“Challengers” is an exquisitely crafted soap opera
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Written by Justin Kuritzkes
Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist
Challengers ends with a sequence of tennis so astonishing it would have singlehandedly justified the existence of the film even if the rest of it weren’t so meticulously crafted. It’s a dizzying display of cinematic grandeur on the part of every facet of the production. The editing’s remarkable precision lends extra weight to each volley of the ball. The score’s maniacal synth oscillations reach a fever pitch that leaves those caught up in it as breathless as the gladiators on screen, whose bodies are as marked with scars and drenched with sweat as those you’d expect to find in a coliseum. Director Luca Guadagnino’s (Bones and All) camera frees itself from any semblance of realism, moving below the surface of the court to stare up at them silhouetted against the sky and reined in only by chalked boundaries. In one instantly iconic moment, it becomes the ball in a bit of flair that should be gimmicky but is wholly exhilarating in practice.
It’s the climax of a film built on its editing. Framed by that climactic match between old friends-turned-rivals Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor, Emma) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist, West Side Story), Challengers unfolds nonlinearly, flashing back repeatedly to chronicle their relationships to each other and the prodigical Tashi Duncan (Zendaya, Dune: Part Two) as they unfold over thirteen years. It’s a structure that could have left the finished product disjointed, a chore to sit through at over two hours long, but instead editor Marco Costa (Bones and All) transforms an intimate story about three tennis players and their shifting standings with each other to create an epic. Even at the script’s most frustrating, Costa’s editing conveys sprawling scale to go with its emotional stakes, leaving the viewer feeling as those these are giants long before the finale literally shoots them as such.
All of this is put to work in service of performances that are winsome even in their characters’ lowest moments. Challengers lives and dies on the chemistry of its leads; Zendaya, O’Connor, and Faist have to sell their highs and lows, the eroticism of their coming together (pun intended) and the rivalry that results from their falling apart, and they more than pull it off. Zendaya is effortlessly commanding at the forefront as the femme fatale who comes to dominate Patrick and Art’s lives; paired with her turn earlier this year in Dune: Part Two, she’s having one hell of a 2024. The first shots give us everything we need to know about her: extreme close-ups of Patrick and Art staring each other down, so consumed with each other that they don’t realize Tashi is watching them both, the mastermind actually in control of the situation. Even later when we see them watching her, their slackened jaws – eyes all but popping out of their heads while their tongues loll out of their mouths in a deeply funny sequence – tell us all we need to know about who holds power here. Her cross necklace, the choral score that signifies her, and the dialogue delivered almost in prayer to her mark Tashi as a twisted version of the Virgin Mary, the goddess the boys look to for both the unconditional love they need and the conditional love that would motivate them.
Faist meanwhile sells every moment of Art’s struggle as a former “champion of tomorrow” trying to avoid having missed the train. He knows what (and who) his brand is built on, and he knows the way people who get left behind are remembered – he himself has dismissed them as a shrug and a “She sucked” – but he also knows there may be rest in laying down the racket. It’s a worthy big screen follow up to his turn as Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story remake and proves once again his gift for seamless gear shifts between fierce drama and something far more charming.
It's elsewhere that the debut feature script from Justin Kuritzkes falters, in the relationships between the characters and the themes. In a heady relationship drama, that’s difficult to overlook. Tashi, Art, and Patrick are all trying to be (and hear this on every level) on top, and they are more than willing to stand on each other to get there. They’re codependent even as each individual firmly believes in their own independence. What that means or what’s even possible for them differs – Tashi is badly injured during a game, which relegates her to less of a spotlit role even as she exercises great power over Art’s career and person – but whatever they’re looking for, Challengers focuses on the way their hot-and-cold relationship motivates them. It’s a thirteen year chronicle of manipulation and entrapment, love and lust at their messiest. That Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” – the title track from the “divorce album” he wrote as his marriage to Julianne Phillips floundered and he fell for E Street Band guitarist Patti Scialfa – features in one scene tells you all you need to know.
That’s all fine. The problem is the specifics of those dynamics never rise to the level of the performers giving them life. It all plays as cliché. Each push and pull, coupling and uncoupling is possible to call from a mile away, and nothing about the way it plays out carries any weight beyond Guadagnino’s terrific helming. It’s juvenile, and while that’s obviously intentional and good for an intentional laugh, it’s distinctly less interesting than anything that happens on the court. What is being said other than “Boy, these kids I wrote, huh?” We hear tennis is warfare. Tennis is a relationship. Its Serious Business described in Serious Monologues, and I suppose that’s true. Relationships are like tennis if indeed you write them that way, but tennis, like any sport, can be repetitive. For all its flair, the monotony the relationship drama collapse into reveals Challengers for what it really is: a soap opera.
The quasi-romance between Patrick and Art takes the brunt of this. From the beginning, it’s clear there’s more to the tennis partners than friendship. They’re physically affectionate even before things turn explicitly sexual: handsy, wrestling around, and kissing their connected trophies at one point, a nice visual representation of the “tennis as relationship” motif. The longer Challengers wears on, though, the more exhausting their story in all its self-satisfied winks and nods becomes. Art spits his gum into Patrick’s hand the way he one day will with Tashi after their marriage. They sit between each other’s legs. They eat phallic shaped foods. To be clear, this isn’t a problem with homoerotic subtext; it’s once again a matter of sheer repetition. Scenes between the two become a deluge of whatever obvious cutesy visual metaphor Kuritzkes could come up with, as if he wants points for pre-Code playfulness between characters who we’ve already seen make out. Like the endless swinging back and forth of the wider love triangle, it stops being clever after a while and starts feeling played out.
And yet, I can no more deny the sheer mastery on display than I can deny the shortcomings of the script. There are moments even before the ending where Guadagnino’s camera combines with the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Killer) to craft something like cinematic nirvana. As these athletes compete at the top of their game, artists do the same to bring their story to life. Does that story sometimes play like an erotic thriller we’ve seen before (with plot points we’ve seen earlier in this same film repeated ad nauseum)? Yes, but at its best, Challengers is no worse off for that familiarity. As it does for its stars, all fades away but the game before us.
Rating: B+
Challengers is now playing in theaters.
