Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie (2017)

A psychiatrist is giving word association to a young man with 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 is, in other words, 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 improbabilities of the plot, 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, assuring Nick, as he embarks on group therapy, of 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