Nonlinear storytelling can be a clever method of making us care about movie characters more than we ought. We’re enthralled by the sociopathic killers, crooks, pushers, and palookas who populate Pulp Fiction, The Limey, and Memento. We empathize with the amoral, oblivious coders of The Social Network. And in Challengers, an all’s-fair-in-love-and-tennis melodrama from Call Me By Your Name filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, the trick works yet again: We’re persuaded to buy into the fates of three extremely privileged, attractive, and horny jocks who’re, at last, facing something like adversity in their lives without acquiring any of the humility or insight we’re told—falsely, perhaps—that suffering engenders.
I don’t mean to bring a puritanical perspective to an admirably prurient, undeniably propulsive movie by the reigning auteur of horndog art-house cinema. (In Call Me By Your Name (2017), Guadagnino did American Pie one better by having Timothée Chalamet unburden himself of lust using a peach, the most dissolute of fruits.) I just realized with something like a quarter hour remaining in Challengers’ 131-minute run time that a stubborn, ungrateful part of me was beginning to resent having expended so much emotional energy on these three jerks. The climactic battle on the court was as suspenseful as a tennis match could be, with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom continually finding new ways to reframe the action and Social Network composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ EDM score pulsating away. Even so, the spell was beginning to wear off.
Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay volleys back and forth between the 2019 “present” and the latter half of the aughts as it examines how the on-again, off-again throuple of elite athletes Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor try to make sense of the ways their longings and ambitions have been realized and foiled. They’re such magnetic performers, individually and as as a trio, and the oscillating narrative structure is so good at convincing us there’s some profound emotional mystery here to which we’ll eventually be served a solution, that the film’s ultimate superficiality is more of a bummer than it would be had we been cued simply to enjoy its glossy surfaces all along. Like last year’s three-act Nike infomercial Air—another movie that conflates athleticism with divinity—Challengers titillated me, then made me feel like a sap for enjoying it. Your mileage may vary.
There is, at least, a lot more tennis in Challengers than there is basketball in Air. Its specific athletic milieu—obscure tournaments with names like Phil’s Tire Town Challenger, where anyone can walk up and find themselves across the net from a world-class player having a bad day or a bad year—will come as less of a revelation for anyone who follows tennis than for a know-nothing like me. But I appreciated Kuritzes’ illumination of this world. He doesn’t bring the desperation of it to life the way writer-director Ron Shelton animated the peculiar heartbreak of the minor leagues in Bull Durham—still the best film I’ve ever seen about sports and fucking—but then Shelton was writing from his lived experience as a minor-league ballplayer. Kuritzkes is “just” a smart dramatist who’s watched lots of tennis. (He’s married to fellow playwright Celine Song, who made her filmmaking debut with the extraordinary Past Lives last year.) Challengers is Kuritzkes’ first produced screenplay, and it plays like a sports flick by way of Neil LaBute.
As the film opens circa 2019, tennis champ Art Donaldson (Faist) is in a slump, and his coach and spouse Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is unsure how to restore his confidence. A top-ranked college player herself until a knee injury ended her career, the former “Duncinator” is part of Art’s lucrative public persona, appearing with him in advertisements and such. She was a tougher competitor than Art ever was, and we intuit early that Art would never have reached the top of his profession without Tashi’s merciless guidance. Her guidance now is to enter him in some tournaments to rebuild his confidence beating up on (presumably) lesser opponents. You already know Art will instead find himself across the net from his former best pal Patrick (O’Connor)—also Tashi’s ex—which is not going to help his case of the yips at all. Especially if the mother of his child starts fucking his former best friend again!
If those born into wealth are inclined to believe their prosperity is somehow earned, so, too, are elite athletes who’ve benefited from top-notch instruction and the time to develop their latent gifts without the distraction of having to make rent. All three of these characters come from money; Art and Patrick were bunkmates at boarding school, and Tashi signed a big endorsement deal before she’s even left home to attend Stanford. We learn all of this in the movie’s most fun section, the 2006 one, when Art and Patrick are both transfixed by Tashi at a party in her honor. (For what it’s worth, all three of our principal actors, who range in age from 27 to 33, make credible 18-year-olds for a couple of scenes.) After briefly making out with both of them and then sitting back in satisfaction having successfully spurred her “little White boys” to make out with each other, Tashi excuses herself from the party. “I’m no home-wrecker,” she demurs, promising at last to give her number to whichever of these two boys wins tomorrow’s match.
Still it’s a surprise, sort of, when we find out that Art is the one to whom she married-with-child a dozen or so years later, and Patrick is sleeping in his car. She and Patrick always seemed to have more animal chemistry with one another, but animal chemistry does not a marriage make. Tashi loves tennis more than either of these boys loves tennis, and more than she loves either of these boys. The most talented and driven athlete of the three, she could never be satisfied channeling her competitive energy via Art’s increasingly tired body. We perceive this much about her, even as Kuritzkes chooses to keep so many of the pivotal moments of her life—her decision to marry Art, her decision to have a kid—off-screen.
What we do see is lurid and exciting. You get two charismatic, still-rising actors and one giant movie star sweating and screwing and elsewhere being just as frustrated and defeated by life’s absurd and comedic unfairness as the rest of us. To ask for more from a movie might be greedy. I guess I’m just like Tashi, Art, and Patrick in that way.
Challengers (R, 131 minutes) opens at area theaters today.