Homer and his successors described Odysseus as polytropos, in reference both to his boundless craftiness and to the literal “many turns” he took on his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. If ever that epithet were due for a deserved comeback, it would be in reference to Robert Pattinson’s character in Good Time, the new film from director-brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
Pattinson’s career has itself been one of many turns; his days as a sparkly vampire heartthrob in the multivolume Twilight movies behind him, he has been drifting around the art-house and international cinema circuits. In Good Time, Pattinson is at his most unrecognizable as Connie Nikas, one of those scrappy Greek kids from Queens who can’t seem to catch a break, or give one to anyone else.
We’re given just enough of a picture of the Nikas family backstory—parents gone, yiayia embittered by her grandsons—to expect trouble when, five minutes into the film, Connie interrupts the speech-therapy session of his developmentally impaired younger brother Nick (played by co-director Benny Safdie). Connie barges in in the name of rescuing Nick from a psychiatric system that isn’t the least bit interested in actually improving Nick’s life. Apparently, Connie’s own idea of helping a brother out is to enlist him as an accomplice in robbing a bank.
This, obviously, does not end well: Nick gets caught and tossed in jail, which kicks off an insomniatic nightmare for Connie, who spends the rest of the night—and the film—relying on his Odyssean wiles to scrounge up the money to post his brother’s bail. Connie is a master in the subtle art of lying his ass off. The tales he spins to get strangers to give him what he wants sound so believable, even from our knowing vantage, that we’re nearly convinced ourselves that they aren’t outright lies so much as variations on the truth.
Still, just as no amount of storytelling prowess could free Odysseus from the decade of wandering ordained for him by the angry gods, poor Connie can’t talk his way out of the fate in store for him. The divinities governing his world—every no-good bank, bureaucracy, and urban-planning committee you can think of—give the Olympians a run for their money by cooking up a nauseating nocturnal gantlet for Connie to run. Over the course of one night he gets dragged all around Flushing, from his girlfriend’s house to the hospital to a random woman’s home where he crashes after breaking a prison-battered Nick out of said hospital and dyes his own hair a gnarly shade of blonde to evade identification as the bank robber who’s wanted on TV. Then, after the most audacious narrative change-up I’ve experienced at a movie all year—I won’t spoil it for you here—he spends the second half of the night on an adrenaline-and/or-acid-fueled adventure that has less to do with saving Nick than with Connie’s own survival.
All of this is happening in the most aesthetically unpleasant movie you’ve ever seen this side of John Waters. Good Time is loud, jittery, propelled by an anxiety-inducing electronic score, and queasily neon. Director of photography Sean Price Williams shoots the thing almost entirely in close-ups of everyone’s artificial-light-bathed pores and neck hairs; the only time he eases up into a wide shot isn’t to give us any relief from our claustrophobia but to show us a guy jumping from a 12th-story window. I think his work is brilliant, but I also think the Safdies are a dash insane for committing so thoroughly to a cinematic vision that’s oriented toward neither strict documentary realism nor palatable entertainment.
Yet somehow I had a good time with this movie. I attribute this mostly to Pattinson, who’s a mesmerizing presence as he saunters and skedaddles in what’s otherwise an unforgivable role. Connie keeps dropping into other people’s lives in medias res and ruining them with his single-minded, narcissistic pursuit of his goals at the expense of everyone’s well-being. Whatever else Good Time is—and it does admittedly go to greater lengths than most American films to humanize those living at the furthest, dirtiest margins of our society—it’s a great story about the causality of arrogance. Unlike so many other modern antiheroes, Connie’s vices don’t go unpunished; his actions have sickeningly palpable consequences; his homecoming never comes.
Instead we watch as selfishness unravels everything he touches, never more upsettingly than when we return to Nick in a “one week later” sort of epilogue. Nick’s in a new therapy program, where a chipper instructor asks her class a series of icebreaking questions to loosen them up. For two whole minutes, Nick sits stonily through all of her prompts. When she finally instructs her students to cross the room if they’ve ever not gotten along with a family member, he doesn’t need to think twice.
Tim Markatos is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
