Challengers: Another Review. By Christopher Patterson.
“Challengers” tells the story of former tennis player Tashi, her husband Art, and her former partner Patrick, as well as the whirlwind that ensues in the not-so-simple game of tennis. Or, as the poets might say, all is fair in love and tennis. To avoid giving anything away, this is a film you need to see. It’s more than just the romance that the trailers might have you believe it to be about, and it’s more than just tennis. It’s so much more.
To start, Guadagnino’s directing bursts with a style that is prone to overuse, yet he appears to have finally found his balance with this approach. The opening is a great, minor, yet significant example of this. At the beginning of this film, we see a tennis match. Rather than simply zooming in on every detail to intensify the match, as most tennis films do, Guadagnino opts to focus on the surrounding scenery, immersing us in the world. This works so well because Guadagnino is giving us the world, not the people, to consume.
Instead of just grabbing cool shots, Guadagnino wants us to know the world through the characters, like portraits we look at and examine from a wide distance before seeing the finer details. As the match concludes, Guadagnino infuses the film with a sense of style, as the characters become the focal points from the beginning to the end, and the tennis matches require this build-up to intensify the tension. While this is quite a minor scene, it reflects all of the brilliance Guadagnino has retained in his days with “Call Me By Your Name” that seemed lost with “Bones and All.”
The acting is one of the most gripping things about “Challengers.” Despite the film’s explosive direction, nothing quite captivates the screen like Zendaya’s powerful performance, which blossoms through subtle behaviours and quite funny, to the point, actions. While the over-the-top antics in this film may be the thing that catches your eye the most, upon examination, it’s the details in the characters’ specific words and intentions that make this film so good. Even more, it’s in the way the characters make slight, irrelevant choices, saying a thousand words more than Tashi’s slap to Patrick. If there was one thing this film definitely gave to the world thanks to all of this, it would be Zendaya’s next Oscar for this mesmerising performance no one could’ve expected.
The screenwriting would be the element that almost distracts from the acting in a good and sad way. The screenwriting here is near flawless, with each line of dialogue having this energetic, more modern-like tone that matches the characters without ever coming off as put-on or as if an older person was attempting to write how people talk. This is so important because the film itself has dialogue that may seem a bit overly witty or cringey if in the hands of a worse writer or one not in touch with today’s society, but thankfully, here, that never occurs. Furthermore, the screenwriting in this film achieves a level of realism and comedic skill that one might expect from a drama like “Succession.”
Despite all the efforts to make the final tennis match quite believable through the buildup and nice direction, the final tennis match itself still feels slightly too over the top. However, the ending itself makes sense; it’s just an issue with execution. Though, this touch of indulgence does not take too much away from a truly magnificent wonder this film is.
Overall, “Challengers” is a powerful spectacle that will likely be a highlight of the careers of all involved.
4.5/5 Stars
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