Notable Festivals: Cannes
Halfway through the 2010’s, directors Josh and Benny Safdie were on a slow but steady upwards trajectory, making a tidy name for themselves as makers of daring microbudget films beloved by the elite community of international festival juries. Though any filmmaker would happily glide through this rarefied air, there still exists an elusive barrier preventing full escape velocity: the engagement of a mass general audience. That would all change with the release of their 2014 feature, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT— but not in the way one might expect. The film itself performed modestly well within its extremely limited release, but not to a degree that would register on the weekly box office reports. One might imagine the sparsely-populated auditoriums, likely with their fair share of walkouts who disagreed with the brothers’ uncompromising storytelling. As fate would have it, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT need only to play to an audience of one: actor Robert Pattinson, then a recovering teen heartthrob who had grown restless and uncomfortable by the stardom granted him by the mega-popular TWILIGHT film franchise. He didn’t want to play a sparkly vampire anymore; he was a Serious Actor, and wanted to be recognized as such. He needed something transformative, far outside his comfort zone, and he saw opportunity in the lurid pink light bathing actress Arielle Holmes’ face on the HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT poster.
To hear Josh himself say it, there would be “no GOOD TIME without Rob” (2). Several wisps of potential stories existed — the prison journals of their friend and collaborator Buddy Duress, for one, as well as a character Benny had been developing independently for six years (2) — but the framework that serves as GOOD TIME’s breathless plot was not even on the brothers’ radar. All this time, they had been busying themselves with planning their dream project, a neurotic dramatic thriller about a diamond merchant’s big score called UNCUT GEMS. It makes perfect sense that years spent evading the relentless pursuit of the paparazzi would compel Pattinson to anonymize himself — even if in just a fictional context — and by the time he made contact with the Safdies, he had already convinced himself that they were the ideal filmmakers to help him get there. Rather than find a way to incorporate Pattinson to their still-gestating passion project, the Safdies decided to tailor a bespoke story to him and his particular (underutilized) talents with eccentric characters. The aforementioned prison journals kept by Duress became a key inspiration, with the title GOOD TIME deriving from prison slang for the time during which one is released on good behavior (2). While working on the parameters of the character with Pattinson, their DADDY LONGLEGS and HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT collaborator Ronald Bronstein would once again co-write the screenplay with Josh (and eventually go on to co-edit with Benny), further ensconcing himself into the Safdies’ creative process as an indispensable contributor— almost like a third brother. The end result would be like a creative graduation; after nearly ten years toiling away in the trenches of the microbudget world, 2017’s GOOD TIME sees the Safdies truly break out into a much greater degree of public awareness, and cement their place at the forefront of contemporary independent filmmaking.
Continuing the Safdies’ reputation as the heirs apparent to Martin Scorsese’s career-long chronicle of New York City and its countless colorful micro-cultures, GOOD TIME is an outer borough on-the-lam caper dialed into a frenzied frequency that essentially concludes each scene with a gleeful answer to the question: “what’s the worst thing that could happen at this moment?”. The story centers on Pattinson, near-unrecognizable as the abrasive, perpetual screw-up Connie Nikas, his singular redeeming quality being an unassailable loyalty to his brother Nick. Played by Benny himself (after no shortage of consternation from financiers, naturally), Nick represents something of a major drag on Connie’s desire to squeeze through life like an oil slick; he’s a gentle giant, stunted developmentally with a severe speech impediment and the academic smarts of someone many years younger. That said, he’s highly intelligent in his own way, and we get the sense that his body is a kind of prison, clumsily preventing said intelligence from expressing itself in a fuller way. Family is everything to this hapless duo, but it’s a twisted, toxic kind of brotherly love; the opening scene positions Nick at the center of a turbulent conflict between his therapist and Connie, whereby Connie actually needs to keep Nick in this tortured state so he can use it towards his own self-interested ends. Case in point: Nick wouldn’t be the type inclined to don a disguise and rob a bank, but he certainly would if Connie asked him to.
A successful heist quickly turns into an unsuccessful getaway, and Nick ends up crashing through a plate glass window and right into police custody. Connie attempts to bail his brother out, but the stack of cash they stole is unusable, literal dirty money— stained a tell-tale chemical magenta after the bank sabotaged their bag with an explosive paint. Thus begins a Sisyphean odyssey where each move Nick makes backfires in increasingly absurd & desperate ways. GOOD TIME’s peculiar, jittery energy juxtaposes the contrivances of its genre plot with mundane settings and naturalistic performances. Apparently, only Pattinson and Benny had access to the script, forcing them to guide the advancement of each scene while reacting to on-the-fly interactions with their co-stars, who were only given detailed backstories to work from (1). GOOD TIME’s collection of supporting performers mixes established performers like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Barkhad Abdi with the rougher characters in the Safdies’ orbit. Leigh plays Corey, Connie’s well-to-do girlfriend who lives with her mother in a luxury apartment. Like Connie’s relationship with his brother, this one has a predatory, exploitive angle too; with her inclusion, the Safdies wanted to convey that mental illness doesn’t discriminate along economic lines. She’s a middle-aged woman with the emotional intelligence of a teenager, flying off the handle at her mother over the smallest perceived slight while indulging Connie’s every manipulative request— even when it means maxing out the limit on her mother’s credit card to pay for Nick’s bail. Abdi, perhaps best known to general audiences as the “I am the Captain now” guy from Paul Green grass’ CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013), has made a tidy career for himself in small character roles; GOOD TIME finds him playing a security guard at a seedy amusement park (and the unwitting recipient of a drug-laced soda bottle). The aforementioned Duress and hip-hop artist Necro make their way over from HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT, with Duress playing a tempestuous wannabe hood named Ray who gives the film an injection of off-beat energy when he’s mistaken for Nick and abducted from the hospital by Connie, while Necro introduces an element of visceral danger as Ray’s threatening friend Caliph.
