Don't Like - Nonsensical Nonlinear Plots
There’s this idea out there in screenwriting land right now that sophisticated plots are written out of order. Tell a story in order, starting at the beginning until you get to the end? No way. It’s far superior to have an intersecting plot that weaves across time and its characters. It’s too simple to see big emotions develop based on actions happening in the present. It’s much, much better to see them in ultra-short glimpses to represent the fractured nature of life experience being played out across an entire lifetime. Do those fragments always tell the plot super well? Not necessarily, but it’s ok because it takes a lot of effort to write a plot like this in the first place. The viewer will recognize that fact and be astounded by the realization that they’re watching a very carefully constructed work of art. So who cares if the story itself has problems or gets boring as it bounces around? It’s being told in an interesting way! And that’s what really counts. Does it matter that so many movies are this way and nonsequential plot structures aren’t inherently good? Actually, yeah, well, maybe…1
**Lots of Spoilers Ahead**
Not to give my Challengers review in a footnote but here it goes. Overall, I think it was a silly movie that thinks it is a smarter and sexier movie than it is. The biggest problems with the movie, aside from the annoying way it’s told, are that the timeline of events is too long and the characters don’t have any real interiority. It’s a movie that begins when the characters are in high school and doesn’t push past that emotionally. Worse than all these characters being stunted adult children, all the motivations and desires they do have aren’t deeply explored so much as they are nodded to. To quote my friend, Kate, “Challengers wanted to be a lot of things and ended up being nothing.”
But back to the timeline… The movie is about a high school through college love triangle that is forced back together over a decade later. The circumstances are that Art, the best American tennis player since Pete Sampras, is seeking to win the US Open at the behest of his wife and coach Tashi. However, he’s currently on a losing streak and needs to get back to his winning ways. So, Tashi suggests he signs up for a lowly and seemingly random challenger-level tournament. This is a massive step down for Art, who has won at every other Grand Slam besides the US Open. But the logic is it’ll be impossible for him to lose so it’s a foolproof plan. But, as it turns out, his old doubles partner from his national juniors days is also there to play. His name is Patrick and when we’re introduced to him his credit card is getting rejected from a cheap motel and he has to sleep in his car. Patrick is seemingly lost in the world and living out the dream of being a grimy professional tennis player and philanderer. Even though he’s down now, he dated Tashi before Art did and he’ll always have that on Art.
Oh, the other thing is that Patrick is also a huge asshole, he’s not friends with Art anymore, and he still serves like he never quite learned how. On the topic of personalities, Art is a delicate soft boy who is sweet, attentive, and caring but in a problematic nice guy way. Between them is Tashi, who is a hyper-competitive manipulator who once was a great tennis player but then had one knee injury and became one of the world’s best coaches with Art under her guidance. We don’t see any of her coaching but we know that she’s also still a celebrity in her own right as she features prominently in a repeated Aston Martin ad with Art (curiously though she is also not so much of a celeb that she’s able to sit unbothered throughout the small time tennis match [it doesn’t make sense]). Back to the plot, Art and Patrick predictably meet in the finals where their lives take a turn for the ultimate showdown. Will the superstar Art regain his form? Or will Patrick pull out a miracle and beat his old friend again? Will they settle once and for all who the better player is—all other history aside? And what about Tashi? Is she committed to staying with Art? Is he going to prove to her he’s man enough? Is she setting him up to fail? Will any of them be able to walk away? Or will they return to their old dynamics because people are stuck in high school and are incapable of growing? (←hint it’s this last one)
Challengers raises a lot of questions, but it doesn’t have many good answers. The premise is pretty weak if you’re at all familiar with the high-stakes world of tennis. The tournament they go to play at is beyond low stakes for a player of Art’s caliber. Winning a Grand Slam is a magnificent accomplishment and it’s clear that Art has progressed into a tennis player that Patrick never could have become. The whole idea that he’s going to outwork him or psych him out is mindless. There comes a point where you’re either elite or you’re not and the elite players beat the non-elite players. It’s that simple. It doesn’t help that none of the actors in Challengers show any sign of being particularly good at tennis. The movie does a decent job trying to imitate what tennis looks like but it isn’t all that convincing. For one, every rally in the movie is approximately five shots too long. That means instead of playing quick, tense, emotional points, everything is played back and forth to death. There is no artistry or understanding of the game, only its most obvious metaphor.
