Guilty Pleasures: The Empathy of The Safdie Brothers
About two-thirds into the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, criminal on the run Constantine “Connie” Nikas (Robert Pattinson) makes a bizarre confession to Chrystal (Taliah Webster), a sixteen-year-old girl he’s essentially turned into an accomplice on a night of bad decisions. “You know what? Tonight, as fucked up as it is, I just think something very important is happening, and it’s deeply connected to my purpose. And you are somehow connected to it as well,” he says, gazing at her with frantic, earnest eyes. She gazes back at him as any teenage girl might, charmed by the charisma radiating past the grime. His next line: “Okay, I’m gonna go take a shit in that guy’s house. Just wait here.” The exchange is at once the most beguiling and one of the funniest moments of the movie. For its calm pronouncement of seriousness — the sense that, in the middle of a New York City crime movie made of relentless motion, bloody violence, vivid neon color, this is where we should prepare to receive the meaning of it all — it’s also a great misdirection.
Directors Benny and Josh Safdie are New York City natives, and, like proud New Yorkers, they work hard to show you their version of it — grimy, nocturnal, compacted with impatient, though not unkind, personalities, a world where opportunity favors recklessness as easily as it does good intentions. Good Time is a pretty thin story about a man seemingly trapped in the throes of his own foolishness, padded with the right amount of cliché a screenplay could support. That might be a bummer, except Good Time embodies it with good taste. With an eye for Scorcesean violence and the incandescent noir of Michael Mann, and ears attuned to the kind of electronic music you might get involved with because you know that Wendy Carlos’s film scores are as emotionally articulate as any conventional one, the Safdie Brothers manage to flip admiration and embodiment of others’ style into their own aesthetic statement. Which is to say, the more you look for some kind of profound social insight, the more you’ll question how fun Good Time actually is.
The first time I watched it, it wasn’t the familiarity of Good Time’s cinematic reference points that convinced me. It was the way the movie presented them with just enough fidelity so that when certain sequences, shots, or dialogue hit with the right kinesthetic impact, those reference points seemed to break apart and then reassemble. At its best moments, it felt like watching cinematically familiar images of New York City reanimate with restlessness and color.
So it’s a good thing that Good Time doesn’t get uptight about its authenticity. Namely, casting British actor Robert Pattinson as Connie, who isn’t a character so much as he is a terribly attractive embodiment of a self-destructive personality. You don’t need to know the finer edges of a New York accent to hear that Pattinson believes he knows them. Listening to Connie fire off explanations and directives, you get the sense that being a man on the run could only register the sensations of pity, bemusement, and comedy if he speaks in rough Queens cadences. And yet, reaching further than the rhythms of Connie’s words, the more compelling modulations of his tragedy are registered through Pattinson’s face. Encouraging his mentally-challenged brother, Nick (Benny Safdie), into helping him rob a bank at gunpoint, speaking to a bail bondsman while trying to calm down his hot mess of a girlfriend Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh), or making dopily earnest pronouncements like, “I think I was a dog in a previous life. That’s why they love me so much,” Connie’s countenance always registers a dim pathos that suspends the chaos swirling around him. I mean, what the hell is a line like that last one supposed to mean? Does it even matter when you have a face as sharply affecting as Pattinson’s?
But if the pleasure of Good Time happens mostly at the surface, it’s because the Safdie Brothers understand that for even that kind of action to play, to have any sort of impact, it has to be earned. Watching Connie hurl himself into chaos hits the right emotional notes because the movie doesn’t condescend to his character and his situation. For all of its surface excitement, at no point do the emotions reeling and swelling up from beneath feel false. This is why as a piece of movie-making, Good Time is your basic work of thrills and pleasure, but as a commentary on social structure or race, it’s rather vague. Which is not the same as having nothing to say about those things. If there is any message in Good Time, it could be that New York City is a place where time bears down intensely on everybody — accelerating and suspending life — regardless of social class or race. The Safdie Brothers take none of this for granted, but they also know that, as catchy or familiar as Good Time feels, it takes nerve to have this kind of fun.
