Review

MOVIE REVIEW: While well-acted, Safdie brothers’ Cinema Verite leaves viewers uncomfortably disengaged

Connie (Robert Pattinson) is a not-too-bright bank robber on the run in Josh and Benny Safdie’s frenetic heist movie Good Time.
Connie (Robert Pattinson) is a not-too-bright bank robber on the run in Josh and Benny Safdie’s frenetic heist movie Good Time.

Cinema Verite, a movement born out of the French New Wave, eschews conventional melodrama and Hollywood hokum in favor of documentary-style day-to-day realism. You don't get iconic character types, or punched-up tropes. You get hand-held cameras, natural lighting and a spotlight on people you might very easily walk past in the street.

Yet, as much as it may disavow conventional dramatic arcs, it still has to tell a story. The difference between an anecdote and a narrative is essentially the fact that the latter has an ending -- a moment of sublime friction that allows it to resonate. Without it, the production can feel pointless.

Good Time

83 Cast: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Taliah Webster, Buddy Duress

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Rating: R, for language throughout, violence, drug use and sexual content

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Good Time, Benny and Josh Safdie's new verite-style drama, is well-acted and precisely constructed, but also frustratingly refuses to reverberate. It's a pebble thrown into a dried up mud patch where there used to be a pond.

We first meet monotone, hapless Nick (Benny Safdie) in session with a chirpy, well-meaning therapist (Peter Verby). Nick is mentally disabled, a bit hulking, clearly sitting on a powder keg of a bad temper, and apparently maintains a bad relationship with his elderly grandmother, with whom he still lives. Claustrophobically shot, close on the two men's faces, the camera lingers on the contrast in their countenance: Nick, flat, mumbling, menacing; his therapist lively, spry and animated. We stay there for some minutes, the tension rising as the shrink asks him to respond to common aphorisms and their meaning ("The squeaky wheel gets the grease," "Don't count your chickens before they hatch") with Nick only offering the most literal interpretations of them ("Don't count the chickens").

The session is eventually -- thankfully -- terminated by Nick's brother, Connie (Robert Pattinson), a restless, anxious type who pulls Nick out of the office over the therapist's strenuous objections, to keep him from saying anything that could be incriminating. Connie has planned a bank robbery, you see, and needs to keep his brother from revealing anything that might get them caught. Based on the heist plan he's devised, however, he needn't have worried about Nick. It's a simple enough operation, involving rubber masks and notes demanding cash, but naturally things go sideways anyway, due to Connie's lack of foresight, which eventually leaves Nick arrested, and Connie on the lam. After Nick gets a jailhouse beating and is sent to a hospital, Connie attempts to break him out, with even more disastrous results.

Over the course of the next couple of days, we follow Connie through an increasingly convoluted series of hustles and schemes designed to get him and his brother free enough to enjoy whatever meager spoils their original crime might have been (unlike, say Al Pacino's character in Dog Day Afternoon, there appears to be no grand plan for this ill-gotten gain, other than partying harder, which only makes the character that much more infuriating).

Connie is the kind of dude who assumes himself to be smarter than most everyone else, to his detriment. In one of the film's later scenes, he gets into an argument with another lowlife (Buddy Duress) about his assumed superiority, and you get the sense that the single most tragic thing about him is the false belief that he's always two steps ahead of the game. True to his name, he's a conniver, a con-man, a user of people -- witness his relationship with Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his older girlfriend whom he keeps around mostly for access to her long-suffering mother's credit cards; or later, Crystal (Taliah Webster), a rebellious high school girl whom Connie plies to his advantage -- but not terribly sharp about it. He acts impulsively, but without much of a long-term plan, which leaves him constantly vulnerable to the chaos of outside forces that derail him. He's good at rolling with the bedlam, and many of his improvised plans on the fly serve a short-term goal, but he has no long game to speak of, which eventually, of course, catches up to him.

The Safdies, whose last film, Heaven Knows What, earned strong critical notice, are certainly accomplished filmmakers. Many of the scenes, including the opening gambit between Nick and his therapist, are filled with a purposeful tension, and they get a riveting performance from former teen heartthrob Pattinson, but in service to their verite ethos, a lot of things seem to happen, but few of them lead anywhere. You're stuck between admiring their technique and appreciating the performances, and being exasperated that the brothers refuse to let their film reverberate. It's so steadfastly resolute in its downplaying style that it never allows for a moment to lift off the screen. Shot like a documentary, it doesn't take advantage of the narrative properties it has access to, which seems a shame.

None of this takes anything away from Pattinson's performance. He's nothing short of a marvel. Here, his deep-set eyes are used not as a smoldering come hither, but as the gaunt, haunted look of a man in over his head and unable to see the shore. His palpable anxiety is tamped way down in order for him to successfully snow his marks, but at different moments, despite his best efforts, it burbles up and we can see it on him as conspicuous as the bright red jackets the Safdies have him wear throughout the film.

It is also a treat to watch Leigh metastasize yet another disastrous sinkhole of a character. We don't get to see much of her, sadly, but Corey's naked vulnerability to Connie -- he has her well in his hooks, to the point where she's willing to throw all caution aside -- gives us our first and most memorable sense of Connie's manipulative powers. He's small-time, but that doesn't mean he can't completely destroy other peoples' lives, and Corey is one of his more hapless victims, along with his cinderblock of a brother, who follows Connie around like a modern-day Lennie in Of Mice and Men.

Unfortunately, none of these impressive elements manage to coalesce into anything beyond their obtuse rendering. Near the end of the film, Connie gets into the backseat of a car, the camera holding close on his expression. It's a time-worn technique (think of the end of 2007's Michael Clayton, or the famous long shot of Jack Nicholson's expression in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and one, you might imagine, that could conceivably yield a further sense of the character, whose motivations and plans have been so lost to us. But there he is, resolute, still implacable, as inscrutable as he was in our first moments with him.

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A security guard named Dash (Barkhad Abdi) has an unfortunate encounter with a sociopathic would-be bank robber in the Safdie brothers’ visceral crime story Good Time.

By the end of the film, we're no closer to understanding what makes him tick than we were when we started. Whether you see that as a loyal adherence to the verite ethos, or a detriment to narrative resonance is entirely in the eye of the beholder, but I couldn't help feeling like it was a missed opportunity.

MovieStyle on 08/25/2017

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