Old Yorker

  • Good Time

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie (2017)

    A psychiatrist is trying word association on a young man who has evident learning difficulties and an air of baffled hostility towards his interrogator.  Another young man interrupts the session, announcing that it’s time to go.  The intruder is Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) and the patient in the psychiatrist’s chair Connie’s younger brother Nick (Benny Safdie).  Despite protests from the psychiatrist (Peter Verby), the Nikases leave and promptly rob a bank.  Part of what makes these opening sequences of Good Time absorbing is their quietness – the bank heist as much as the preceding conversation.  The quietness is not a taste of things to come.  The bank job appears to succeed – Connie and Nick leave the premises with $65,000.  It’s not until they’re in a getaway car that they discover a dye pack has been concealed with the stolen cash.  The dye fills the vehicle with red dust, causing the driver to crash.  Once it bursts into noise and speed, Good Time is more or less relentless.  This is a New York film in terms of its scratchy, hopped-up temperament as well as its physical setting.

    Police officers stop Connie and Nick as they walk away from the car crash.  Nick panics and makes a run for it but, after a chase, is caught, taken into custody and placed in a holding cell.  Connie does escape.  After various unsuccessful attempts to secure bail for his brother, he learns that Nick, after a fight with another prisoner, has been hospitalised.  Connie breaks into the hospital to break his brother out of it, and takes refuge in the home of an elderly woman and her teenage granddaughter Crystal (Taliah Webster), only to find that he’s abducted the wrong patient.  Under the facial bandages is Ray (Buddy Duress), a criminal just released from prison on parole.  When Connie learns that Ray left a bottle of LSD solution worth thousands of dollars in an abandoned amusement park, the two men and Crystal go there to search for the precious acid.  They find it but are accosted by a night security guard (Barkhad Abdi), whom Connie and Ray then assault, stealing his uniform.  They also find keys in a pocket of the uniform and get into the man’s apartment, in a Brooklyn high rise, where they hide out until morning.  (Crystal, meanwhile, is arrested.)  After an altercation in the apartment, Connie runs off with the LSD solution.  He’s pursued and arrested by the police.  Ray climbs out of the apartment window to try to escape but falls to his death.   The film ends with Connie in jail and Nick back in therapy, this time as one of a group of mentally handicapped patients.  Withdrawn and baffled at first, he slowly begins to engage with the group.

    The Safdie brothers’ title, in other words, is ironic.  Its events, locations and rhythm give Good Time a nightmare quality.  It’s also a nightmare for the photophobic:  much of the action takes place during hours of darkness, with no shortage of flashing lights.  (A moan:  I’m fed up with film certificates that warn the viewer of such atrocities in store as scenes of smoking but not of strobe and similar effects.)   Good Time, written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is a coherent lowlife drama.   Brotherly love that’s real, though manifested in sociopathic ways, is a central theme.  There’s some excellent acting, especially from Robert Pattinson and Taliah Webster.  Pattinson’s whippet-thin, quicksilver presence is a big help to the Safdies in sustaining momentum; more remarkably, his burning eyes humanise as well as intensify Connie.  Newcomer Webster makes Crystal apprehensive of, yet intrigued by, Connie and what he’s up to.  Ben Safdie’s swollen look hints at pain inside Nick.  Jennifer Jason Leigh makes a brief, striking appearance as Connie’s girlfriend.

    Plenty of admiring reviewers seem to have derived pleasure from Good Time.  Plenty of films before this one have dealt with unhappy subjects and situations, and raised the spirits because they’ve done so with talent and insight.  But the Safdies’ piece is a lowering experience.  There’s no exploration of the wretched, drugs-addled lives described; what’s more, those lives are subjugated to the visceral quality of the direction:  direction calculated to give the viewer a good – that is, an immediately exciting – time. Perhaps the plot improbabilities, like Connie’s taking as long as he does to discover he’s removed Ray instead of Nick from the hospital, make it easier for people to take the film as a ‘dark’ comedy of errors.  The words ‘good time’ are actually spoken by the psychiatrist, telling Nick, as he embarks on group therapy, what’s he’s going to enjoy.  The phrase is ironic in this particular context too.  The implication of the last scene is that Nick, no less than Connie, is imprisoned.

