Review of Good Time (2017) by Matt C — 05 Sep 2017

I find it fascinating how the cinema screen is almost always a smoke screen, deflecting the audience's knowledge that what they are witnessing is indeed staged, fictitious, and more often than not, featuring people that hold clout within their field.

As such, being sucked into a movie to such a degree is understandably rare, especially for a person predisposed to process them on an analytical level. Good Time is special in that for a vast majority of its duration, it was able to transport me not just into its world, but back to when I could simply enjoy a movie off of sheer entertainment value.

The irony of its title translates to the irony of rooting for and against a protagonist who's essentially the scum of the earth, but it's the Safdie brothers' direction and Robert Pattinson's performance-but not quite the script-that allow for a brisk jaunt like this to register like a neon-lit carnival ride.

Connie (Pattinson) and his mental disabled brother Nick (Ben Safdie, who also co-directed, co-edited, and worked on the movie's sound) are a pair of bank robbers in New York City, the former exploiting the impressionability of the latter for his own personal gain.

Following a heist that ends up falling through, Connie ends up losing Nick to the police, leading him on an impromptu odyssey over the following night to get thousands of dollars in bail money and evade the authorities, during which he implicates nearly everyone he crosses paths with.

It's high-concept yet carried out in that the most accessible way possible, with directors Ben and Josh Safdie riding the waves of the script's meandering storyline and not giving the audience a whole lot of reasons to sympathy with the protagonist.

Nonetheless, he is one to root for, his craftiness and amorality proving to be quite impressive in a perverse way. Pattinson gives a performance of high caliber that's coincidentally complimentary in nature to his equally strong work in The Rover three years ago.

Jittery, fried, and almost always running on fumes, his work is chameleon-like in nature with how consistent it is. Players such as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Barkhad Abdi show up for minor roles, the former of which adds texture to the world of the film and the latter whose presence proves to be a welcome surprise in one of the movie's best set pieces.

The Safdies frame the movie in the scope of immediacy, shooting almost all of it in close-ups and dowsing it in blue and red light like the seemingly omnipresent antagonistic force, both of which prove to inject a cinematic quality to a movie that is otherwise rather small.

Good Time, despite its strong pacing and acting, appears to be a bit slight. It's fittingly chaotic and admirably cohesive both thematically and aesthetically, but it isn't until a final scene that plays over the credits that the shallow development of these characters shows itself.

Nick, despite being the objective here, is defined solely by his mental disability and dependence on others, and a true relationship between him and Connie never comes to fruition. While the egoism of Connie and his actions make sense throughout his journey, an end goal such as another human being seems almost at odds with his sensibilities (or lack thereof) as a person.

Nick is a human MacGuffin, which is less than a movie like this. Nonetheless, it's the performance from Pattinson as well as Safdie and others that ground Good Time. With a story that's truly exciting to watch unfold, the elusiveness of how it will all play out is a gritty joy to watch.

It's a neo-noir with style for days, and with each pulsating synth of the score and each level closer to hell the main character seems to dig himself into, the movie lives up to its title. 8/10, really good, B+, definitely above average, etc.