The Safdie Brothers’ Transcendent “Good Time”

This article originally appeared on this site.

A guy tells another guy, “You leech off mommy, then you leech off welfare, then you leech off the government in jail.” What would you think of a person who believes that someone would go to jail for the pleasure of three square meals a day and a roof over his head? At the very least, it’s a person with a political bee in his bonnet, a bee of the sort that might find the Republican Party a congenial hive. Those words are spoken by Constantine Nikas, a.k.a. Connie (Robert Pattinson), the protagonist of Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film, “Good Time.” The movie is a physically rough, emotionally turbulent, harsh-textured crime drama centered on downbeat places in Queens, which, at least by one metric, is the most diverse place on Earth. Nonetheless, as “Good Time” shows, Queens is as much a labyrinth of white privilege as anywhere else.

“Good Time” is a heist film, of sorts—it dispatches the main heist very early on, in a brief but finely detailed scene. The rest of the movie shows Connie trying to work his way out of the troubles that issue from the heist. It’s a study in avoiding consequences, and in the ferocious sense of desperation that fuels Connie’s twists and turns. “Good Time” is an intense, fiery, hallucinatory film that’s filled with violence but doesn’t feature a single gunshot. What blood there is gets shed with pain and depicted with horror. There’s a sprinkling of off-kilter comedy and one arc of grand, lofty, classical irony, but the irony never pertains to the violence, about which the Safdies find nothing amusing. The violence isn’t aestheticized, prettified, lionized. Rather, it’s fast, plain, and sordid.

“Good Time,” written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is a bitterly realistic drama with only one leap out of the narrative framework into a flashback, but, in its images and its tone, it streaks and smears and shreds the screen with a sense of furious subjectivity—that of its characters and of its directors alike. The Safdie brothers had something of a chaotic New York childhood (it’s the subject of the earlier movie “Daddy Longlegs”) and they have a strong sense of the city’s underworld—which is to say, not the literal Mob but the unglamorous world, the world of people who work hard or dull jobs, often at night, the world of people who are in the soul-killing gravitational pull of the judicial system, the world of people for whom subsistence is a daily hustle and whose relationships with friends and family are coarsened and befouled by that hustle—for whom the marshalling of vital energies and strong impulses can be a matter of survival or of devastation.

Connie is bright, resourceful, and daring. He sees a step ahead in schemes that he’s wrong to envision in the first place, and, when things go awry, he improvises solutions with a remarkable boldness. He’s also a monster of lies and violence and, above all, of ego; he’s a world-class cadger with a colossal sense of entitlement. Connie is also good with his fists and fast to use them—at least, faster than the other guy, whom he’s always ready to pummel into unconsciousness if it suits his needs. Yet he’s even better at using the old soft soap; his manner is insinuating if unrefined, and his swagger, his air of cool wavers iridescently between seeming and being. It’s an act and it’s not—it’s the device by which he can charm the skin off a snake and it’s also the knowledge, the confidence, that he can do so. That charisma of performance that serves Connie so well in his sordid life is given onscreen allure by Pattinson. It’s the first time that the Safdies have worked with world-renowned actors (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Barkhad Abdi have memorable turns in the film, too) and the directors deploy these charisma machines with a sure artistic purpose.

Connie’s brother Nick (played by Benny Safdie) has a mental disability and impaired hearing. The movie starts with Nick undergoing an assessment in a psychologist’s office. Nick’s vulnerability and unexpressed pain show clearly, and, when Connie barges in and physically drags him out, it’s with words of hearty and heated brotherly love (“It’s just you and me. . . . I love you. . . . I’m your friend.”) that he ropes Nick into disaster—into participating in a bank robbery. Connie outfits himself and Nick in rubber masks with the faces of black men and in road workers’ green-and-red reflective vests. Nick is the silent partner, and Connie has to talk him through each stage of the heist, keeping him calm and focussed until the getaway car shows up. But they don’t get away (the failure of the ride, involving an exploding packet of red dye, is absurd, terrifying, and poignant). When the police approach the brothers in the street, Nick bolts, Connie follows, and, in the resulting chase through a local shopping mall, Nick crashes through a glass door, gets badly cut, and is arrested. Connie, however, gets away, and makes it his business to get Nick out of Rikers Island on bail.

But the money that Connie has in hand, the bank cash, which is spattered with red dye, is unusable, or, at least, hot. The Queens Boulevard bail bondsman (who seems ready to launder the money at a sharp discount) sends him back for another ten thousand dollars. For this, Connie turns to a woman friend, Laura (Leigh), who lives in a comfortable apartment in a doorman building where her mother keeps her, as she says, prisoner—in order to prevent her from being with Connie. But Connie drags Laura into a cab with a tale of woe. Laura, who’s conspicuously older than Connie, is in her own way oblivious, talking only of a long-awaited trip to Mexico or Costa Rica. Emotionally desperate and vulnerable to Connie’s charm, she forks over her mother’s credit card to the bail bondsman. But, while there, Connie learns that Nick isn’t in jail but in nearby Elmhurst Hospital—and he’s determined to go there and get him out.

