Bonus: I'm Writing About Challengers After All
On a Thursday just this once
Watching
Challengers (2024)
What makes for good live sporting events is not the same as what makes for good writing or good filmmaking. John McPhee understood this in his epochal masterpiece Levels of the Game1, a longform essay describing a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Through McPhee’s virtuosic prose, we are not only sitting courtside with him watching the match, we are off the court learning the whole story of how these two men ended up in this place at this time, we are even in and out of the players’ heads, hearing thoughts impossible for McPhee to know except by extrapolation from his hawkeyed observations. Contrast this panoply of perspectives with a televised tennis match: an unblinking, fixed angle showing as much of the court as possible, interspersed with a limited number of instant replay recordings2 and filler shots of the stadium crowd, players getting water, maybe the occasional aerial view.
If you’re going to make a movie about tennis that’s any good as a movie, you’re going to have to make some decisions about how and when to break from the format of a televised match. For one thing, actors are (generally) not professional tennis players, so out go any straightforward wide shots of long rallies. Luca Guadagnino, who I would not have previously thought up to the task, working with Justin Kuritzkes, who on the basis of my familiarity with his YouTube fame I really would not have thought up to it, know a bit of what John McPhee knew, transposed to the work of a director and screenwriter. What Challengers can’t do is show us an epic tennis match head-on. What it can do is just about everything else.
I’ve now seen Challengers in theaters twice; I’ll definitely watch it again, at home at least, and I expect to return to it many times in the future like another favorite scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network. Whereas the Fincher/Sorkin collaboration is pointedly trying to make a grand generational statement, and similarly unlike the sophisticated sociopolitical interest McPhee takes in the subject at hand, the Guadagnino/Kuritzkes partnership is almost comically uninterested in saying much of anything. We’re just here, as Zendaya puts it, to watch some good fucking tennis. And how better to deliver that in a movie than to use every trick in the book and then invent some you’ve never seen before? The club music is popping, the slo-mo is frequent and portentous, the camera is switching from bird’s eye to racket’s-eye to ball’s-eye to mole-person-beneath-the-court’s-eye view, the cross-court zooms into the crowd are obscene in their grandiosity, the players’ backstories are full of more twists than what you can get out of a pepper grinder, there’s a Blood Orange track from 2013 diegetically bopping in the background of a scene set in 2006 just because it hits right, the homoeroticism between Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor (allegedly added to the script, perspicaciously, by Guadagnino) is constantly threatening us with a good time, Zendaya is, depending on where you’re sitting, either acting out her ears or failing to rise to the occasion. Challengers would have to, I concede, probably say a little bit more about its people and place to really be considered a masterpiece, but it’s an instant classic nonetheless, a compression of all the ambient factors that make live tennis exciting into a form that truly sings in a theater.
Programming Note
I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to observe a reduced summer schedule this year. I have one project picked out to work on between June and August, so you’ll have at least one newsletter to look forward to. If that ends up being the only thing I write this summer, consider this your advance notice!
I’d like to thank Bradley Babendir for briefly invoking this comparison on letterboxd first and inspiring this off-the-cuff review.
For more on this, incidentally, check out Theo Anthony’s Subject to Review.