Abel Ferrara's Intense 1993's Melodrama Dangerous Game Is a Different Kind of Madonna Movie But It Still Fucking Sucks
As illustrated most powerfully in her provocative documentary Truth Or Dare, Madonna sees her life as one long performance she’s intent on nailing. There’s something famously calculated and even purposefully insincere at the heart of her persona, a sense that she’s always on. Madonna may be her given name, but she’s turned “Madonna” into a character she has portrayed brilliantly, and sometimes messily, over the course of her decades in the white-hot epicenter of pop culture.
Given the widespread perception that what passes for Madonna’s personal life actually represents an ongoing and extravagant treatise of sex and race and class and gender and sexuality and celebrity, it’s a little strange that this consummate performer is also notorious for being a terrible actress.
In real life, Madonna brilliantly portrays the fascinating and multi-dimensional role of “Madonna” to great controversy and sometimes great acclaim. When called upon to play anybody else, she often seems lost and overwhelmed. It hasn’t been all bad. Madonna was convincing in Desperately Seeking Susan, Truth Or Dare and Dick Tracy, but for the most part her acting career has been one long joke nobody is laughing at, not unlike the motion pictures Shanghai Surprise and Who’s That Girl.
So it feels perverse for cinematic bad boy Abel Ferrara to cast Madonna as an actress, of all things, since her finest and most important performances never seem to be for the big screen. When Ferrara roped Madonna, an A-list star but a C-list actress, into his cinematic shenanigans with 1993’s Dangerous Game, he was at the height of his creative and commercial powers, in the midst of an early to mid-1990s renaissance that would give the world King Of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Body Snatchers, The Addiction and The Funeral.
Ferrara was able to leverage his professional heat for an attention-grabbing cast that paired Madonna as actress Sarah Jennings with Bad Lieutenant star Harvey Keitel as mercurial filmmaker Eddie Israel and, less impressively, James Russo as hot-headed actor Francis Burns.
Burns might just be too out of control, drunk, angry and zonked out of his mind on drugs to effectively play the male lead in Israel’s movie about an out of control degenerate who’s drunk, angry and zonked out of his mind on drugs. The premise for the film within the film involves a pair of wanton hedonists who have devoted their lives to a never-ending series of boozy, coke-fueled sexscapades.
The character Sarah plays clings to her Christianity as a life preserver in a sea go self-negating, increasingly joyless decadence but the character Francis plays excoriates her at length for being a sinner and a hypocrite, for believing in God yet behaving in an ungodly way. The characters in Dangerous Game all seem to be trying to shout their way back in time and into a John Cassavetes psychodrama that might actually be worthy of their furious exertion.
Ferrara favors handlheld cameras that give the proceedings a cinema verite quality, and sometimes shifts between video and film in a further bid to give the film a verisimilitude that falls somewhere between fact and fiction, narrative film and documentary. Dangerous Game isn’t just tedious: it’s boldly meta-tedious. In Dangerous Game, real life and reel life overlap, blur and get hopefully confused but they’re both handled in a punishingly overwrought fashion that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to be emotionally invested in the psychosexual games of these awful show-business players.
Eddie isn’t just an Abel Ferrara-like figure making an unmistakably Ferrara-style melodrama delving deep into Ferrara’s well-worn obsessions. No, Eddie is making what appears to be an unselfconscious and oblivious parody of an Abel Ferrara arthouse shocker, a movie that’s all screeching emotional intensity and no nuance. Ferrara’s endlessly recycled themes tumble forth artlessly as these almost uniformly deplorable characters scream at each other about sex and salvation and redemption and drugs and nihilism and pleasure and other assorted nonsense Ferrara handled way better in the other films he made during this era.
It feels like Ferrara was less interested in collaborating with Madonna than in torturing her. He seems primarily interested in pushing her to her limits as an actress and beyond. Indeed, sadism is the connective tissue behind much of what happens here.
Francis is abusive and assaultive to Sarah onscreen and off yet she is in a sexual relationship with him all the same that feels less like a vehicle for pleasure than a form of self-punishment. It’s as if she’s forcing herself to have sex with this awful man as part of her creative process.
Sarah is also having sex with Eddie, who draws a clear line between his relatively sedate home life as a husband and father and a professional life that calls upon him to constantly push the boundaries. But as the film progresses, that clear line becomes fuzzier and his personal and professional life begin to spiral out of control.
It’s not encouraging when the most memorable aspect of Ferrara and Keitel’s first collaboration following Bad Lieutenant, indeed a film hatched in that cult powerhouse’s looming shadow, is the regrettable choices the film makes with Keitel’s hair. When long and arranged into a strange, modified Prince Valiant conflagration, Keitel bears a curious and deeply distracting resemblance to Tommy Wiseau. When he later pulls it up into a ponytail, meanwhile, he just looks like another asshole having a midlife crisis and making poor follicular choices.
Dangerous Game was designed as an actor’s showcase. It’s an opportunity for its leads to eschew social niceties and understatement and throw themselves into the film’s deafening tabloid melodrama with sweaty intensity and pummeling conviction. Alas, there is no acting in Dangerous Game. There is only feverish overacting, with Russo as the worst culprit.
The problem is that the movie-within-the-movie in Dangerous Game is abysmal. It’s a nauseatingly loud, one-note exploration of a dark night of the soul for a singularly doomed couple that embodies the worst excesses of a certain strain of American independent cinema that worships at the altar of John Cassavetes but mostly just replicates the laziest and most obvious conventions of his films.
The single most moving sequence in Dangerous Game tellingly did not originate with the film itself. Dangerous Game is never more powerful or passionate than in a moment late in the film when Eddie Israel, whose personal and professional life are falling apart, watches a clip of Werner Herzog talking in Burden Of Dreams, Les Blank’s wonderful documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.
In this moment, and in this moment alone, the film finally has something to offer beyond deafening volume, dispiriting hedonism and exhausting intensity. Israel sees the creative and cinematic transcendence he’s after but it’s terminally out of his grasp. He’s not Herzog and it’s easy to see why this troubled man might want to slip out of his personal and professional skin and be reborn anew, a pure artist and not just a spiritually corrupt, hopeless man.
In Dangerous Game, the path of excess leads not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a migraine headache. Ferrara’s dispiritingly excessive inside-show-business psychodrama is intent on punishing everyone in its path, the audience most of all.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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