To that end, the only reason the plot gets to move along at all is that Tashi is the plot’s puppet master. She has a gravitational pull on “her two white boys” in the film. At the beginning of the movie, she is the biggest thing in youth tennis. She has an Adidas campaign and is primed for the bright lights of the pros but she decides to go to college and play at Stanford because she apparently isn’t privileged enough to have the luxury of being a generational athlete (this plot point really makes no sense). Ignoring that, the boys pine and lust for her early on as they’re cast under her magnetic spell. In what is probably the “hottest” scene in the movie, they all share a makeout in a hotel room together, which begins slowly and tensely before ending with Tashi watching Art and Patrick kiss each other to set an ambient and never really dealt with homoerotic undertone in the movie.
After the kiss, Patrick initially wins Tashi’s heart by beating Art in their Juniors final match. Art is totally jealous of Patrick and even prods him to find out if he had sex with her for real. Patrick holds the ball in the crux of his racquet to let Art know they had sex. It’s all very perverted in a boyish way. It doesn’t end there though because Art doesn’t give up on his crush. Coincidentally he’s also going to Stanford to play college tennis so he’ll have plenty of time to use underhanded tactics to get her to break up with Patrick while’s out on the pro tour.
Speaking of which, Patrick being on the road means he has to come visit. Naturally, it’s a total trainwreck. The trip begins with Art and Patrick catching up and Art telling Patrick about how Tashi doesn’t really care about him or think of their relationship as anything serious, which Patrick takes oddly well despite the obvious jealousy. Shortly thereafter, Patrick meets up with Tashi. They try to have sex but it all goes wrong when Tashi tries to talk serious tennis strategy with him while unbuttoning his pants in an odd twist of having love for the game. They get into a fight but don’t fully break up. Patrick then leaves the campus because he doesn’t want to stick around. Conveniently, once he’s gone, Tashi blows out her knee in her match a few hours later. Luckily, Art is there to comfort her and when Patrick does show up at the training facility to help, Tashi and Art both yell at him to “get out!” (This then sets up the oddest plot detail, which is that this knee injury ends Tashi’s career completely and she barely tries to get back on court despite being a looming superstar of her own. Remember, this movie takes place from 2006 - 2019 when coming back from knee injuries was far from impossible. Tashi is also supposed to be insanely competitive and have an incredible work ethic as she’s so much better than her competition. But I guess there wasn’t room for that plot arc.) Moving on, Art being there for Tashi doesn’t start their relationship just yet… That would be too easy. Instead, a few years have to quickly pass so Art can reconnect with Tashi and have her become his coach. Somewhere in that time, Art once secretly sees Tashi and Patrick go off for a one-night stand at the Atlanta Open. Art is presumably jealous about that. That’s all Challengers has to say about it, too.
Then there’s a big gap in the plot at this part of the movie but basically what we infer is that Art gets international superstar level good at tennis. He and Tashi get married, have a kid and theoretically live out the dream—aside from winning the US Open. But make no mistake, they are winning at life and must be having a good time as a power couple. Sure there is probably some high-level drama but there’s also just no way a tennis player could win six Grand Slams and act miserable. This is truly such a rarified level of success that Challengers doesn’t quite seem to get. Meanwhile, Patrick is failing to ascend to the degree that he is slowly going broke. Don’t feel too bad for him though. It’s been made clear that he comes from a very privileged background. He’s a tennis dirtbag because it’s fun.
