Challengers is a bad movie. Maybe the worst movie from someone I consider a quality director in the last year or so.
It gives me enormous pause when people I respect really like the film… and they are out there. I can see some of the things that they find attractive about the film. But as I sat in that theater and watched it roll out, I really tried to find the better angels of the film. And I kept finding it offering up the rough sketches of interesting ideas, repeatedly turned into cartoons.
At the core of it, the key problem with Challengers is very simple. It doesn’t know what it is about.
It’s not a mystery movie. It’s not a riddle to solve. It’s 2 male best friends who both are sexually drawn to a girl they do not know when they all meet (cute). One guy is more aggressive and has, as the movie loves to tell us, an especially big penis. The other is more passive and his big move is not being an asshole. No one ever mentions his penis, so apparently, it is nothing special.
They are all pretty much selfish children… but the film - which occasionally allows some hard ego shots 1-on-1, refuses to deal with who these people outside of a context so narrow that it never touches human emotion in a real way - really doesn’t want to cop to it.
Not only is the stakes impossibly low, but even as time piles on what should be greater stakes, it still ignores the idea that the stakes have actually been raised... with things like a living child to whom 2 of the characters are (fake-movie) parents.
This brings me to perhaps the most problematic part of the film. Time.
I don’t know what the evolution of this script has been, but it seems like time has been bent to fit the casting conundrum.
Jimmy Conners turned pro at 20 in 1972. He won 12 grand slam titles in 11 years, the last being in 1985, age 33. John McEnroe turned pro at 19, won 9 grand slams in 11 years, the last in 1984, age 25… kept winning glad slams in doubles (11 in total) until he was 33.
Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter, seems to know this history… or maybe it is just fairly normal amongst high-level tennis players. But this is the rough outline of this story. University age (Stanford, where McEnroe went) to roughly the end of a pro tennis career in one’s 30s.
I don’t believe either of these male characters are near the end of a full career in tennis… because they haven’t really changed. They do have a scene near the end of the film that is pretty good… except that it doesn’t pay off… so the clever dialogue and the exposure of some truths is basically wasted.
But even more so, Zendaya is simply not believable here as a woman in her 30s with a kid of about 6 or 7. Not for a second. She is 27 years old, so it’s not just age. She can play 32. But the movie is an uninterested in her parenting as she seems to be in the film. Her mother seems to be her permanent babysitter, which is realistic enough. But this character is willing to turn her world upside down as though the kid is an afterthought. The character is built of her power and obsessiveness… but somehow, her kid is not the recipient of same.
She is still behaving like the experimenting college girl that she is at the beginning of the film. And yes, there are people who never grow up, certainly not by 30-ish. But the film leans hard into the idea that Zendaya’s Tashi is controlling and deeply considers everything… which makes her choices in the third act completely absurd or, if you like, sociopathic. And that is on the script and the director, not the actress.
The same thing is true with the guys. The film is so heavy with extreme postures that it takes what is some potentially realistic immaturity and pushes it to the point of absurdity. The story fits 3 characters who are still pretty close to their adolescence while in a high-stress, early-age high-achievement work world. More 25 than 33. But that is not what was on the page, I guess.
If Tashi was thrashing around emotionally with whether she made the right choice, it would make a lot more sense with a demanding 2-year-old on her hip, rather than at the height of her husband’s success with a kid old enough that she really requires no attention. If Art (Mike Faist) was at a moment when he could hang it up or accelerate to his (and their) greatness, much more likely in the middle stages of a career and not after achieving almost all anyone could. If Patrick (Josh O’Connor) had screwed up his tennis career and was scraping along… more likely 5 years into pro tennis than a decade-plus.
That said, any choice a writer makes can be okay. I am not suggesting there is only one way to tell any story. There are no rules for what characters can be. But if the writer wants to make complex choices, they need to work through them in full OR write the movie to NOT work through them in full. Here, the storytelling combined with this set of actors and this director feels endlessly random.
That is, until late in the 3rd act, when there are some hints of what the writer or the director might have seen as The Golden Answer. But again… it never pays off. And that could be because of any or any combination of the many steps in making a movie in a group of people who have strong opinions and call force the issue.
