Challengers
I feel like, with Luca Guadagnino’s films, the lower my expectations, the stronger my feelings are. “I Am Love” I barely remember, and “A Bigger Splash” and “Call Me By Your Name” didn’t do much for me. But, I was pleasantly surprised by how taken I was with his “Suspiria” remake, and I was unexpectedly beguiled by “Bones and All.” After almost eight months, I’m finally catching up with his acclaimed, and successful, “Challengers,” and well, there’s a part of me that just has a shrug for this film.
Sports as an avatar for the complexities of life is nothing new, and that is basically what is unfolding in Justin Kuritzkes’s screenplay. The focal point of the film is on the shifting dynamics between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), two friends on the men’s tennis circuit, and Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a gifted tennis player who is lighting up college sports on the court. At first, Art and Patrick are having fun with the games Tashi is playing between the three of them, but as circumstances change, so do relationship dynamics, and 13 years after their first meeting, Tashi’s career is over from a catastrophic injury, Art’s is taking off with Tashi as his wife and coach (as well as the mother of his daughter), and Patrick is struggling financially, and living in his car as he goes from tournament to tournament. Ahead of the US Open, Art and Patrick take part in a challenger tournament in order to qualify, and of course, they are playing one another in the finals. Let the sparks fly.
(Full disclosure- I played youth tennis in the first couple of years after we moved to Georgia. I was never that good, though; bowling was what I excelled in. But I enjoyed giving it a try, and watching tennis, at the time.)
A film critic’s responsibility is to critique the film in front of them, not the one they have in their heads. In a way, “Challengers” makes good on its trailer’s promise of a sexy, pulsating tennis drama with a romantic triangle in the middle, even if it doesn’t show much beyond three attractive lead actors playing tennis in sweat-drenched outfits. (The hotel room scene with the three of them is the closest we get to real off-court action, and I’ll be honest, the way it plays out was satisfying for this critic.) Where “Challengers” loses me is how it practically spells out its metaphors in visual terms that are unmistakable, from its structure (which, to be fair, is a solid foundation for the film) to how it stages key scenes (including one during what appears to be a hurricane that is comedically ridiculous). Guadagnino is not a subtle filmmaker, and never has been, but the moments in his films that connect strongest are the ones where he lets the drama play out in muted form, letting the characters dictate how it lands. Here, style overwhelms a lot of the dramatic tension, with few exceptions (the hotel scene, in particular when they’re on the bed; a scene in a restaurant where more is implied by what one character sees, or doesn’t see, than what is shown to the audience; and the end of the movie, where a key gesture signals the truth between two characters). For the most part, I’m intrigued by the way Guadagnino and his cinematographer, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, shoot the tennis scenes, and they nail the fast paced nature of each point. That being said, the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross- while certainly a compulsive listen- doesn’t really connect with me the way other scores of theirs do; as I said in my review of Fincher’s “The Killer” last year, I find myself more interested in their work now when it moves away from a completely electronic musical base. (As for example, their score for “Bones and All.”) The performances by the three leads are good, I guess, but honestly none of them really land any genuine emotional punches; even the finale, which brings all the relationships full circle, feels like a climax built for three people, none of whom are in the audience. This is a movie intended to be seen through the gaze of watching hot people on screen in sexualized character dynamics. For me, that fell flat.
