Reconsidering David Fincher’s ‘The Game,’ a great San Francisco film

The manic 1997 thriller “The Game” doesn’t appear on many “best San Francisco films” compilations. And that apparently includes director David Fincher’s list.

The filmmaker, who directed “Zodiac” and “The Game” in the city, told an Indiewire reporter in 2014 that he probably shouldn’t have made the latter movie.

“We didn’t figure out the third act,” Fincher told Indiewire. “And it was my fault, because I thought if you could just keep your foot on the throttle it would be liberating and funny.”

Perhaps Fincher, like many of us, needs to give the movie another chance. “The Game” isn’t quite a masterpiece, a label applied to just a handful of San Francisco films, including “Vertigo” and “The Conversation.” But it’s one of the most nakedly entertaining pieces of cinema that has been shot in San Francisco. And it has aged incredibly well. Time has vaulted the movie to must-see status.

“The Game” features Michael Douglas, in the middle of his run as a Hollywood leading man, playing what turns out to be a combination of his pushed-to-the-edge company man in “Falling Down” (1993) and the corporate raider from “Wall Street” (1987). Douglas is San Francisco financier Nicholas Van Orton, who has a cold approach to business and personal relationships, heightened by the suicide of his father.

Van Orton’s unreliable younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn) gifts Nicholas a voucher for “the game,” run by a mysterious company called Consumer Recreation Services. The masterminds at CRS contaminate Van Orton’s life, sending him on a hellish journey that challenges both the businessman’s superior attitude and emotional distance from his fellow man.

The game in “The Game” is ridiculous, which has always been the major knock on the film. (This feature will be light on spoilers for a 22-year-old film, but be warned there are a few coming.) The screenwriters and Fincher chose not to reveal the nature and motivation of the game’s puppet masters until the last 10 minutes, so the complicated machinations behind what’s happening to Van Orton are not explained — except for some very quick exposition in the end scenes.

On an episode of The Big Event podcast with “The Game” superfan Beth Spotswood, Beth and I tried to break down the economics of the game. We agreed the cost for Conrad’s CRS voucher, with all the bribes, break-ins and damaged property necessary to complete Van Orton’s journey, has to top $1.2 million … in 1997 dollars.

But the suspension of disbelief in “The Game,” always in the name of entertainment, is much less distracting three decades later. This approach of a mystery-wrapped-in-a-puzzle-wrapped-in-a-surreal journey is an entire genre on modern television. Well-received entertainment including “The OA,” “The Leftovers” and “Stranger Things” have established that precisely how and why things are happening isn’t as important as the existential outcome.

Time has been a friend to “The Game” in almost every aspect. Fincher, clearly a Hitchcock fan, pays as much attention to documenting 1997 San Francisco as he does to capturing his lead characters. And he happens upon an important time in the city’s history, seemingly moments before the old-money dominance would be eclipsed by tech growth in the city. With few period piece tells (Van Orton’s cell phone is not distractingly big), “The Game” matches the greatest San Francisco location movies — “Dirty Harry,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” etc. — in capturing both the look and mood of the city at a critical time.

Douglas appears in every sequence, and “The Game” is arguably a top-five career role for him. Penn is superb in a much smaller role. No matter what the awards say, “edgy and paranoid Sean Penn” has always been the best Sean Penn in film, more interesting than “brooding Sean Penn” or “flawed yet noble Sean Penn.”

And there are scores of memorable characters in the margins, including several locals — longtime American Conservatory Theater leading man Peter Donat excels as a lawyer, and look for 49ers great Keena Turner as a cop. James Rebhorn is particularly entertaining as the CRS middleman who tests Van Orton, and screen legend Carroll Baker has nice moments as a live-in maid.

If “The Game” received its deserved level of fame, there would be tours of the locations from the film.

The Filoli mansion in Woodside substitutes flawlessly for Van Orton’s Sea Cliff or Marin estate. (We can’t tell which, because while the Bay Bridge is important in the film, Fincher doesn’t show the Golden Gate Bridge once.) Van Orton famously plunges through the glass ceiling in the Garden Court Restaurant of the Palace Hotel at 2 Montgomery St.

But Fincher, his location scouts and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft got the little things right, too. A Google search in 2019 reveals that the New Moon Chinese restaurant, pivotal to Van Orton’s investigations in the film, is a real place still dispensing takeout.

Other unexpected locations include the lion house at the San Francisco Zoo and the pedestrian stairway into the south end of the Stockton tunnel. Fincher told The Chronicle in 1997 that he loved that spot, for both its topography and history as a location in cinema.

“I found these stairs and thought, ‘Wow this is fantastic,’ ” Fincher said. “It leads down to this great alley. Apparently that is the exact alley in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ where Mary Astor lures Archer and kills him. It has kind of a good cinematic pedigree.”

Fincher, then just 34 years old, was enthusiastic throughout that 1997 interview — about shooting in San Francisco and making a film that would surprise and entertain moviegoers. Fincher in 2019 should feel exactly the same way.

Given another chance, “The Game” adds to the cinematic pedigree of a great movie town.