    24 November 2017

  • Ingrid Goes West

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matt Spicer (2017)

    Matt Spicer’s debut feature, which he co-wrote with David Branson Smith, is slippery, unconvincing and very entertaining.  Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza), a young woman living in Pennsylvania, is furious she didn’t get an invitation to the wedding of Charlotte (Meredith Hagner), with whom Ingrid has an unrequited friendship.  She crashes the reception and maces the bride in the face.  Ingrid emerges from a subsequent spell in a mental hospital to develop a new attachment.  Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) is a photographer with a sizeable Instagram following.  The look of Taylor and of her life in Los Angeles is, to Ingrid, thoroughly enviable.  Although her first online contact with Taylor yields a negligible response, Ingrid is undaunted:  she decides to use the $60,000 she inherited from her late mother to subsidise a new life and moves to LA.  Ingrid, although she hangs out in places where Taylor likes to hang out, is getting nowhere fast until she comes up with the idea of kidnapping her idol’s dog Rothko – in order to return him to, and thereby ingratiate herself with, Taylor.  The plan works and the two become friends – in a more real way, it seems, than Ingrid was friends with Charlotte.  Not for long, though:  Ingrid’s crazy possessiveness and Taylor’s egocentric inconstancy are a recipe for disaster.  Is Ingrid Goes West the tale of a sick individual?  Is it a critique of a cyber-epidemic (Instagram was described by the journalist Eleanor Margolis, in a New Statesman piece in June this year, as a ‘cultural pissing contest’)?   It’s both, but rarely at the same time.  In Nightcrawler (2014), Dan Gilroy dramatised the synergy of a pathological personality and a morbid journalistic practice.  Matt Spicer tends to switch focus between Ingrid’s psychological instability and the mad inanity of internet ‘celebritization’.  He does so according to whichever of the two will deliver more instant impact – and, often, humour – in taking his film forward.

    Social media don’t appear to be the root cause of Ingrid’s mental problems.  Her Charlotte obsession developed when she was reeling from the loss of her mother:  Ingrid’s essential need, it seems, is to be the most important person in someone’s life rather than in-with-the-in-crowd online.  She rents accommodation in Los Angeles from Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr), an aspiring screenwriter and Batman enthusiast – ie he’s writing what he hopes will be the screenplay for the next Batman film.   Though he finds Ingrid exasperating, Dan is soon attracted to her.  When they eventually go on their first date, both reveal the painful losses they’ve suffered in their life.  That night, they sleep together.  Spicer ignores the implications of Ingrid’s discovery that she matters to Dan for as long as these would get in the way of the plot.  Instead, like Ingrid, he uses Dan’s affections to justify his assisting in her bizarre projects, which, of course, dig Ingrid into a deeper hole.  Her urge to monopolise isn’t uncontrollable and there’s no suggestion that she desires Taylor physically.  She gets along well enough with Taylor’s husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell), an unsuccessful artist.  (The only picture he sells is to Ingrid, as part of her Taylor campaign.)   When, however, Taylor’s brother – recovering drug addict Nicky (Billy Magnussen) – appears on the scene, he and Ingrid are immediately at daggers drawn.  Matt Spicer, well aware of his influences, has Nicky explicitly accuse Ingrid of ‘Single White Female stuff’ but Jennifer Jason Leigh’s antagonist in Barbet Schroeder’s film was a good deal more single-minded.

    It’s never clear how big a fraud Taylor is meant to be.  Ingrid, once she’s returned Rothko to Taylor, insinuates herself in the latter’s life very easily; they spend plenty of time in each other’s company until Taylor herself starts trying to get in with a high-profile fashion blogger (Pom Klementieff).  On the other hand, Taylor’s self-advertisement as a successful photographer presumably isn’t a complete sham:  with Ezra making no money at all, it’s Taylor who appears to finance their lifestyle.  Matt Spicer’s attempt to suggest that Taylor and Ingrid are essentially alike is half-hearted.  Ezra tells Ingrid that Taylor too, when she first came to LA, was desperately friendless but when, in their final confrontation, Ingrid tells her this, Taylor’s refutation seems fair enough:  she may be part of a cultural malaise but she’s nothing like the maladaptive Ingrid.  The climax to Ingrid Goes West works well because Spicer is able to fuse the protagonist’s fragile state of mind and his satire of internet pathology.  Ingrid makes a video – in which she explains that she’s alone, sick of being herself and about to take her own life – and uploads it to Instagram.  She wakes in hospital to learn from Dan that her suicide attempt failed because he immediately saw her video and called emergency services.  Since then, the video has gone viral, with gazillions of expressions of love and encouragement sent to Ingrid’s hashtag (#iamingrid).  All the young actors in the film are good but Aubrey Plaza holds it together – she plays Ingrid with fierce empathy, as well as plenty of comic skill.  Elizabeth Olsen’s performance as Taylor can hardly be subtle but it’s a pleasant change to see her in a role where she can be glamorously vivid.  O’Shea Jackson Jr is likeable and witty as the long-suffering Dan.

    23 November 2017

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