Potentially rich but dramatically flat, Challengers whiffs a grand slam opportunity
Photo by Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
I’m not usually one for starting off a review by considering the creative team’s married lives, but in the case of Challengers, it’s a situation worth noting. The film’s screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, is married to Celine Song, the writer and director of the semi-autobiographical Past Lives, recently nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars. In that film, a South Korean playwright living in New York with her white American husband reconciles with her past and a relationship that could have been when her childhood best friend arrives for a visit.
Kuritzkes’ Challengers script also deals with a love triangle, this one a messy triad between tennis players Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor). Throughout their high school, college and professional careers, the trio trade beds and competitive jealousies, culminating in a showdown match between Art and Patrick, former best friends turned enemies.
I’m telling you all this because it’s got to be hard watching a critically acclaimed movie about your marriage do really well, but it’s probably even harder when your own attempt to explore similar emotions isn’t nearly as good. Past Lives had deeply realized characters and a central tension that made you truly feel for each of them. Challengers aspires to tension, but doesn’t give us enough of the characters to sell the stakes.
The match between Art and Patrick frames the rest of the film’s story, which switches between past and present. Art and Patrick start as close friends and doubles partners when they first encounter superstar Tashi at the U.S. Open Junior Championships. They’re both immediately smitten with her beauty and her fierce, single-minded competitiveness. Tashi is initially drawn to Patrick, but after a career-ending injury in college, she becomes Art’s coach, and later his wife. Old rivalries re-emerge when a down-and-out Patrick shows up at a tournament during a pivotal moment in Art’s career—and a frustrating moment in Tashi’s own.
Juicy partner-swapping, friend-longing, and love triangles are all familiar territory for director Luca Guadagnino, the director of A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name. However, those movies feature characters with defining characteristics making big discoveries about themselves and each other. Challengers keeps things frustratingly surface-based. We don’t know much about Tashi, Art, and Patrick beyond their passion for tennis and their fascination with each other—a fascination that appears to be solely based on physical attraction since there’s not a lot else going on.
The script hints that the simmering rivalry between Art and Patrick may come in part from closeted romantic desire, something Guadagnino tries to run with as much as he can. We get one awkward Tashi-directed kiss between the two of them, and a semi-flirtatious moment in a college cafeteria, but these don’t go far beyond vague implications. It’s a shame since that extra level could lend the film some depth and give the surrounding match an evolving tension that it desperately needs.
Another attempt at grabbing the audience’s attention comes via the film’s score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who turn in their best work since The Social Network. The music is intriguing, slick, and confident as only Reznor and Ross can be (it stands on its own as solid background music), but it feels incongruent with the way it’s used in the film, sliced and diced and shoved in, ostensibly to get us invested in the proceedings but feeling more like it’s trying to command viewers’ drifting focus.
Guadagnino adds style and edge to the proceedings, as do the performances from Zendaya, Faist, and particularly O’Connor, who continues to excel at giving his characters interiority beyond what’s on the page. However, none of that keeps Challengers’ storytelling from feeling like the work of a novice professional writer, the kind of thing that sells well conceptually, but falters on screen.
A director can only do so much. Kuritzkes’ script is the driving force of Challengers, and it’s never as sharp, hot, or insightful as it needs to be to make the movie sing.
Courtesy Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
