Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is shaping up to be a kingmaker. “I Am Love” gave Tilda Swinton a zesty role that allowed for more than serving as hipster shorthand, which is how she is often utilized these days. “A Bigger Splash” let Ralph Fiennes reconnect with his inner sleaze-rascal hedonist. “Call Me by Your Name” launched Timothée Chalamet, who showed a core of ferocious yearning that he has yet to really revisit. (It resurfaced in bits, in “Bones and All,” also by Guadagnino.) Now, with “Challengers” he allows one star, and two more on the rise, to similarly bloom.
“Challengers” is the kind of movie that you enter into with little preconceptions, only to realize about 15 minutes in that you’re in good hands. It has a sense of generosity, a willingness to roam, that’s unusual in contemporary Hollywood movies. Yes, sometimes Guadagnino tries a little too hard, with a showy camera trick. Yes, sometimes he leans on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ propulsive score a bit too much. The film could use more of the shagginess of other character-driven sports pictures like “Semi-Tough” or “Bull Durham.” But the fact that I’m thinking of those films at all in a theater in 2024 can’t be taken lightly either. Most, importantly, Guadagnino remains a musician with actors.
“Challengers” is set in the world of tennis, which explains the polish. These modern athletes aren’t 1970s-era shamblers with unchecked addictions. There’s no room in this film for Nick Nolte or Kris Kristofferson or Burt Reynolds. It’s a new age of hyper-conscious branding, something the film is aware of without quite critiquing, though this awareness still gives the narrative one of its many sources of unspoken tension. These tennis players are attempting to be the perfectionists that our era demands. Tashi (Zendaya) and Art (Mike Faist) are a married power couple with multiple branding deals and a lux lifestyle. An injury took Tashi, once a prodigy, out of the game, while Art is a Grand Slam champion who’s suffering a crisis of confidence. Art is losing to people less skilled than himself, and Tashi is trying to restore his game for the U.S. Open. Tashi pushes him into a challenger tournament for lower-level players and big leaguers looking to rejuvenate.
In such a match in New Rochelle, New York, Art faces off against Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who presents himself as a struggling louche moving from game to game. This match is the film’s framing device, containing many, sometimes too many, flashbacks revealing the shared past between Tashi, Art, and Patrick. This is a sports movie, so this match is of course a metaphor. Art has to find the eye of the tiger, while Tashi and Patrick could stand to regain empathy. This trio of strong personalities needs to even itself out.
That sounds pat on paper, and many filmmakers would’ve played it that way. The platitudes of sports movies are foolproof—so irresistible that you have to really be off your, um, game not to be able to sell them. They are about externals as routes to healing our internal, which is to say they are about easy answers via the pop psychology of winning a competition. That’s a more glamorous solution to neuroses than therapy, especially when it’s a star doing all the photogenic suffering.
The trick is to season the clichés so that an audience can swallow them and still live with itself in the morning, and to let the stars inform tropes with personality. Guadagnino is nearly without peer at these things right now. There are many close-ups of Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor’s big and beautiful and textured faces, and they tell you more than loads of dull exposition could. A few instances of fraught body language and we know that Tashi and Art’s marriage is in trouble. Tashi is clearly an alpha, while Art is the nice guy who’s refreshing for an alpha until he isn’t. Patrick has an unwashed virility that announces him as trouble: he’s smug, hairy, and sweaty and good-looking and charismatic enough to wear all these qualities as a fashion statement. He seems as if he always smells like sex.
The flashbacks initially take us back to the trio first coalescing about 15 years prior while at the beginnings of their careers. Art and Patrick are good friends with a strong homoerotic current between them, while Tashi is the woman with whom they are both besotted. The screenplay, by playwright Justin Kuritzkes, never positions Tashi as “the girl.” She is not merely a fantasy, but a full-blooded player in a triangle, with contradictory motivations that lead to ambiguous jockeying for power.
Though Tashi is the most durable side of this triangle, she isn’t condescendingly made perfect either. This is not one of those insufferable girl-boss roles of which Hollywood is currently so enamored. Tashi is so confident that she is mercenary, and Zendaya isn’t afraid of the rough edges. This ruthlessness is sexy until it isn’t, becoming a weight that Art and Patrick must carry through life as a reminder of their own inadequacy. Mind you, little of this is discussed, as Kuritzkes’ tangy script is remarkably allergic to preaching. The filmmakers create a thick air of emotional subtext that will be familiar to those who’ve had to fight their lover’s resentments and their own insecurities, daily, in an ongoing cage match to preserve a relationship.
Tashi initially pairs off with Patrick, and there is a wonderful scene in which she stops sex because he isn’t showing interest in her advice on his tennis game. In the tradition of anyone who has ever been successful in anything, she can’t stop. Tennis runs through her mind like ticker tape, and Zendaya finds a unique spin on this obsessiveness: Tashi’s commitment to tennis is sexy, because anyone that committed to anything is sexy, as well as irritating and a sign of strength and vulnerability. Tashi stops the sex and begins stretching her long limbs for a match, the stretching sexier than anything that was just going on between her and Patrick in bed. Defending her commitment, Tashi gets a tart line that sums them both up at once: “Coasting on your talent? How’s that working out for you?” Zendaya’s delivery, rich with a half dozen meanings, couldn’t be any sharper.
Art is the most earnest of the three, and outgunned in terms of ability and swagger, but he’s wilier than he appears to be. Faist, so good in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and last year’s “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game,” is proving to be a virtuoso of playing nice guys without turning them into schmucks. What Faist plays in “Challengers” is a suspicion of his niceness not being sexy. Such awareness can become self-loathing if not managed, and so his Art has a sense of weight and turmoil that position him as an every-man among Hollywood-movie settings and traditions. And yet amongst all that Faist gives Art’s love for Tashi an unaffected purity that’s poignant. You could see why Tashi would fall for him and get bored.
O’Connor plays a different kind of self-consciousness. For whatever reason, Patrick can’t give himself over to tennis the way that Tashi or Art can. The script is too smart to furnish one of those speeches in which a character asks Patrick what he’s so afraid of, and since that speech isn’t here, this suspicion of Patick’s cowardice runs underneath the film like a live wire. O’Connor plays him as an earthy hedonist goofball—a commanding hipster clown who suggests the second-coming of late 1960s and early ‘70s-era Elliott Gould. This performance is an announcement.
The match between Art and Patrick of course becomes a referendum on this triangle of friends and lovers. Art needs to know that Tashi can love him whether he wins or loses, but Tashi needs him to have the resources not to need her validation—a form of resentment that most movies won’t touch, but about which “Challengers” is casual. Art needs to know that he can be the wild animal that Patrick is or, if he isn’t, make peace with that, and Art and Patrick need to regain their equilibrium with one another. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air. This movie is shrewd about male insecurity, including how men can bond over screwing one another over.
There are betrayals in “Challengers” and they aren’t framed in the usual melodramatic way; they are seen as part of the game. You lose this set but maybe win the next. That lack of self-pity is one of the film’s strongest suits. The final moments, in which the ledgers of this love equation are evened, are among the most exhilarating in recent American movies. Most pop movies are fantasies of self-actualization, and here you see three folks not only actualize, but harmonize. It doesn’t come easy. They work for it. Neither relationships nor sports are for the timid.
“Challengers” is now playing in theaters everywhere.
