Challengers (2024)

Rated R, mainly for more than its fair share of sexuality.  There's also a lot of nudity, but hilariously not in the context of sexual situations. The movie really wears its R-rating on its chest, always being just a bit too much to recommend to one's in-laws, despite being a pretty solid movie.  There's underage drinking and smoking.  The movie is very comfortable with adultery and people just being out and out cruel to each other.  Also, after all of that, there's still issues with language. R.

DIRECTOR:  Luca Guadagnino

I just read a Time magazine article talking about that "bonkers but perfect ending" to Challengers.  Here's the deal.  I'll give them "bonkers", but I have a long way before I can even approximate "perfect" for this movie.  For a long time, I thought that Challengers was going to get close to being a perfect movie.  I don't know why I was so invested in the movie, but I was.  No doubt, the movie had sold me on a premise that I never thought that I would enjoy.  I tend not to like sports movies.  I don't like adultery in films.  But gosh darn it, this movie out Woody Allened Woody Allen.  I wasn't ready for how good the simple idea of recontextualizing scene after scene was going to work.  But it absolutely did. 

Which means I have to talk about how one moment ruined the movie for me.  Okay, it didn't ruin it.  I still adored this film.  Honestly, I lost my mind over how much I enjoyed this movie.  But I have to talk about the ending.  And the ending is a heck of a spoiler, so I have to bold it.  I hate myself for doing it, but that's the world I live in.  The movie has to have an emotional resolution to the tension that gets built up in the movie. It's about two friends who learn to absolutely hate each other because of their mutual love for this intense woman who seems emotionally distant to both of them.  Woven into that is a metaphor for tennis, talking about how real tennis, in the rare times that it is played honestly and furiously, is a relationship. Okay.  The two guys, by the end of the film, have developed a keen sense of hatred for each other.  Despite being sexually attracted to one another, they have put each other through the ringer and come out husks of their former selves. After the big revelation that Zweig has slept with Art's wife and plans to win the game anyway, Art, in a moment of blending sports and romance, embraces Zweig and they all feel something that they've never experienced before.

Now, I get the argument.  The movie is about that relationship that comes out of the sport.  It treats tennis more than what it is: a game.  It's Tashi's mission statement for tennis.  It's why she is so intense and refuses to distance herself from the sport.  It's also why she deprioritizes her marriage with Art because tennis will always be her true love.  Okay.  I'm on board. But the physical manifestation of that almost feels like a betrayal to the movie itself. I know.  That's some incredibly 21st Century Disney  Star Wars fandom nonsense.  My argument is how abrupt the whole scene is.  Hitchcock once said --and I'm paraphrasing badly --that it is about the suspense of the gun going off, not the gun going off itself.  My goodness, this movie builds up the tension. Each scene tops the last.  By the end of the film, we're watching bad people make worse people and there needs to be some kind of catharsis to the whole movie.  Instead, we get a hug.  It's too little.  It's comically little for what the movie is about.  But more importantly than the metaphor about the relationships built through sport is that there lacks a verisimilitude towards the entire sequence.  

It's unbelievable. Like, too unbelievable.  Let's pretend that this scene happens.  From my memory, it's Art who is about to spike on Zweig.  It really teases that Art is going to murder Zweig, but Art chooses forgiveness, despite that --moments before --Zweig does the unforgivable and cuts out the one thing that kept Art going.  Okay, it could be a noble moment to have Art choose to be the bigger man (despite everything in his character saying that it is impossible to find common ground between these two).  I don't buy that Zweig would just understand and reach the same emotional place.  Sure, the kiss earlier in the movie shows that the two are wired both for attraction and the way that they handle situations.  But that also leaves Tashi, whose repeated philosophy is that she's not going to be a homewrecker.  Her big character moment is that she confesses that she became the very thing that she refused to be.  I don't see her cheering for this moment.  

I don't know, everything about that final moment seems to be a betrayal of character.  Yes, the two guys have similar traits, but they're also fiercely competitive at the same time.  The movie spent two plus hours establishing the characters' motivations and moral codes only to have all of that abandoned for a message that "Tennis is about relationships?"  It all feels so...phony. AND I HAVE TO REITERATE!  This is an absolute banger of a movie.  The way that it builds these characters and makes us question intentions all the way through the film leading into an event that --for all intents and purposes --is mildly meaningless.  So much is invested in all of these things that a hug is a cop-out.  It feels like an afterschool special with that moment.   It's cheap.  It's there because it's surprising, not because it is what the scene needs.  Man, I might dislike this movie more than I thought I did because I'm really riled up about this.  (It's partially why I write this blog, so I'm forced to confront my thoughts on movies.) 

The funny thing is, I'm probably going to give it a 4/5 on Letterboxd.  Part of that comes from the fact that I like everything. (That's not true, but I am more forgiving than most.)  For so much of the film, the movie earned my absolute investment.  I was pausing the movie, talking it over with my wife, processing.  That rarely happens with me.  I'm usually about the uninterrupted experience, but this movie made me think.  I can't forgive that end.  Not where my head is right now.  I think it's a noble attempt, but it ruins a beautiful film. I want to like it so bad, but man, it just feels like such a disappointment of an ending that I can't process it.