Alas, Challengers is not a movie about what ifs. It’s about what happens and only the useful, immature parts of their shared past are relevant to the movie. That brings us back to the juncture we’re at, the big final match of the New Rochelle Open. Remember, Tashi’s big-brain idea is to have Art play in a low-ranking tournament so he can beat a bunch of nobodies and get his mojo back. Strangely though, she just happened to choose a tournament that Patrick would be at. Or, maybe this is her puppet mastery at work and she’s itching for a climactic showdown. Did she see the draw and know that Patrick would be there too? That could be a scintillating plot but isn’t it a little far-fetched that an athlete who is the current face of Aston Martin would be digging all the way back into these depths? Did she really coach him to greatness to have to bring him back for a final duel against his old high school rival? Isn’t that a bit… much? Winning the US Open to complete the career slam would be phenomenal for Art but going to a super small tourney like the one she chooses would set off alarms in the tennis world and anything other than a resounding win would be deeply embarrassing and risky for him—especially since the real question of his ability at the moment is his mental fortitude and not his skill. In short, the risk is not worth the reward here. But who are we to question Tashi’s genius? She’s the best, ok?
The entire premise is a bit faulty when put that way but as people will be quick to point out, it’s not really a movie about tennis. It’s an interpersonal drama about a love triangle. All this mess just has to happen. Perhaps Tashi is hatching this plan because she wants to see Patrick again. Except, we don’t have any clear indication as to why this would be the case except that maybe she still has a thing for the bad boys? Is he what she really wants? Is she just bored in her marriage? We don’t get to have an idea. She doesn’t show any remorse when she leaves him and there aren’t any hints that she misses him in the context of her present relationship. Yes, they had a one-night stand a bunch of years ago. But that was years ago before she dated Art and Patrick is so clearly a loser now in the context of everything that has happened in their lives. It’s like, really, this guy? She even runs into him while he’s on a pathetic hotel bar date where it’s clear his only game is that he’s a borderline professional athlete. But just wait, part of the way Patrick teases Tashi, in an almost negging fashion to intrigue her again, is by suggesting that she should be his coach now because if she could guide him to a Grand Slam win she’d be the best coach ever. Mind you, we never actually see her coach and we also see that Patrick just isn’t that good at tennis. If that’s supposed to be some great human emotional drama, I must be lost because it’s all a bit confusing.
That ploy doesn’t work on her in the moment but Tashi does end up getting nervous about the whole ordeal. So the ever-confident mastermind hatches a new plan: beg Partick to throw the match for Art. Patrick surprisingly agrees, and then they immediately get into a literal spat before they have sex in the back of his Honda CRV while a windstorm rages outside (the literalness of this visual metaphor was not lost on me). It’s a very contrived moment of passion. It’s supposed to be juicy but it’s some extra pulpy concentrate. Is her life falling apart this badly? She came to New Rochelle to get Art’s groove back so he can go win the US Open. The idea that everything could so badly so quickly and collapse in the backseat of the CRV is uninspired. Shouldn’t Tashi be smart enough to realize the greater futility of her situation and aspirations? I guess maybe she’s only human and this was a deep moment where she caved in against her higher values. Too bad we have no idea what those are because it’s unclear what Tashi wants. Maybe that’s relatable in the way no one knows what they want anymore. But having characters who don’t know what they want is also pretty boring. Why not let them make the hard choices instead of lulling into one crazy situation after the next?
Also, Art and Tashi have a kid together. Is she really ready to blow up her life by sleeping with Patrick again? She knows everything that’s happened between all of them. She’d have to have some idea that cheating on Art with Patrick would end poorly. So what kind of chess is this emotional mastermind playing? My read is checkers. Challengers just skips around from thing to thing. This raises other problems with the movie starting with: what is the substance of Art and Tashi’s bond? Is he really still the same fragile teenager craving her attention? Has he really not grown over the last 13 years of his life? Do his Grand Slams not count for anything to him? Does he really not have any sense of identity outside of his relationship with his wife/coach as an adult in his 30s? Shouldn’t they have to have fully eclipsed and forgotten about the old member of the love triangle? They conquered the tennis world together and now they’re barely hanging on by a thread because she wants to keep living vicariously through his play? (Also what kind of hyper-competitive elite athlete wants to do that?) I’d love to tell you more about their relationship and why they are the way they are but Challengers doesn’t bother relaying such things to its audience. Instead, it’s happy to let the action rest on a puerile view of meaningful adult relationships.