The description of the plot hardly suggests the keenly observed and inventively imagined profusion of details—of behavior, dialogue, mood—and the coalescence of Sean Price Williams’s intimate, high-pressure cinematography with the actor’s presences. Benny Safdie, as Nick, catches the character’s unease and bewilderment, as when he tugs at his mask during the robbery and hastens to take it off afterward; Leigh careens between fear, tenderness, longing, and despair, and, in scene after scene, the precisely filmed and acted gestures, phrases, and glances crash rhythmically together like glittering, razor-sharp shards of nearly unbearable experience.

What lands Nick in the hospital is a brutal beating that he endures on Rikers Island. With no coping skills or sense of danger, he obliviously provokes a fight that leaves him bloodied and unconscious. But what happens at the hospital when Connie gets there is emblematic, dramatic—and, in one particular way, too good to spoil. My definition of a spoiler is simple: it’s a detail that I was happy to discover in the course of watching the movie and that I wouldn’t want to have known beforehand. Here’s what I can say: Connie manages to smuggle the patient and his wheelchair into an Access-a-Ride van, but, when they’re dropped off, they have no place to go, and Connie knocks on the door of a black family—people he’d seen in the van—and talks their way in, ostensibly to call their mother. He shamelessly flirts and romances the sixteen-year-old girl who lives there, Crystal (Taliah Webster), in order to maintain his cover and win her help; and when things suddenly go wrong, he gets her to come along, in the middle of the night, on another leg of his mad mission, to the Adventureland amusement park, on Long Island. There, Connie brutally assaults the security guard (Abdi) and (slight spoiler alert) gets away with it in significant part because the cops who respond to the call are white; Crystal doesn’t, in significant part because she’s black.

“Good Time” is, among other things, a drama of the sham of white “color-blindness”—of the deference that some white people expect to get and that others enjoy unawares. The Safdie brothers dramatize, and reveal as if in cinematic societal X-rays, the usually invisible and perhaps even unconscious prerogatives with which white people stride through America with an unquestioned sense of belonging—of it belonging to them—and the abuses that sense all too readily invites.

Pretty much every good crime movie in the history of cinema has run the risk of being challenged for glorifying sociopathic behavior. Howard Hawks’s “Scarface,” from 1932, which is filled with cinematic gestures of sublime ugliness and unexpected, garish comedy, was censored prior to its release and adorned with a silly, moralistic prologue. It’s fifty years since the release of “Bonnie and Clyde,” which, of course, was famously denounced at the time of its release—as by Bosley Crowther, in the Times—for amorality and lack of realism.

The protagonist of “Good Time” is a criminal whose misbehavior is inseparable from his shtick—his suave, earnest, focussed, and very persuasive shtick. If Connie’s charm failed him at any stage of the plot, the movie would be over pretty quickly. His every criminal plan depends upon his ability to rope others into it, not by force but by charisma and smooth talk. He’s a person of exceptional character—who deploys that exceptional character to ugly and evil ends. In his own way, he’s enabled by others—unable to achieve anything at all without the aid of others—but is oblivious to his dependency. Rather, he considers himself to be a sort of independent, self-sufficient superman who is superior to those who have to rely on others. He’s an egomaniac whose ego is the basis of his exploits and is further inflated by them.

Meanwhile, a hint of dialogue suggests that Connie, for all his grifting, has never been imprisoned. Whatever he has done, he has always got away with it—and it’s this, above all, that accounts for his sense of superiority. His independence isn’t financial; it’s emotional (in the sense that he actually doesn’t care about anyone else, doesn’t care what they feel or think) and, above all, it’s experiential, based in his impunity, in the belief that he has the charm to get away with whatever he wants. Connie is an equal-opportunity user, who treats everyone—white people and black people, family and friends and strangers—with identical contempt and preys upon their vulnerabilities to fit his needs of the moment.

At Metrograph, the Safdie brothers have programmed a series of films that inspired them while making “Good Time.” One of those films, Jon Alpert’s 1989 documentary “One Year in a Life of Crime” (which I wrote about in The New Yorker), depicts three young criminals in their private lives and in their criminal pursuits alike—and it depicts them as seductive swaggerers who use and abuse the people around them, emotionally and physically, and who manage to do so through a peculiar combination of strengths and weaknesses, powers and pathologies. For these young men, crime is a sort of drug—the excitement that it provides, along with the complexity of the practicalities that it requires, fills their life with the matter and the emotion of drama. They become, in effect, heroes or antiheroes of their own personal fictions; they become characters, bigger than life—and the allure that they exert on those in their lives is similar to the fascination that criminals in dramas elicit from readers and viewers.

Just as a young criminal’s regret comes only with punishment in Alpert’s documentary, so, in “Good Time,” Connie’s bravado depends precisely on his impunity, his arrogance on the success of his evasions. Of course he’s charming, of course he’s alluring; in his narrow, boastful arrogance, he is, of course, and unfortunately, an antihero of our times. Just as the stylization of Hawks’s “Scarface” is an emblem of the Depression, just as the stylization of “Bonnie and Clyde” is an emblem of the Vietnam War era, so the stylization of “Good Time” is, and will remain, an exemplary and brilliant artistic distillation of the age of Trump.

Reply