MAUDLIN AUTOBIOGRAPHY seems increasingly necessary to harness reader attention. Well. I was a terrible athlete as a child. I’m the least hand-eye coordinated person you’ll ever meet. By and large, I hate sports and, growing up, I especially hated the kids who were good at them. (In my school/church, sports were very important.) It’s a cowardly, kneejerk skepticism: I hate them because I don’t understand them, because I don’t have an athletic bone in my body, and because I am probably too old by now to ever force myself to decipher their rules, codes and cultures. The social gains just aren’t there anymore. For me, watching a game means squinting to follow the evolution of live-TV broadcast aesthetics, engaging in petty voyeurism (both of the crowd and the players) and, most of all, enjoying a social opportunity to not-talk, crossing my fingers that nobody will ask me to explain or analyze or prove that I understand what the fuck is happening on the court/field. Unless the Seattle Mariners are anywhere near the playoffs, I don’t care and couldn’t begin to tell you. I’m just here for the spectacle.
For these reasons, I walked into Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers fearing and presuming I wouldn’t be able to understand the movie, only to take relief—two hours and fifteen minutes of it—in realizing Challengers is not really about sports so much as about spectacle. It’s a vision of the culture of pro athletes, dotted with impossible-to-ignore product placement (albeit less pointed than in Fincher’s The Killer) and refracted through a millennial story of lust, nostalgia and regret. (It’s very 2024 for a film to claim to be about something when its real interest is in the boojie, bajillion-dollar lifestyle of that thing’s most famous practitioners.)
The plot of Challengers follows a pair of tennis players named Art Donaldson (Mike Feist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and the woman who came between them: Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a onetime prodigy whose career was brought to a screeching halt by a torn ACL. Before that happens, Art and Patrick meet Tashi in 2006, when they are still conspicuously thirsty college students who have been “bunkmates” since they were young. Before long Patrick is dating Tashi, but he fumbles it due to his unbridled egotism and her hard-charging nature, so she flips over to Art, who is far more sensitive; they get married and she becomes his coach. Patrick drifts to the margins, living out of his SUV while playing lower-circuit matches for chump change, his best days behind him. Well after he has become a champion with the sponsorship deals and nonprofit foundation that entails, Art’s confidence deteriorates as he grows increasingly suspicious that Tashi only loves him when/because he’s winning at tennis. Tashi aims to disprove Art by pushing him harder to win. Circumstances oblige Patrick and Art to play one another for the first time in years, long after Tashi and Art have cut Patrick from their lives. Patrick attempts to seduce Tashi, discerning the tension and sexlessness of her picture-perfect home life with Art.
Challengers jumps between the climactic rematch in 2019, used as a contemporaneous framing device, and a telling of the history of their love triangle that wends its way from 2006 to the present. The trifecta is anchored in the suppressed homoeroticism of Art and Patrick (which Tashi exploited, or revealed, in her initial meeting with them) and each character’s crushing need to win. But that’s not quite right; it’s how Art and Patrick comport themselves vis-a-vis Tashi’s crushing need to win, now projected onto them, that pushes the narrative forward. Chaos factors could include Art’s world-weariness or Patrick’s shit-eating charm, which seems teflon even as his life falls further into dereliction. It’s a clever contraption of a plotline and all three of the leads make the most of the material; more on that later.
When I say Challengers is a “real movie” I mean it as a compliment, with the caveat that the state of cinema is dire. In my youth (the Bush/Clinton years), it was guaranteed that studios would release at least a couple of what I’m calling “real movies” in theaters every weekend. And it’s not hard to understand why people were excited about this one: hot actors playing out real-ish life dilemmas with great music, camera movement, flair, precision. No CGI robots or AI-generated interdimensional vortices. Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay is not based on a preexisting character, franchise or intellectual property. Zendaya is a bona fide movie star, such that her name and fame have eclipsed her actual acting career—until Challengers? Mike Faist was great in Spielberg’s weirdly underrated take on West Side Story. And if Guadagnino was always too bombastic for the arthouse, he enjoys a reputation, not wholly undeserved, as one of the few directors who can bring a real appreciation for aesthetics (and sexuality) to what has become an ever-chastening era for Hollywood movies. Like I said, the bar is low.