That emptiness would be fine if the movie was really fun, sexy, and cool (which is how it’s billed and largely talked about) but what happens on screen is fairly tame, often bordering on dull. There’s some masturbation talk in a hotel room, a three-way makeout in that same hotel room, a brief hookup in a dorm room, some naked guys in a locker room, and a hookup in the back seat of a Honda CRV. Any of those scenes could have been hot and horny but they strangely weren’t. For whatever reason, Luca Guadagnino decided that being topically horny would be horny enough for Challengers (and for everyone out there suggesting that was copious amounts of horny sweat in this movie, I would suggest you go watch Body Heat sometime soon). If there is a bright side to the movie it’s the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which is perfectly fine electronic music. It’s well-produced and thumping but is too often used to inject energy into scenes that just isn’t there.
That’s not the fault of the music though. It’s a product of the script and the direction. The movie doesn’t want to deal with the drama at the center of it. Very rarely do the characters call each other out for what’s going on. Everything exists in a kind of vague fugue state. To make matters worse, the rare moments of direct confrontation we do get are lackluster. For instance, there’s a crucial scene that takes place in Art and Tashi’s hotel room the night before the final match. Art is feeling nervous about his match. He tells Tashi that he wants to retire at the end of the year no matter what happens with the US Open. Tashi unconvincingly accepts this from him. He doesn’t buy her response though, so then, in a moment of vulnerability, he asks her if she’ll still love him even if he loses. It’s the lowest place he’s at in the entire movie. It’s a little confusing he’s here because he’d just spent the afternoon humiliating Patrick in the locker room but it’s where he’s at as a raw emotional character. And how does Tashi respond to Art’s plea? She says that she will leave him if he loses to Patrick. And what does Art do? He takes it sullenly right on the chin.
It’s absolutely preposterous that one of the biggest emotional moments in the movie lands with so little verve. Is she serious? Is Art going to call her bluff? Does he even want to be in this relationship? Is he not having any profound realizations about what his relationship has become or maybe has always been? Art isn’t a total pushover—Grand Slam winners can’t be—but all we get is a bunch of nothing. Art accepts his fate and then goes to sleep so soundly that he doesn’t notice at all when Tashi gets up and disappears for a few hours in the middle of the night to cheat on him with Patrick. When Tashi returns Art has woken up to go sleep with their daughter but is back sound asleep and not worrying at all why his wife wasn’t in their hotel room after a big fight. That might make for a CRaZy story but it doesn’t make for a good one.
Anyway, to bring this review back to the point of the main post, the intersecting back-and-forth plot doesn’t help the movie. As every critic’s review points out, this is meant to be a formal nod to a tennis rally. I think that sounds more impressive than it actually is. After all, how hard is it really to find tennis metaphors in a tennis movie? Consider this. In an unsurprising move, the movie’s final scene takes place on the court as Art has rallied his way back to level the match at one set apiece. In the heat of the final set, the two go furiously back and forth until Patrick starts to throw points with double faults. Art is confused about what’s going on until Patrick puts a ball back in the crux of his racquet to reveal he’s had sex with Tashi again. It’s the ultimate fuck you in this movie. Art then lets Patrick ace him on an underhand serve to send the match to a tie-break. The tennis shoots off into a hyper-frenetic mode as the drama is ratcheted all the way up for the film’s true (and final) climax but it’s impossible to remember what anyone is playing for anymore. That’s ok though because the movie cuts before the match is won as there are no winners here. It’s a limp ending that only reinforces the idea that all the ping-ponging around in the plot is there to distract from the fact that Challengers doesn’t have much to say.
For further reading, I’d highly recommend reading Angelica Jade Bastien’s critique of the movie and Zendaya’s acting in Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/article/challengers-review-its-almost-a-sexy-movie.html.