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Challengersis not exactly a romantic comedy, not exactly a drama, not exactly a psychosexual soap opera. But when Zendaya, as the movie’s gifted and calculating heroine Tashi Duncan, says the line “Tennis is a relationship” in an early scene, she’s also saying that tennis is a metaphor—which is how we know what we’re watching is a sports movie.
We see Tashi first as a teenage prodigy – and already the “hottest woman I’ve ever seen,” per fellow kid Patrick (Josh O’Connor), talking to his best friend Art (Mike Faist). They are also both very good at tennis, but neither of them is Tashi Duncan. Instead of going pro after high school, Tashi goes to college, matriculating alongside Art but dating Patrick—and then an injury sidelines her. When we see her again years later, she’s off the court but not out of the game; she’s both Art’s wife and his coach, and still seems to be searching for that moment where the sport transcends competition and becomes some kind of elevated hyper-awareness of your opponent and yourself. No words, no skin-to-skin contact. Just communication with racket, ball, and movement. It doesn’t look easy; it’s no wonder Tashi looks so dissatisfied so often.
Challengersbegins with Tashi watching Patrick and Art facing off at a tournament in the late 2010s, and keeps circling back to that improbable but inevitable moment while jumping around in time to fill in the story of the intervening years. Though the movie doesn’t directly touch much in the way of this era’s politics, the timing still feels important. In its exploration of tennis as an existential philosophy, the movie feels like a continuation of sports pictures from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s: Movies likeBull Durham,White Men Can’t Jump,Tin Cup, andHe Got Game, where athleticism is both a means to an end—a career, a ticket out—and, in its best moments, a statement of self. The action in these films doesn’t always come down to a traditional big game. InHe Got Game, it’s a father-son one-on-one. InTin Cup, it’s a magnificent act of stubborn self-destruction. InWhite Men Can’t Jump, the final basketball match isn’t staged for suspense, but montaged over for pure love of the game—which doesn’t necessarily leave our heroes triumphant.
These movies often (but not always) involved sports underrepresented onscreen, like basketball or golf. They often (but not always) involved Kevin Costner, and regularly (though not universally) involved writer-director Ron Shelton, a former minor-league ballplayer responsible for all of the aforementioned examples except Spike Lee’s terrificHe Got Game. This mode of sports movie fell out of favor almost exactly as the millennium turned. In September 1999, Costner flopped withFor Love of the Game, his third and worst baseball picture (despite some nice baseball directing from Sam Raimi in pro-journeyman mode). In September 2000, Denzel Washington, who gave such a rich and complex performance in He Got Game, scored one of his biggest-ever hits withRemember the Titans. Profanely philosophical sports movies were out. Heartwarming, coach-heavy, underdog-team sports movies, often based on true stories—likeTitans,Miracle,Glory Road,We Are Marshall, and so on—were in. (Michael Mann’sAli, a sports biopic with its own style and tempo, felt like the exception that proved the rule in 2001.)
Asked to single out one contemporary filmmaker as the new Ron Shelton, Luca Guadagnino would not have been my first thought. Guadagnino is probably most famous forCall Me By Your Name, so the flexible three-way sexual tension pulsing throughoutChallengers– which is less explicit thanName, if not less steamy—isn’t surprising. But Guadagnino also finds unexpected rhythm in the scrape of sneakers and the smashing of rackets. There are some tennis-ball’s-eye-view shots that might send Raimi into paroxysms of delight, or possibly jealousy. And Guadagnino clearly loves to photograph Zendaya; even after she’s off the court, she has a sinewy energy and watchful eyes, literalized in a wide shot of a tennis audience moving their heads back and forth in unison, while Tashi sets in the center, staring straight ahead, a visual somewhere between Kubrick and sitcom.
Amid all this visual showboating, the script, by Justin Kuritzkes, is Shelton-style smart about the intertwining of sports, business, and life, without leaning too heavily on its tennis-as-relationship thesis. There’s a sense that Patrick, Art, and Tashi all have different ways of accounting their wins and losses, all of which involve potential contradictions, and the movie seems less interested in reconciling all of these conflicts than in playing them off against each other, which makes the movie’s unwieldy timeline work unusually well. The story’s resolution offers us satisfaction over comfort, which is about as clear a description over the appeal of sports that I, a decidedly non-athletic person, can think of; one more thingChallengershas in common with pre-millennial sports movies likeHe Got GameorWhite Men Can’t Jumpis a near-perfect ending, true to its pursuit of a relationship that can be tidier on the court than real life allows. —Jesse Hassenger