Earlier I said Challengers purported to be about tennis but is more interested in the world of pro-sports celebrity. It’s also a movie that claims (or threatens) to be about desire when its true focus seems to be performance, which is to say style, and the exercise thereof. (Trying to conjecture me off a cliff, one friend teased that my problem could be boiled down to “not enough sex scenes.” Yes and no.) It has style in spades; if anything, too much style. To situate the chapters in the chronology of the love triangle, Guadagnino uses obsessive-compulsive Wes Anderson-type tableaux with impossible-to-ignore block lettering eating up the frame, immaculately kerned and leaded. When Tashi and Patrick confront each other after hours in a decrepit parking lot, Guadagnino uses jerky, impressionistic slow motion offset by the red neon floodlights of cop cars and ambulances; it’s the stuff of Wong Kar-wai (and by now, a full generation of wannabe Wongs.) During the battle royale at the end, the camera will adopt a godlike, omniscient POV, then it will hopscotch between Patrick or Art or Tashi’s POV, then it will adopt the tennis ball’s POV, moving into fully kinetic videogame/anime territory.
The game builds to a climax, and the climax builds to a signal between Patrick and Art, an idea introduced in the movie’s first thirty minutes, hopefully forgotten until the final fifteen or so. This signal could have taken a millisecond, upending the drama of the match and spilling the characters and the audience (both onscreen and IRL) into chaos. But instead Guadagnino opts to hype the signal up before, during and after its execution, using slo-mo again (this time, the silky-smooth kind beloved by Stanley Kubrick, or ESPN replays) as well as macro-lens extreme closeups and the Reznor/Ross score to maximum effect. During this protracted climax I thought both of the screenwriting adage “Show, don’t tell” as well as the middle-school essay writing adage “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you have told them”. Challengers shows and tells (and then tells some more, and then recaps, while showing more stuff) in equal measure.
The way Guadagnino uses music is fascinating. The movie has a terrific score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross which is closer to synthpop than the ominous industrial-ambient sound they patented in the long aftermath of The Social Network, to say nothing of Reznor’s earlier music as Nine Inch Nails. If I say Challengers uses this score traditionally, I mean the music cues are designed to keep the story moving and add emotional resonance to key moments, like the haunting leitmotif used when Tashi, Patrick and Art hang out for the first time by the beach in the 2006 passage (“L’eouf”). There is a pivotal flashback scene where Tashi decides to withhold sex from Patrick in the run-up to a tennis match, leading to the argument that will end their relationship. Staged in a long single take, it’s a showboaty bit of performance-filmmaking kicked off unmistakably by the track “Brutalizer”, whose pounding, brain-numbing repetition suggests a more leather-daddy layer of interior psychology than the peaks and dips of the movie’s otherwise more cheerful synthesizer music. “Brutalizer” returns later during a confrontation between Patrick and Art in a men’s sauna, bizarrely interrupting a heretofore quiet scene of acid tension between the two ex-friends.
When the narrative requires a moment of actual tenderness between the estranged Art and Tashi, Guadagnino overlays the guitar ballad “Pecado” by Caetano Veloso, telegraphing a tone shift that’s unmistakable from the techno of the rest of the movie (Proustian madeleines like “Hot in Herre” by Nelly and “I Turn My Camera On” by Spoon notwithstanding.) If music has to do the heavy lifting in some of the film’s key emotional passages, why not commission a score that can do both?
None of these choices are dealbreakers unto themselves, and I suppose Guadagnino’s more-is-more maximalism is commensurate with the volcanic emotions powering the three protagonists. The problem is that this reverse-cuisinartal gobbling and regurgitating of different visual and sonic languages suggests a movie trying to be too many things at once. It’s a nice problem to have if, like me, you feel passion is a virtue lacking from most contemporary cinema; watching Challengers I remembered Mae West’s axiom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” But when my thoughts drifted back to the subject of said passions—the conflict between Art, Patrick and Tashi—that’s where I ultimately found Challengers most lacking. The promise of a future breakdown in the characters’ wildly different self-images and expectations of one another keeps the story chugging along, but it is never about root causes.
