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.