The relationships in “Challengers” are complicated. Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) were close pals on the juniors tennis circuit when they met Tashi (Zendaya), a phenom. As the years pass and they become entangled in on-court rivalry and off-court sexual tensions, the film builds to a vicious challenger-circuit match between Art, now a top-ranked pro with a confidence problem, and Patrick, sleeping in his car between tournaments. In the stands is Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, Tashi, who turned to coaching after an injury cut short her career. The film ends abruptly, the outcome of the match unclear — and that has been the subject of much discussion online. So we asked our critic at large Wesley Morris and our movie critic Alissa Wilkinson to weigh in. Caution: Spoilers ahead.
WESLEY MORRIS Alissa, we’re here to discuss the final moments of “Challengers,” and in order to do that, I’m committing a big personal no-no and talking about a movie that people have had only two weeks to see. Sometimes it takes me — a culture professional — a while to catch up, so I’d imagine other folks might appreciate some distance between opening weekend and the instant media chatterboxes start breaking down the dismount. I also understand that’s a very 1988 flavor of film discourse and that a judge would overrule me.
So: People are confused about this ending? Or intrigued? Either way, I ask: Which part? The storm of final shots (final camera shots) that boot us out of the theater midmatch? Or the final encounter between Tashi and Patrick, which I refuse to ruin? Or her final glimpse, on match eve, of a sleeping Art?
If we’re talking about that shot storm, which goes down in a third-set tiebreaker between Patrick and Art, is it so intriguing that it warrants a conversation? There’s one image of Patrick crouching and another of Art aloft, mid-slam, that I’ll always remember. What follows? Eh. I don’t know who these characters are, who they’re supposed to be, or what they might want, even secretly. So I didn’t care what happens after this match.
If anything concerned me, it was the fact that this finale takes place in the middle (or the end, I suppose) of the third point of the tiebreaker, which has at least four or five more points to go. Is caring who wins the match gauche? Is it safe to assume that, based on the number of warnings and penalties the exasperated chair umpire (Darnell Appling) Frisbees out, whatever’s happening in that final scene is the end of the match anyway, because one of these guys is getting ejected? Did I just wind up re-enacting what people are doing with this movie anyway and express genuine intrigue?
ALISSA WILKINSON I also wondered what the issue was when I discovered people were asking about the ending. In fact, honestly, I doubted they were, until I dutifully went back to see the movie with my husband. At the end, the guy sitting next to him leaned over and said, “What happened?”
The actual question, I believe, is who won the match? And the answer, of course, is we don’t know. As you note, the director, Luca Guadagnino, ends the film with points left in the balance, and the real “winner” of the New Rochelle Challenger presented by Phil’s Tiretown is simply left to the imagination. For me, the answer is “nobody,” because here’s a how a movie is supposed to work: When it ends, it’s over. The characters cease to exist, and the story ends where it does on purpose. But I think factors like our endless sequel culture and our need to assign value to characters so we can decide which one we’re rooting for makes us want to know.
Plus, I mean, it’s intentionally provocative — as the cast and Guadagnino told our colleague Kyle Buchanan, they’re happy that it’s ambiguous. Open-ended finales let us argue about what really happened and thus, I think, tend to keep a cultural artifact alive for a long time. (We’re still arguing about the end of “The Sopranos.”)
To be honest, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what these characters want (maybe because I went back and saw it again!). Art wants Tashi, and he wants to rest. Patrick also wants Tashi, and he wants Art, too, but he also wants to crush them both a little, so that he feels like he’s reintegrated into their relationship. And Tashi just wants to win at tennis, because to her that is a relationship. That is love. She says as much the night they all first meet.
I think I fall on the side that Tashi won the match, because the scream of “Come on!” she lets out just before she smiles is precisely the same scream she lets out when she was winning the junior U.S. Open all those years earlier. But I think you’re also right, and that whatever happens right there at the end will result in expulsion, and probably it doesn’t matter. The whole point was for Art to get his groove back and Patrick to feel like he’s back in the game — that is, the three-way relationship — and they got that, too.
Between us, though, you’re the tennis expert. Does that make any sense?
MORRIS When you put it that way, yes. I just didn’t care about these people as people. The stakes are among the strangest I’ve ever seen in a movie. Its structure is time divided by tennis. The two used to be oil and water (a match could last days). Guadagnino and the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes impose a temporal framework. Each of the three sets is a chapter. The tiebreak is an epilogue. During all of it, the film moves through the various pasts of the Tashi-Patrick-Art connection. (Tashickart, anyone?) This, to me, was too clever. Sure, the experience of disorientation worked. But why was any disorientation necessary? Why should it matter?
As tennis, this is a movie about whether Patrick can clean up his act to get back to the major tournaments — the U.S. Open, namely. Art’s in the main draw of the Open no matter what. But is that what he wants, to win more majors? Or does he want to win because Tashi wants him to? This is not a plot that can resolve that. But it also isn’t a movie that can resolve anything for itself. It doesn’t know what it wants. Tennis is a symbol (for sex) and a pretext (for relationships), but the movie does what tennis can’t: ends in a draw. That’s untenable.
I wonder if Guadagnino is the right director for this movie and not, hypothetically, James L. Brooks or Ron Shelton or Frank Oz, Americans whose major contributions to American culture ended in the previous century, yes. But I’m thinking out loud. With these guys, you’d lose the ridiculous opera of that ending, and none of them would have gone with the lewd-aerobics thrusting all over Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. Instead, you’d get what some of their movies — “Broadcast News” or “Bull Durham” or “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” respectively — thrived on: character studies in which vocation enlivens personality. That’s true enough in “Challengers” that it brings these other movies to mind. But “Challengers” never struck me first as a film about tennis as vocation.
