfect understanding of the female unconscious lets them play her like a jukebox. It doesn’t help that she’s the least self-knowledgeable shrink on the planet, which is—though I am not any sort of shrink myself and would even agree that your average psychotherapist is not, as a matter of course, exactly neurosis-free or especially self-acute—a joke I take to heart nonetheless. In fact, the movie accrues many such jokes at its protagonist’s expense. Consider the overabundance of vehicular symbols—“Ford,” “Driven…” from which an automotive-age Freud would likely deduce a condition of being stuck, stalled, fixated—thus compelled and doomed to neurotic suffering. Which is, indeed, the small jest that motors House of Games .
    Things first start to go south when one of Ford’s patients, Billy, a compulsive gambler, pulls a gun and threatens to shoot himself in the middle of a session. Ford coolly bargains with him: “Give me the gun, and I will help you,” she says confidently. “You don’t do dick, man, it’s all a con game, you do nothing,” he taunts. Nevertheless, a suddenly docile Billy hands over the gun along with a challenge: he owes twenty-five grand he doesn’t have to a guy named Mike—“the Unbeatable Gambler, seen as Omniscient,” according to Ford’s notes—and they’re going to kill him if he doesn’t pay up the next day.
    â€œGive me the gun and I will help you” is the first of a series of exchanges Margaret Ford enters into with men, exchanges that take the form: