Dangerous Game

Every time I watch an Abel Ferrara film, I decide afterwards that he's the single most underrated American filmmaker of the last couple decades. Even his less well-reviewed ones like The Addiction and The Funeral are some of the best and most challenging movies I've ever seen. And Dangerous Game confirms that. Lord, what a movie.
It seems to get bad reviews all around the board, and I can only think of two reasons for that- a. critics hate personal films and tend to write them off as indulgent; b. the relentlessly bleak tone of the film. Usually Ferrara's films drop you in the gutter of humanity for 2 hours and then end on a note of transcendent redemption. Dangerous Game just keeps getting deeper and deeper into spiritual death and finally sticks the knife in at the end.
It's kind of his "Day For Night" or "8 1/2"- that is, an expose of the artist's role in the filmmaking process. There are a couple of really great references to that effect. First, "Blue Moon" is heard at two different moments, the opening credits and the end crawl; I saw this as a clear reference to the scene in "8 1/2" where Guido's wife comes to visit him suddenly, knowing that this film is very clearly indebted to Fellini's. The other is towards the end and really gives you something to think about; after an intense fight with his wife, Keitel's character watches "Burden of Dreams", the great documentary on the making of Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo". In particular he sees the scene where Herzog admits that he has absolutely zero sense of satisfaction and happiness with completing the monumental task of making that film, and no one will be able to convince him otherwise; without needing to hear anything from Keitel's director, we realize what Herzog's words mean for him. Having seen "Burden of Dreams" and "Fitzcarraldo" really contributes to the weight of that scene, and it may be considered a weakness of the script to quote a film that not everyone has seen- or maybe Ferrara just knows his audience well enough.
But beyond being just a film about film, Dangerous Game has much in common aesthetically and thematically with emotionally intense chamber dramas like "Scenes From A Marriage", "Paris, Texas", and "A Woman Under the Influence". The tension between characters is almost unbearable at parts. Harvey Keitel has given some classic performances- "Mean Streets", "Bad Lieutenant", "Ulysses' Gaze", "Reservoir Dogs"- and this one is as good as all of those.
I've made it to the end of this review without a single mention of Madonna, which I count as an accomplishment. But now that it's out there, let me say that viewers would get much more out of this film if they didn't spend the entire duration marvelling at the parallels between the actress and her character- her performance is good enough to make those secondary concerns unnecessary.