It’s such a good, basic idea. But Guadagnino complicates things in the wrong directions. He makes the tennis cutthroat and the physical intimacy tenuous. This is a sex movie with barely any sex and an eroticism whose bud never blooms. Instead, it toys with everybody, namely us. Guadagnino gave us “I Am Love” and “Call Me by Your Name” and a so-terrible-it’s-fantastic remake of Dario Argento’s “Suspiria.” He’s foremost an Italian sensualist — an oralist, really — whose dabbling in cannibalism earned the “us” in “menus” (see “Bones and All”).
He seems flummoxed by a place as comfortably devoid of Michelin-star bait as New Rochelle (though it often looks eerily like Boston). Of course, as long as these people have something suggestive to eat (eggs, bananas, bagel sandwiches, churros, a mouth), we’re in good shape. And even then, the idea that such an extreme palate has made a film featuring both a Dunkin’ Donuts meal and its erstwhile logo feels less like camp and more like tragicomedy.
The movie doesn’t want to be labeled — as gay, bi or even libidinal. And in that sense what really comes to mind here is Alfonso Cuarón’s “Y Tu Mamá También,” which was also about what happens when a sexy woman exposes a nascent homoerotic bond. Cuarón is just as ambivalent as Guadagnino about where things stand by the end. But when that movie ended, I did feel that some souls were searched. Somehow all I hear in the far more ridiculous “Challengers” finale is nervous laughter.
WILKINSON There are a lot of logos and sponsorships in this movie, not just Dunkin’ Donuts: Adidas and Uniqlo and those watch and car ads … but then again, there are an awful lot of logos in sports.
I think what I so thoroughly enjoyed about this movie is exactly the stuff that irritated you — that it feels like a floppy, whirly mess that doesn’t want to say anything other than, man, aren’t these people gorgeous and weird. As a person who half-watches most sports, that feels pretty well aligned with professional sports as an enterprise, though that might get me a lot of hate mail. It’s all just sweat and grinding for its own sake and nothing more — any attempt to philosophize it always strikes me as vaguely goofy, and that is why it’s so vital to our cultural health, I think.
But I think that points back to the ending: It’s unsatisfying, and that’s not a mistake. You aren’t supposed to “know” what happened (even if, in an actual match, you definitely should). For me, it locks into something I think about a lot this time of year — baseball is more or less the sport I watch — which is that it’s Sisyphean, that even if you win it all this year, it just starts over again next year. Leaving the match unfinished is sort of like leaving the characters suspended there forever, looping and pinging back and forth, the results always up for grabs.
The most Sisyphean thing about my life, on the other hand, is the awards season; this movie was originally slated to open the Venice Film Festival last fall, which probably means it would have been trapped in Oscar discourse pretty fast. Flung out into the spring movie calendar, the whole thing takes on a different tenor, I think.
MORRIS I’m with you. Here we have a movie based on an original script opening in April that isn’t out sniffing around for Oscars. It’s got a starry-ish cast and is a cultural and box office hit. The thing about stakes I should’ve mentioned earlier is that, going in, they were low for me. You like this movie much more than I do, Alissa, but I do like it. It’s got this fragrant semi- or even anti-seriousness, a substance many of the movies I love secrete. I’m grateful for “Challengers” that way. It’s the kind of movie a lot of us complain is missing from our current moviegoing diets — mid-tier, mid-budget, “middlebrow” — the kind of movie that makes, solidifies and tests stardom; the kind of movie that, were it a TV show, our colleague James Poniewozik might aptly identify as mid. Mid was what made American movies what they were. Now, one art form’s drought is another’s deluge.
If Zendaya’s screen-acting career lasts, this stretch, which includes that second “Dune” installment, will likely be decisive when we look back. We actually want to see her act — maybe even with Faist and O’Connor, whose smirky, ratty understanding of bad-boy swagger, insecurity and disrespect is exciting. His performance embodies something you identified earlier that I appreciate about “Challengers,” which is the repetitive, hothouse nature of all sports.
You and I are having this conversation in the middle of what for certain people is a spring bonanza — early-season baseball, midseason golf, clay-court tennis, hockey and basketball playoffs, assorted drafts, the culmination of the Champions League. If sports are vital to our cultural health, it could be because, as you surmise, they’re philosophy-proof. But also perhaps because they’re philosophy-ridden: a proving ground and microcosm of so much that defines us as a species — how do we collaborate, strategize, obey, perceive, communicate, conform, transcend, sacrifice, strive, pay attention (but not too much attention), fail, recover, lose again, compete; how do we believe in each other and in ourselves. And sometimes — usually, in a few sports — the avatars within that microcosm are gorgeous and weird.
Tennis fascinates because, like boxing and the martial arts, it’s always only ever the two of you out there, figuring yourselves out in front of an audience by testing each other. But it’s never enough, in sports, to be talented. You need some combination of these other traits. You need some hunger. Which, again, is a very Guadagnino mode of being.
If anything compelled me about that ending, it’s probably that. Tashi knows what it takes to win. Because she can no longer win for herself, she now relies on these avatars to sate her lust for competition. I’m just restating your observation, Alissa, but that last shot is these two guys proving to her that they want it. Whatever that “it” turns out to be. The proof, the hunger is what turns her on.
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