First and foremost: Chalamet's performance. I'd read so much about what a "Dangerous" "highwire act", "alive", performance it is.
I found it to be mostly a one note performance. He doesn't change much; hardly at all, from scene to scene. He's the same motormouth, desperate, parasitic louse all the way through. He will hurt anyone and anything in his desperation to keep his "dreams" going, whether holding up his own co-worker at gunpoint, to repeatedly explaining how he'll walk away form his girl for the first handout that comes along ("so hey, can you pop back up to your place and grab me another necklace?") He's basically George Costanza on Molly. All the way through. Which makes the final moments of the film pretty hard to swallow. And makes you wonder how anyone else in this story ever connected with this loser in the first place.
I mean, it's effortless for the guy to turn his back on everyone, use everyone for anything. He told his girlfriend at least 3 times how little he cared about her; that he'd walk away from their situation basically for the price of a plane ticket. He screws over anyone he considers a "friend" (realistically, he doesn't have any friends). And all the while doing it at super high energy, mile a minute jibber jabber we're supposed to translate into the pull yourself up by the bootstraps mythology of the American dream. Marty's not exactly a thinker; there's not a whole bunch of reflection going on with the guy regarding the mistakes he makes (which is basically the entire story; one long mistake).
Some of the "sports" aesthetics this film tries to take on become horrible misfires. For Marty to be this great a table tennis player; he'd need to be playing a whole lot of table tennis, which we never see outside the British Tournament, the sequence in which he unrealistically rips off other ping pong hustlers just a quick drive away from him own milieu (makes zero sense there; nobody knows this guy, really?); There's zero that shows how he'd have become a better competitor to Endo since getting creamed by him; he hasn't been playing any table tennis since that first ass whipping. In short, none of the details showing any obsessiveness of the sport are there whatsoever. I guess he's the Anti Rocky. And too many of the incidents in the story are just pure contrivances placed in the story instead of coming from something authentic within the characters or the setting. The bathtub falling through the hotel floor for example, landing on Ferrara: ok. And so on. There's too many shaggy dog stories and side steps along the way to do anything other than drag the story out.
The movie was too long; it became repetitive in what each sequence's point being made was.
I think what I liked the best was a couple of the supporting performances (I thought both Gwyneth and Odessa Adlon were quite good). And of course who isn't going to dig the Tears For Fears needle drops; those worked well in the misplaced time frame setting. The story had its moments; and it was a fairly entertaining ride.
Safdie's got talent. I just haven't seen it truly coalesce into something truly great yet. I'm sure I'll give this another look in the coming weeks; maybe I'll see something more "there" next go around.
I think it's the second paddling humiliation in the past couple years now. Which was better : DeNiro's or Mr. Wonderful's?
A solid B to B+ I think. I don't think I'd put it on the level of One Battle, or Sinners, or some of the others near the top of people's end of year lists. Next tier probably.
Cheers!
