An early draft of this review was originally published on May 4, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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If you’ve seen the trailer or read reviews for the new film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) and rookie screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (husband to director Celine Song who made Past Lives), you know the premise:
Challengers is, on its surface, a twisted saga of two competitive tennis players, Patrick Zweig (La Chimera‘s Josh O’Connell) and Art Donaldson (West Side Story‘s Mike Faist). When we meet them, their relationship is a complicated mix of camaraderie, competition, and homoeroticism. But that volatile chemistry becomes unstable when they get playfully combative, and eventually contentious, over another rising tennis star, Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), a woman who enchants them both. And as Tashi works her magic, we begin to what she wants from playing them against each other, especially when her own career on the court comes to a crashing halt.
The intrigue of two men competing for the heart of the same woman has been popular template at the movies, so critics have plenty of possible precedents to consider for comparison. My personal favorite, an ’80s comedy, inspires my suggestion for an alternate title here: Dirty Rotten Sweaty Cheating Power-Serving Scoundrels.
Since this movie’s been inspiring lively conversations for months now, you probably don’t need me to reiterate the usual talking points:
You don’t need a more detailed synopsis than I’ve offered here. Most of the joy of the movie comes from riding its narrative rollercoaster from one surprise to the next. (I suspect some of you will scratch this one off your list if I tell you that the scene that serves as the “hook” in the trailer — the one win which Tashi gets both men kissing her at the same time — takes a turn in which the kissing continues, but without Tashi. If that’s not a dealbreaker for you, let me tell you, there a lot more movie to discover beyond that, and the part that interests me most — which has nothing to do with shared bodily fluids — is still more than an hour away.)
You’ve probably already heard that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross give the film a compelling electronic score that works wonders. I agree, even though I admire their work on The Social Network more.
And you don’t need me to tell you that Challengers is going catapult Zendaya to marquee-level movie-star status (if she wasn’t there already). If I have anything specific to contribute to the conversation about her performance here, it’s just that I think she strikes me here less as an Oscar-caliber actress and more as a reliably commercial star. And I think that’s a bit of the problem for the movie, as both of her co-stars look ready to headline prestige pictures for decades to come. Faist and O’Connor—especially O’Connor—create much more complicated and interesting characters here, by my lights.
But what you probably haven’t heard — and I’m amazed that so few of the movie’s opening weekend critics bother to mention this — is that Josh O’Connor was doing incredible things on big screens in two feature films while Challengers was getting most of the attention. Check out the layered and thoughtful drama/comedy La Chimera, in which O’Connor plays a troubled tomb-raiding treasure hunter. (It’s available on rental platforms now.) O’Connor is one of those rare, unconventionally engaging stars that makes his characters seem complex and ruggedly human, and he’s on an unlikely Adam Driver-esque ascent right now. He’s going to be everywhere soon, and deservedly so. (He’s already been cast in the third Knives Out murder mystery.) I won’t be surprised if he and Faist both earn Oscar nominations for their work here.What I find most interesting is how Challengers fits in the weird Amadeus and River Runs Through It genre of movies that ask “Why Is It That Those Who Behave in Self-Destructive and Relationally Self-Sabotaging Ways are the Ones Who Achieve Transcendence in Art?”And that has a lot to do with how I interpret the last ten climactic seconds, which made me laugh out loud in surprise and delight.
I had already come to the conclusion that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes couldn’t possibly find a satisfying conclusion for this saga of three-way abuse. But in revealing that this is ultimately about the drive to achieve transcendence in art rather than romance, they redeem the arc of appalling behavior. They’ve found the best possible way to end this very messy film.
I promise not to spoil what happens at the film’s climax (that word is, um, unusually appropriate here). But I will say that it’s likely to frustrate a lot of viewers with its seeming lack of closure. And I’m going to stubbornly claim that the film’s furious conclusion is, in fact, perfect closure if you’re tracking what the movie is really about, what it values most.
Indulge me for a moment — I’m going to do something critics should probably never do. I’m going to mention… my college band.
There’s a reason for that. Bear with me.
We weren’t great. Only two of the four of us really knew how to play guitar or keys. I was fumbling around with my guitar, trying to find anything that qualified as chords on a keyboard, and sometimes I just pounded bongos. But we were an improv comedy band, and the clumsiness was part of the act.
We didn’t care much if people liked us (although we were invited to play at parties and got the laughs we were looking for at open mics). We played for the joy of it. We played to try to make each other laugh.
But the biggest reason we loved playing together was because we loved finding our way toward something that held together as a song, and when we found something we were excited about — which happened a lot — we experienced something we could not get from any other endeavor. We learned early on that inspiration could come from anywhere, and its arrival was almost always a surprise. That’s what we lived for: those moments when we’d find our way into an unexpected and thrilling cohesion of lead guitar, bass, drums, keys, and melodies that were better than we’d known we were capable of.
In those moments, with the tape rolling, as one or two of us almost competitively strove to deliver surprising and hilarious lyrics on the spot, and as we all tried to stay on beat and in instrumental harmony, we’d look at one another in amazement, hoping that this magic would stay with us for at least the next three or four minutes. In those moments, we brought out the best in each other, and any of the competitive impulse we felt in trying to catch each other off guard or out-perform each other melted away. We’d found another level, and we realized that this was what it was about after all.
I have recordings of almost two thousand songs that we spontaneously discovered in our amateurish endeavors. And I listen to those recordings all the time now, reliving the thrills of surprises that took place while the tape was rolling. How did we do that? How did we start playing a song that did not yet exist, making it up as we went, and every so often stumble into a kind of euphoric jam-band fusion that made us feel more alive than anything else we knew? Why does it feel so good, so rejuvenating, so motivating when we tap into that feeling that we are a part of something larger than ourselves?
Most artists who have been at their art for a long time know what I’m talking about. Either alone or in collaboration, they’ve experienced those rare sessions when something mysterious takes hold, and they work at a level beyond what they know is possible.
I have no trouble believing that career athletes know what this feels like too.
And that is what I love best about Challengers. It’s why the final moments of the film become, for me, profound.
The surface-level appeal of Challengers is the stuff of movies I’d usually avoid or dislike. The characters are reckless, selfish, manipulative, and downright cruel, reducing the ideas of love and sex to power games. File this one under “How to Deprive Yourself of Any Hope for True Love.” To quote Michael Stipe from “Wake Up Bomb”: See ya, don’t wanna be ya.
But what the movie is ultimately about, in my interpretation, is something important, something I care about deeply, something I pursue, something I miss and hope I get to experience again. For almost everyone else I’ve read on this movie, this is a movie about tennis and sex. And nothing else. For me, it’s about so much more than that. Challengers is ultimately about devoting yourself so fully to an art that you arrive at something greater than fame or victory or anything you could claim as an achievement. It’s about discovering transcendence.
As I published this review at Substack on May 4th — Star Wars Day — I should share these thoughts that crossed my mind even as I watched Challengers from the “comfort” of my AMC recliner:
Surely I’m not the only one who realized that the chemistry triangle of Art, Tashi, and Patrick bears a strong resemblance to the chemistry between Luke, Leia, and Han Solo in the original Star Wars.
It fits perfectly (except that nobody is anybody’s sibling). Imagine Leia manipulating Luke and Han against each other to bring out the best star pilot or gunslinger in both of them. I mean, we actually get an “I love you” / “I know” exchange here. And Patrick is totally giving Han Solo’s “You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life” vibes.
I won’t be surprised if this inspires some rather R-rated fan fiction.
Oh, oh! We could call it Tashi Station.