Pattinson in career-best performance
IN THE lowlife picaresque Good Time, Robert Pattinson delivers what some will surely call a career-making performance, especially if they’ve missed his impressive turns in such similarly non-twilight indies as The Rover, Maps to the Stars, Queen of the Desert and The Lost City of Z.
No matter. Connie Nikas, Pattinson’s stumblebum character in Good Time, due for release in South Africa on October 6, feels reverse-engineered to allow the former teen screen idol the attention he deserves for seriousacting chops, checking every box from aggressively antisocial tendencies to a startling physical transformation.
As Good Time opens, Connie bursts into an office where his hearing-impaired and cognitively delayed brother Nick (Ben Safdie) is being questioned by a well-meaning therapist. Connie arrives just at the moment when a seemingly long-buried trauma is surfacing, which alerts the audience to the multivalent irony of the film’s title: No matter how noble the intentions of even the most optimistic protagonist, there’s something to be said for good timing.
As Connie leads Nick on what begins as a caper and ends in his own increasingly hallucinatory journey through the neon-lit underworld of Queens, Good Time takes the shape of movies we’ve seen before.
One scene elicits memories of Dog Day Afternoon, while others recall Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets and Panic in Needle Park. In a manic, dead-eyed rendition of an antihero who is one part Charlie Manson and one part Kurt Cobain, Pattinson infuses Connie with charm and malevolence. He’ll do anything to get what he wants in the course of a fateful night of his own misbegotten making. In the name of fraternal loyalty, he’ll manipulate himself into the pocketbooks and good graces of anyone whose path he crosses, whether it’s the frowzy, magical-thinking woman he’s dating (Jennifer Jason Leigh) or the wised-up but vulnerable teenage granddaughter of a Haitian immigrant (Taliah Webster).
Co-directed by Safdie with his brother Josh, Good Time bears some resemblance to their previous films, Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What. Good Time traffics in the same sentiments, but it also represents an artistic leap forward, in its debt to canonical thrillers and its improbably rich look.
Sean Price Williamsembraces an elegant, composed sense of visual beauty, occasionally leaving behind tight, jangly close-ups to take to the skies and deliver exhilarating views of the Queens streets down below. (Good Time was shot on 35mm film, and it has the texture and translucence to show for it.)
As Connie trips the night fatalistic, a shaggy-dog story turns out to contain yet another shaggy-dog story, with the fable-like weirdness of Good Time taking on a harder edge by way of the assaultive, techno score (by Daniel Lopatin, under the recording alias of Oneohtrix Point Never) and Connie’s own increasingly offputting sense of exceptionalism.
At one point, now conspiring with a hangdog miscreant (Buddy Duress), Connie delivers a screed against dependency that mashes up Freud and Ayn Rand with his own supreme hypocrisy. He has a way of saying “God bless you” before he tricks another mark into helping him down his road to hell.
Many of those victims are immigrants, making Good Time feel authentically of its time and place, especially when two black characters are reflexively apprehended by the police.
But the film-makers choose to keep the film’s politics buried under the surface of Connie’s lunkheadon-the-lam hop from bail bond office to bodega to pizza joint to hospital.
Josh Safdie wrote the script with his long-time collaborator, Ronald Bronstein.
A climax set in a hellish afterhours amusement park pushes Good Time’s visuals – and the audience’s patience – to their limit. What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures. For all of the Safdies’ prowess, and Pattinson’s willingness to tarnish and rough up his own celebrity persona, there’s little by way of deeper meaning to a pulp thrill ride that turns out to be as petty as Connie’s crimes. – The Washington Post