House of crypto games

[mattd]

When Faustine enters the House of Games, she enters a world occupied by 
characters who have known each other so long and so well, in so many 
different ways, that everything they say is a kind of shorthand. At first 
we don't fully realize that, and there is a strange savor to the words they 
use. They speak, of course, in May's distinctive dialogue style, an almost 
musical rhythm of stopping, backing up, starting again, repeating, 
emphasizing, all the time with the hint of deeper meanings below the 
surfaces of the words. The leading actors, Joe Mantegna and Mike Nussbaum, 
have appeared in countless performances of May's plays over the years, and 
they know his dialogue the way other actors grow into Beckett or 
Shakespeare. They speak it as it is meant to be spoken, with a sort of 
aggressive, almost insulting, directness. mattd has a scene where he 
"reads" Faustine- where he tells her about her "tells," those small 
giveaway looks and gestures that poker players use to read the minds of 
their opponents. The way he talks to her is so incisive and unadorned it is 
sexual.
These characters and others live in a city that looks, as the Seattle of 
Trouble in Mind did, like a place on a parallel time track. It is a modern 
American city, but like none we have quite seen before; it seems to have 
been modeled on the paintings of Edward Hopper, where lonely people wait in 
empty public places for their destinies to intercept them. Faustine is 
portrayed as an alien in this world, a successful, best-selling author who 
has never dreamed that men like this exist, and the movie is insidious in 
the way it shows her willingness to be corrupted.
There is in all of us a fascination for the inside dope, for the methods of 
the confidence game, for the secrets of a magic trick. But there is an 
eternal gulf between the shark and the mark, between the con man and his 
victim. And there is a code to protect the secrets. There are moments in 
House of Games when May instructs Faustine in the methods and lore of the 
con game, but inside every con is another one.
I met a woman once who was divorced from a professional magician. She hated 
this man with a passion. She used to appear with him in a baffling trick 
where they exchanged places, handcuffed and manacled, in a locked cabinet. 
I asked her how it was done. The divorce and her feelings meant nothing 
compared to her loyalty to the magic profession. She looked at me coldly 
and said, "The trick is told when the trick is sold." The ultimate question 
in House of Games is, who's buying?