CHALLENGERS - Mark Reviews Movies

Challengers, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 25, 2024

Tennis is the backdrop of Challengers, and a love triangle makes up the foundation of the plot. Writer Justin Kuritzkes and director Luca Guadagnino's film, though, isn't actually about tennis, and as for the concept of a love triangle in this specific case, there's a much bigger question at hand. Are any of these characters capable of loving anything other than the game, the competition, and those rare moments on the tennis court when two players are at the height of their abilities, playing the game more as an intense conversation than a matter of sport?

Once the answer to that question becomes apparent, the film opens up in unexpected and much deeper ways. Here's a sports film that's far more concerned with its characters than the game, so much so that even the fast-paced and grueling tennis sequences do start to look like acts of wordless conversations, and it's daring enough to look at those characters with plain and sometimes unsettling honesty. Not one of these characters is particularly likeable as people, in the way that everyday folks just want things like the love of friends and a romantic partner, some feeling of personal validation, and some sense of professional success.

These aren't any normal, old people, though. They're athletes, who are, were, or could be at or near the top of their chosen sport. They know this—believe it to the very core of their being, really—and behave with that knowledge. We can't observe them from the perspective of who they love, their family lives, how they act with and talk to each other, and why they're so driven to succeed. These three are obsessed with chasing the apex of what they can do and what accomplishments they can achieve. The film knows this, too—genuinely believes to its very core that this is the sole defining factor of who these characters are.

That makes it fascinating, funny, and highly dramatic in a way that might seem improbable with the premise of a tennis-based love triangle. It features three great, lived-in performances from the leads, who get both that their characters aren't anything approaching endearing and that they need to elevate their respective charms to compensate for that.

The narrative spans more than a decade, watching as the characters' careers rise and fall and—perhaps worst of all for any of them—settle into a comfortable rhythm, their romantic entanglements are made and shift and occasionally collide, and both professional and personal matters become ammunition for each to get what he or she wants at any given moment. The framing story is a match between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) at a second-tier tennis tournament in New Rochelle, New York, sponsored by a tire company.

For Art, this is a big step down, since he's only one top-tier tournament victory away from winning all of them at least once during his career, but some losses have shaken his confidence. For Patrick, it's potentially a considerable step up, since he occasionally makes those big tourneys, but he needs this win to guarantee he'll get another chance. They're both in their 30s, so it's not as if the two men will be able to or want to be in their current uncertainty for much longer.

The two know each other, too, and through a series of flashbacks, we realize how deep the connection used to be and why the emotional scars might be the result of more damage than the physical ones. Art and Patrick were the best of friends, having gone to boarding school, risen through the junior league, and played doubles matches together. A woman comes between them, or better, she does to the extent she can with these two, who probably would have been opponents on the court and off it no matter what else may have happened in their lives.

She's Tashi (Zendaya), a phenom in the junior league and college, and in the present day, she is Art's wife and coach. A large scar on her knee tells the professional side of her story even before we see it happen. Tashi's the one who convinces Art to join the lesser tournament as a confidence-boost, because she needs it just as much as, if not more than, he does.

A lot happens as soon as Tashi enters the lives of the two men. They're both infatuated with her as a woman and, mostly, as a tennis player (It's quite amusing to watch the evolution of their body language from when they first see Tashi in person, as their mouths drops, to when they first see her play, as their whole bodies drop). She can see it, of course, and, in an increasingly intimate scene in the guys' motel room, feeds off and toys with their attention. The film teases sex and sexiness in a clever way, always getting close to or implying something along those lines happening without ever showing it. When you want to be the best, who has the time for something so distracting, after all?

Romantic bonds form, break, and are reignited down the line of the story. It goes back and forth with the same dexterity of Kuritzkes' dialogue, the way Gaudagnino pulls out every trick in the book—and comes up with some unique ones, like first-person shots and some that impossibly exist underneath the court—to make the tennis scenes as dynamic as possible, and the score (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) thumps and blooms with synthetic rhythms and melodies. There are real betrayals, perhaps, but then again, is it possible to betray the romantic feelings of someone whose real feelings are limited to a game and being the best at it?

These performances put that question upfront. Zendaya plays a cold, calculating player, coach, and wife, but she does so with a degree of blunt truthfulness that, in the context of what she wants, is almost admirable (Besides, it means the guys know exactly what they're getting into from the start, since she is so forthright about it). Faist continues to prove he's one of the more compelling new actors out there, as the one character who becomes somewhat sympathetic on a plainer level—although it's not as if he isn't using Tasi for his own ends. Finally, O'Connor is charismatic, despite Patrick being a smug, privileged man-child who knows exactly which buttons to push.

Challengers is an excellent piece of character-focused entertainment. Indeed, everyone here knows exactly the story they're telling, how it needs to be told, and why it's about more than tennis, big personalities, and the melodramatic twists and turns of its puzzle-like narrative. That stuff—especially the personalities on display and the melodrama—pulls us in, to be sure, and because of the complete confidence of the filmmakers and the actors, it never relents in gripping us.

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