If you had seen the movie and we were discussing the story, neither of us could really say what the movie is saying. We could cite a dozen moments we remember… turns that were interesting… things we learned about the characters. But explain the story from start to finish… take more than 25 words… take more than 2500 words… I dare you. What does each of the 3 central characters want? What is the meaning of them not being able to answer that question? What is the damned point?
But it’s sexy… ewwww…
Whether it was the script or the talent or the director, this movie is a lot more interested in pretty pictures and close-ups of moist lips than it is in telling a story that actually feels emotionally and intellectually real.
That brings up my feeling throughout the film… I am a fan of Luca Guadagnino. Challengers feels like the first movie he did for the money. It feels like producer Amy Pascal sharply understood that she wanted that Luca Guadagnino feeling for the film… sexy, sophisticated, intimate. But this, Guadagnino’s 6th American feature release, feels distinctly and for the first time, like “one for them”… a paycheck movie. And it probably is the first big payday of his career. I believe that everything else was funded from Europe first.
The problem is… Guadagnino seems to have no knowledge of or interest in tennis. He shoots the tennis like no one before… which is to say, absolutely incoherently. The movie is beautifully shot by DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom… just not good as a movie that spends a lot of time on a tennis court.
And unlike any work by Guadagnino I have seen before, the movie has a deadly poor sense of the issues of class, race, gender, and the vagaries of sociology. It’s not about any of that, though it tees up all of it, repeatedly.
As I was watching it, all I could keep thinking is that they came to Guadagnino, he liked the idea of it, he loved the idea of Zendaya coming of age in his film, he loved the idea of two straight guys who are kind of in love with one another, and he took this script that he really didn’t try too hard to understand and then added every trick he has in his long book of visual and emotional tricks as a filmmaker. Style overwhelming an utter lack of substance.
Zendaya is the greatest trick of all. She is an object of undeniable beauty. Walking candy. Even with, perhaps, the worst haircut on a breathtakingly beautiful movie star in history, she beams. Guadagnino is all about her ass and her lips. There is actually no real sex in the entire film. There is some kissing. There is Zendaya’s ass in a thong, on all fours on a bed. Guadagnino even gets the see-thru bra going. But even when he does, there is a completely unbelievable turn of intention that keeps an actual act of sex from ever taking place in the film.
It’s not that I need a sex scene. I needed the intimacy of what you might get in a sex scene… long before simulating intercourse. The movie has a stunning lack of abandon. Challengers is the most sexless movie that wants to be sexy ever.
The 2 guys get closer to sex in the film than their object of passion and lust. That’s a big chunk of the movie… they talk about their sex and Tashi laughs at them… then they have sex with her off-screen. Does she really like it from either of them? Does sex drive her at all? For all that hot, is she any good at it?
I won’t give away the last shot of the film… but maybe that is the real meaning of the movie… and if so, it is even more inexcusable. I laughed out loud - clearly not the intention of the film - at least 4 times during the movie.
The movie is - as Drew Carey expresses in this can’t miss clip from @fter Midnight about seeing the band Phish - like being edged for days. And for those of you who might not know the term… “'Edging is the practice of engaging in sexual stimulation to the point of ejaculation before stopping and starting again.” (h/t Medical News Today)
Challengers - and again, this is so odd coming from Guadagnino - is like the most immature version of sexual excitement. None of the characters is every really clear on what they want… only what they don’t want and what they don’t want for others… even though the entire premise of the film is that these are super-competitive, passionate professional athletes.
But good GOD, is Zendaya gorgeous! (She really is!)
This seems to mean to be a movie about growing up and being challenged by the journey… but it never says anything that I didn’t learn in a backseat in high school. For me, that wasn’t enough reason to feel good about objectifying Zendaya for 2 hours and reducing an entire movie about friendship down to penis jokes… which is mostly what passes for sexy and story in this film.
Until tomorrow…
I'm not sure I was interested in seeing this movie, but I might check it out on streaming at some point.
Oddly enough the wife and I rewatched Wimbledon the other day and it still remains remarkably breezy and fun? I don't think Kirsten Dunst is very good in it but apart from that it's just a very solid romcom. At the very least it's one of the better movies Paul Bettany made when he was in his leading man era (I wish I could erase the memory of having watched Legion and Priest).