Tashi is the most important character in the film. She’s not a manic pixie dream girl, but the drama hinges on her increasingly mercurial decisions, whose explanations never go deeper than "the only thing she really cares about is tennis.” Okay: why? And how did she end up like that? In the 2006 sequence she seems to care about academics, too. She also makes reference to the racism of patrician boarding schools like the one attended by Art and Patrick; it’s the first time race, or racial difference, comes up in the movie’s screenplay in any way, shape or form. (The second and last time is Tashi’s now infamous quip about always taking care of her “little white boys”.) In interviews, Zendaya has talked about the difficulties of navigating a moneyed, majority-white world like the one depicted in Challengers as a Black woman. But Tashi’s background is largely a device (like the aforementioned homoeroticism) important only when the film needs to push from point A to point C.
Art is similarly elusive, but his narrative arc is more consistent. We know he’s from a rich family, he’s quick-witted, dutiful, as stoic and disciplined as Patrick is spoiled and letting it all hang out. We know he loves Tashi and their daughter and chafes from the bright lights and gilded cage of megacelebrity, especially when his heart is no longer in the game. But we never learn much else about him, and his consistency is mostly a rebuff to Patrick’s unending hot mess.
Patrick is the juiciest character, both from a screenwriting and an acting perspective. He wheedles and deals his way through life, relying on his charisma and (among tennis freaks, anyway) niche celebrity to bail him out of each day’s mini-crisis. We are told repeatedly that Patrick, too, is from a rich family, yet his debit cards keep getting declined, he can’t feed himself, he has nowhere to stay, nothing to eat. How does he keep filling his busted SUV with new gas? After living in New York City for over sixteen years, I think I’ve met at least one or two such haute-elite failsons; aside from the ruin they inflict on everyone they meet, the tragedy of such cases is that they never have to learn from their mistakes because they always have somebody to bail them out. Maybe he burned every bridge afforded him and blew his trust fund; fine, but where’s that story? (It’s been theorized that Patrick has a drug problem lurking beneath the surface of Challengers’ established dramaturgy; Kuritzkes has avowed that this isn’t the case, but for a movie to depict one of its main characters in chronic withdrawal without acknowledging the addiction sounds very plausible per the chastening of Hollywood I mentioned earlier.)
O’Connor does a tremendous job embodying this tangle of contradictions in a portrait of white cismale entitlement; when Tashi castigates him for being a lazy and uninspired athlete, it hits, yet I also found myself craning my neck in anticipation of his rejoinder. I can’t say why Tashi ultimately does succumb to Patrick’s advances, other than for capital-P Plot reasons which are taxonomized in flashbacks worthy of a Christopher Nolan film, recalling and reexamining small yet crucial details as if under an editor’s microscope. For me, the risk of indiscretion warranted a chaotic, destructive sexual chemistry that simply wasn’t there. In one particularly embarrassing twist, Tashi is evacuating a conversation with Patrick, but he points out she’s going in the wrong direction away from her hotel, and she stops, ramrod-straight, as if her whole paradigm has been rocked. Music swells and she returns to Patrick. It’s an absurd and sloppy depiction of somebody changing their mind in real time. The movie punts on plausibility when it most needs some.
Challengers suffers other such instances of “the dog ate my homework”-grade storytelling, but I’ve been chastised by fans, both zealous and similarly skeptical, for taking it all too literally. I see their point. But to my mind the most important metric of unabashed pulp entertainment is that it’s well-enough made to keep me from thinking about such ludicrousnesses, at least while the ball is up in the air. Gourmet, zippy, easy on the eyes and ultimately trifling, Challengers succeeded; this is why it’s a Real Movie.
Current Mood: Competitive 💪💪💪
Current Music: Exos - Strength (full album)
Special thanks to Isaac Hoff and Natalia Elizondo.