The "game" of the title refers to family interactions based on the roles that each member is expected to play and not on genuine emotional ties.
[1] The movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to Palme d'Or Winner The Ballad of Narayama).
The Numata family consists of the father, Kōsuke (Juzo Itami); mother, Chikako (Saori Yuki); and two sons, Shinichi (Jun'ichi Tsujita) and Shigeyuki (Ichirōta Miyagawa).
At a family dinner celebration, with all five main characters present, a food fight breaks out and Yoshimoto begins to riot, throwing spaghetti around wildly, pouring wine indiscriminately on the table and hitting the Numatas.
Pre-war films frequently attributed blame for this loss to the forces of urbanization and economic modernization which led to a decline in family cohesion (as in Ozu's The Only Son).
In the postmodern cinema, blame can shift to the “salaryman," the typical, white-collared salaried employee, who is shown to be a neglectful or ineffectual father in many films, including The Family Game.
[10] An example of this technique occurs in the scene when Shigeyuki's classmate, Tsuchiya, suddenly appears in the Numata's front door; Morita is able to include all five characters in one cramped shot, each with a different expression on their face.
According to Donald Richie, the "game" that the family plays is an "enactment the members agree to go through with, a set-up filled with tricks and dodges, a kind of gamble the results of which are not serious.
He kisses him on the cheek when they first meet, sits near him, places his hand on the boy's bare thigh after his fight with a classmate, teaches him martial arts, and even gives him a piggyback ride after the entrance exam.
This epochal shift was marked, another critic said, by Morita's films and the works of novelist Haruki Murakami and musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, leading to a culture which celebrates meaninglessness.
Morita's film overturns this framework through shock value, bizarre framing, deadpan food fights, sexual innuendo and even homosexual undertones.
The attitude of the father is that his son’s education is a commercial venture that he is invested in properly funding so that it will pay off with dividends in the future.
The whole dinner scene is captured in an 8-minute static long take, which shows the characters looking in the direction of the camera seated on the straight table with tutor Yoshimoto in the middle.
The dinner devolves into a verbal altercation between father and older son about the boy's future education and then into a food fight involving the four males, provoked by Yoshimoto's antics.
But in the new Japanese culture represented by the Numatas, the linear composition no longer means accord, and instead their seating in closed proximity results in conflict.
"[18] Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times in 1984, praised the “extraordinary visual design” and also wrote that "The Family Game is so rich that Mr. Morita would seem to be one of the most talented and original of Japan's new generation of film makers.