Con Jobs HOUSE OF GAMES

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Men play games. Women live them. Buy that? Then catch this, from David Mamet. When the Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, he cares less about how you conducted yourself than whether you won or lost. The Guy's into irony. And cruel surprise endings. What's the point of running the only game in town if you can't have your little jokes?

Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) is unaware that she lives in a chancy universe. A trimly repressed psychiatrist, she must believe that whatever problems come her way are amenable to rational solutions. So when one of her patients tells her that the gamblers to whom he owes an impossible sum of money are threatening his life, she marches straight to the House of Games, determined to talk compassionate sense to the management.

The gang there looks as if they might have drifted over after work from the Glengarry Glen Ross real estate office -- especially since Mike, their leader, is played by Joe Mantegna, who was the star salesman in Mamet's sharp, funny play about the hustling of dubious Florida property. This group, however, lives even further out on society's margin. They are peddling greedy dreams unbacked even by swampland. And obviously there is a thing or two they can teach Margaret about practical psychology.

Nice -- her growing sense of fellowship with them. After all, they are in the same business. She manipulates her clients to discover their best selves; they manipulate their marks to tap into their worst natures. Nice, too, her growing excitement (sexual and intellectual) as they seem to draw her deeper into their confidence as well as their confidence games.

Nicest of all is a demonstration of another kind of confidence: Mamet's. Though he has written several scripts (The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables), this is his debut as a film director. He has reached out for an arresting style that is suited to both his story and his superbly compressed way with dialogue. Shooting on location in Seattle, he and Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia have used the city to wonderfully dislocating effect. Indeed, they have transformed Seattle, lighting it like a giant stage set, a succession of false fronts for false behavior.

While one can talk openly about the picture's manner, one dare not get into its intricate plotting, which tweaks, turns and doubles back on itself. House of Games is not a vehicle carrying a Mamet moral; it is the moral, telling us much about the irresistible pull of our own cleverness and how that must inevitably bring us to disaster. It is Margaret, the tyro games player, who turns out to be a bad sport. She demonstrates in a startling way that some funny, phony games can turn out to have deadly consequences. Finally, she must stop pretending to be one of the boys and act a more traditional role: that of a woman wronged. Is Mamet hinting at an ineradicable difference in the playing styles of men and women? Difficult to say. The whole point of this witty and devious work is that in this world you can't be sure of anything.