Challengers (2024)
First screened and reviewed in June 2024
Director: Luca Guadagnino. Cast: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Darnell Appling, AJ Lister, Nada Despotovich, Hailey Gates, Burgess Byrd, Bryan Doo. Screenplay: Justin Kuritzkes.
VOR: ③  Execution mostly feels way off, but Hollywood's been avoiding this lane of sexed-up adult(ish) love triangle. Style takes risks, too.


   
Photo © 2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
I suppose it's possible that Challengers could have overcome the unforced error of its opening: three sweaty, unflattering, scrunchy-faced extreme closeups on the eyes of its three comely leads, one after the other. But this is just the beginning of the gratuitous obstacles that director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes place on their own movie's path to narrative or artistic success. Long before the much-debated finale, beset with so much indulgence in slo-mo that the giant tortoise and the three-toed sloth sitting on either side of me both got impatient, I might cite just off the top of my head:

* The fact that the tennis is only fitfully convincing, even when captured in unedited overhead shot

* The fact that the court sequences' clearly plotted arc from early control into escalating chaos yields all kinds of fussy editing and ungainly photographic tricks (a tennis ball's POV, an ever more evident reliance on CGI, upward views from beneath the surface of the court), such that not only is the game impossible to follow, the screen's unpleasant to look at

* The fact that the entire script has been julienned into non-chronological compartments, constantly stamped with head-spinning legends (THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, A FEW DAYS LATER, EARLIER THAT WEEK, EIGHT YEARS AGO, 3AM), which not only amounts to needless distraction but actively interferes with the actors' capacities to chart their already convoluted conflicts and through-lines in any organic way

* The fact that Mike Faist, even conceding the character's deep slump of confidence and morale in the present, never once comes across as someone who has many times won major Grand Slam tournaments and is both wealthy and world-famous

* The fact that Faist, playing a champ, has the jumpy and slight physical vocabulary of someone whose major career never got off the ground, while Josh O'Connor, cast as just such a non-starter, has the leonine swagger and calculated aloofness of a champion

* The fact that at no point do Zendaya and Mike Faist feel like a married couple, much less one married long enough to have a child

* The fact that at no point do Zendaya or Mike Faist feel like they are parents of any child, though one has been imposed on their characters, so as to lazily up the ante on the audience's assumed investment in their couplehood—which, incidentally, had no such effect on me

* The fact that nowhere we spend time in the movie feels like anywhere in particular, such that the settings feel as anonymous and untextured as the personalities

* The fact that so much of the movie preoccupies itself with sexual tension between the Faist and O'Connor characters, but both the editing and the Whac-a-Mole story structure flee the scene immediately once these guys do actually make out, declining to fill in even slightly the immediate or long-term aftermath of that moment

* The fact that Luca Guadagnino might be the single clumsiest gay director at conjuring anything like homoerotic gazing or homoerotic charge, as evident in plenty of scenes in Challengers, not least one in a locker room and one in a sauna

* The fact that, even though the casting is age-appropriate to the life cycle of a top tennis player (or someone who woulda shoulda coulda been in their prime exactly now, if fate hadn't intervened), the movie perpetually feels cast too young, like the college-student production of Death of a Salesman in Synecdoche, New York

* The windstorms. You guys.

* The fact that neither the director nor the producers are averse to hanging unready actors out to dry in brief but important roles (the Tinder date, the umpire, the sore loser in that locker room), which feels impolite and doesn't help the movie as a whole

* The fact that Luca Guadagnino is not a particularly great director of performance (Chalamet and Stuhlbarg aside), nor of narrative structure, nor of dramatic momentum, nor of theme in any but the crudest terms, nor of any kind of bigger-picture world-building that might contextualize immediate actions or plausibly recall the planet Earth as currently inhabited

I'd call that a pretty comprehensive set of liabilities, and it's not even exhaustive. No wonder the film can't overcome them and in fact becomes less tense, more disheveled, and more inclined toward empty stylistic affectation as it proceeds. I'm still impressed that all three leads are able to pass as much younger than they are when the script requires that. I'm impressed that a mid-budget, technically adult-targeted movie about adults has been made and released in multiplexes in the year 2024. I am impressed that such a wide-release adult drama takes the gender-fluidity of desire as more or less an unremarkable given, though maybe that's truer near the beginning of Challengers than near the end. O'Connor's performance eclipses the other two (which are no better than fine) in grounding detail and crafty inflections, occasionally giving life to a scene that has been undermined in other ways by writing, direction, or structural placement. Zendaya's courtside outfit and styling in the New Rochelle match to which we continually return are keepers.

But sadly, thus ends my list of what impressed me about Challengers, a film that badly wants to provoke a reaction but left me almost entirely unmoved. Grade: C–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Zendaya
★Best Original Score: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
Best Original Song: "Compress/Repress"

Other Awards:
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Original Score (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)
Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Editing
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Editing (Marco Costa); Best Original Score
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