'Challengers' Is the Best (and Sweatiest) Movie of 2024
Whichever special effects company in Los Angeles that sells industrial grade fake sweat in bulk certainly had a boon year in 2022 when Challengers filmed. Not since the cast of LOST were trekking through the jungles of Hawaii has so much perspiration been caught on film. Challengers, the new Luca Guadagnino sports romance starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist is basically a two-hour excuse to baste its trio of hot stars in gallons of glycerine gel. There's sweaty tennis matches, sweaty tennis practices, sweaty post-workout chats, sweaty sauna sits, sweaty makeout scenes and one non-sweaty scene involving a churro that got me a little hot and bothered.
Set in the world of professional tennis, Challengers opens in the WASP-y upstate New York enclave of New Rochelle where O'Connor's Patrick Zweig faces off against Faist's Art Donaldson in the finals of what should be a fairly low stakes tourney. Tashi Donaldson nee Duncan (Zendaya), Art's wife, watches from the sidelines decked out in a fantastic wrap dress, chic jewelry and the bob to end all bobs. As the audience comes to learn in a series of flashbacks starting 13 years earlier, however, this match is oozing (sweating even?) with a decade's worth of tension.
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You see, once upon a time Patrick and Art were besties and tennis partners. They won the US Open junior championships in doubles, shared sh-tty hotel rooms and Patrick even taught Art how to pleasure himself (something that Challengers somehow makes heartwarming). That is until they meet tennis prodigy and Adidas spokesperson Tashi Duncan at a bougie Long Island tennis party and fall instantly in love. In a pivotal scene (both for the movie and it's horny, viral marketing campaign), Tashi visits Patrick and Art at their dumpy rent-a-room and instigates a three-way kiss so sexually charged it feels transplanted from Saltburn. Leaving the boys wanting more (and with the rock hard physical manifestations of such), Tashi, who is actually more turned on by tennis than men, informs her boys that whoever wins the singles championship the next day will get to date her. Patrick wins. They start dating, BUT she's married to Art in the present day. And so you can probably see why this B-tier tennis match is so fraught with MEANING.
Over the 2+ hour runtime, we see Art sleeping in the skimpiest briefs imaginable, Tashi crack her leg in half, Patrick flaunting his a-s in a sauna, an Applebee's parking lot hookup, a one-night-only hurricane in New Rochelle, and enough product placement to give Erin Lichy's anniversary party invitations a run for their money. (Yes, Astin Martin, Dunkin, Coke, Sprite, Uniqlo, Orangina, Taco Bell, Pepsi, Budweiser, Gatorade, Wilson, Evian, On Running, Chanel, Rockstar, Blackberry, Applebees and JP Morgan Chase all make appearances.) But interspersed between the sweaty tennis, sexually fraught glances and artfully held cans of soda (logo out!), are three of the most richly dense and delicately crafted characters to appear on the silver screen.
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MGM
Challengers succeeds on numerous levels, but it is the best film of 2024 AND the best film of Luca Guadagnino's career BECAUSE OF Justin Kuritzkes's masterful script. The playwright and novelist has somehow concocted a movie that is both paced like a high-stakes thriller and Shakespearean in its character development. By the film's final scene, which is a pitch perfect culmination of the film and feels more akin to a Renaissance painting than a movie sequence, Tashi, Art and Patrick are so specific and fully formed that they feel like they've been ripped from Macbeth or Death of a Salesman. Kuritzkes deserves to join his wife and Past Lives director Celine Song next spring among the pantheon of Oscar-nominated screenwriters. (As an aside, I'm also desperately intrigued as to why both members of their marriage wrote movies about love triangles. Can the mysterious third man please write a screenplay next year to complete the triptych?)
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While Guadagnino is best known for Call Me By Your Name, his work since in Suspiria, Bones and All and We Are Who We Are has been a bit chaotic. The Italian's big dreams often need a bit of focusing and Kuritzkes' precise script keeps Guadagnino from wandering too far afield while providing him ample opportunities to flex his creative urges in the tennis sequences. The juxtaposition of the script's exactness and the often outlandish volleying scenes (shot in slow-mo, from above, from below, from the point of view of the players, from the point of view of the ball) is somehow charming and makes Challengers "artistic" rather than "untethered."
The crafts, from the character-specific, impeccably styled tennis ensembles to the location scouting and yes, the use of sweat bolster an already great film. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's 1980s video game-inspired score reminds you constantly of the games being played (on the court, in the bedroom and in the mind). And Guadagnino gifts audiences with an endless stream of artfully staged ass shots.
Challengers is a movie about the tangled webs of romance, about the spectrum of sexuality and the thin line between a lover and a friend, about the difference between passion and precision. It's about a Hemingwayian pursuit of perfection in craft. It's about the dynamics of wealth and class that creep into every aspect of life, including silly games with bouncing balls. It's about forcing our dreams deferred onto those we hold most dear, for better and for worse.
Challengers is a layered masterclass in screenwriting elevated at each turn by the many craftspeople who contribute to a feature. I could end this review by saying its "an ace" or "serves" up perfection or wins in a "grand slam." But there are already too many tennis puns floating around the internet. So I will just conclude by leaping to my feet and screaming into the void, "COME ONNNNNNNNNNNNNN!"
Grade: A+
