R | 2h 11m | Romance, Intrigue, Sports | April 22, 2024
However, as I’ve often said, anytime the critics go crazy for a film, it’s likely I’m going to dislike that film. “Challengers” currently stands at 89 percent critics and moviegoers seem to like it—it’s a big film. It’s not a particularly well-constructed film, but it will hold your attention. But regardless of that, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Tennis Doubles, er, Triples
“Challengers” features a love triangle involving three tennis players that spans 13 years, from 2006 to 2019. Zendaya stars as Tashi, a rising superstar high school and college tennis ace whose career-ending knee injury forces her into coaching.In the movies’ best sequence, she hilariously twitterpates (yes, I’m making a verb out that “Bambi” Disney term) two young male tennis champs who are best buds, former bunk-mates, have known each other since they were 6, and act like brothers. One is Art, the shy, blonde, nice guy (Mike Faist) who goes on to become a major tennis star and ends up marrying Tashi.
The other is Patrick, the dark-haired, perennially-smirking, bad-boy rich-kid (Josh O’Connor). Patrick has a long-distance affair with Tashi before she marries Art. His erratic, flash-in-the-pan career involves occasional nuggets of brilliance in a prolonged professional slide to an increasingly seedy existence; playing obscure matches, occasionally starving a little, going on dates to score a place to sleep for the night, and living out of his car.
When, after a long separation, Patrick crosses paths with Art and Tashi again, she’s become her husband’s coach, and Patrick can tell she’s increasingly fed up with Art’s losing streak and lackluster approach to dealing with the steep demands of a tennis champ. After dealing with her own injury, Tashi’s maddened by Art’s inability to recover from his injuries—could there be a more fertile ground for a cheating spouse?
Tashi’s Patrick-lust gets rekindled at the hotel where they’re all staying for a Challenger event (hence the title). Estranged friends Art and Patrick compete for Tashi and wind up playing the final match against each other. Who will wind up with the prize? Er, both prizes? Because you know one of the prizes will be Tashi.
What’s Really Going on
So basically there’s a whole mess of sports pressure, emotional complexity, rivalry, friendship, betrayal and backstabbing, on repeat, presented in a highly (and highly annoying) non-linear narrative, featuring endless flashbacks and flash-forwards. You'll eventually want to lob your coke at the screen the next time you see a subtitle announcing “7 years earlier,” or “2 weeks later.”All the jumping around in the timeline is presumably to add some sort of kinetic energy to a fundamentally static situation, which is that the two man-boys, while alphas on the tennis court, engage in passive-aggressive, weak-but-vindictive hostilities towards each other, regarding the woman they both would appear to be crazy about. All of which has a distinctly soap-opera-ish vibe. But there’s a deeper reason for the inability of the men to step up and grab the prize, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Also, the original score by Nine Inch Nails’ members Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is irritatingly intrusive at times, as well as the early Spike Lee-type use of random slo-mo for sake of stylization and nothing else. Clearly the film’s selling point is that it’s all supposed to be heatedly erotic, featuring many sex scenes with various combinations of the three leads. Well, except for one between the two man-boys. Sort of.
Which brings up the point I was getting to: Italian director Luca Guadagnino, whose work first came to the public’s attention with 2017’s “Call Me by Your Name,” starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, directs this love-triangle as an excuse for the underlying narrative to be about unspoken, unconscious attraction between the two male leads. The endless homoerotic symbolism couldn’t be more heavy-handed. Clearly, director Guadagnino, much like Gus Van Sant, is among Hollywood’s gay directors-of-a-certain-age who delight in getting young straight actors to do gay things.
This is the road Hollywood, and by extension, American society, are on. However, this is really the urban culture of America’s two coasts, East and West, that Hollywood is attempting to normalize and surreptitiously indoctrinate the rest of the country with. My guess is that “Challengers” will not achieve any kind of a grand slam in winning over America’s Silent Majority, but the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is … interesting.