Working once more with their HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the Safdies present GOOD TIME in an elevated style commensurate with its resources. Their largest budget to date affords the creative team the freedom to shoot on 35mm photochemical film, though a small footprint and an ease of mobility remain critical to their shooting style. The Arricam LT was likely chosen for this reason, allowing the Safdies and Williams to capture the action while responding in realtime to the immediacy of the streets around them. A set of Canon Cinema zoom lenses facilitate their pseudo-documentary aesthetic, pairing well with a set of spherical Zeiss Super Speeds that establish a sharp, modern texture. GOOD TIME’s visuals are as gritty and unrelenting as its plot, the 2.35:1 frame blooming with rich, lurid color; there’s a distinct day-glo palette at work, be it the literal kind found in the safety vests worn by Connie and Nick during their bank robbery, the searing magenta dust exploding from the booby-trapped money bag, the sickly-green tinge of fluorescent bulbs, or the reflective neon hues that are only visible under black light. Though there’s plenty of the same claustrophobic, handheld closeups that can be found in their earlier work, GOOD TIME also exhibits the Safdies’ talent at conveying scale. Steadicam tracking shots allow us to glide through 3D space along with the characters, while a handful of strategically-placed aerial shots juxtapose the characters’ small-scale desperation against the enormity of The Big Apple. Two distinct moments come immediately to mind: the opening shot that evokes the curtain-raiser of THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) as it swoops ominously towards downtown Manhattan, and a birds-eye view of a snaking Bronx highway at night, a stolen security car sailing away from Connie’s misadventure at the amusement park.
When it’s not unfolding on the concrete canyons of the city, GOOD TIME’s action is often staged in uncomfortable spaces we’d rather not return to— even with the twinkly string lights and sparse Christmas decor that the Safdies’ Red Bucket Collective colleague Sam Lisenco sprinkles throughout his production design. We’re dragged along through nondescript inner-city bank branches, the stale misery of hospitals, tacky luxury apartments, worn-down working-class housing, a sleazy X-rated amusement park and a gaudy bachelor pad tucked away in the projects. Composer Daniel Lopatin, better known by his stage name Ohneotrix Point Never, matches this seedy mise-en-scene with a pulsing, grimy electronic score that would go on to win the Cannes Soundtrack Award. As tense and unrelenting as the film itself, Lopatin’s score blends the John Carptenter-esque sound of an 80’s horror film with the flat MIDI tones of 8 or 16-bit video games— Super Nintendo on trucker speed. GOOD TIME closes with an original song written by Lopatin, a haunting little ballad named “The Pure And The Damned”. Given added poignancy by the worn-out vocals of Iggy Pop, the piece works to bring us down after a sustained 2-hour adrenaline rush while underscoring the inherent sadness of the brothers’ plight.
Despite the commercial demands imposed by the biggest budget of their careers up to that point, the Safdies steadfastly maintain a vision rooted in their particular way of working. When he’s not acting onscreen, for instance, Benny still operates the boom mic. Surely, production could have easily afforded to hire a dedicated sound recordist, but having run sound out of logistical necessity for years, Benny has adopted sound recording as part of his shared directing practice with Josh. Rather than crowd video village, he can presumably trust the visuals to Josh while forging a tactile connection to the performances, catching small details that Josh might otherwise miss on the monitor. Similarly, the brothers dispatch their longtime collaborator Eleonore Hendricks on their signature street-casting sessions, peppering GOOD TIME with a wealth of distinctive faces and idiosyncratic real-world personas. Indeed, the chaotic unpredictable energy of the street — and the range of humanity to be found on it — is the foundation of the Safdies’ artistic voice.
Like their fellow Manhattanite and cinematic forebear Martin Scorsese, Josh and Benny always strive to leverage the emotional truth of documentary within their fictional storytelling; to disregard that is to disregard the very core of themselves. The element of street theater has been baked into the Safdies’ storytelling from the beginning, gleefully mixing performers and contrived scenarios with the general public so as to capture the spontaneous melodramas of life itself. GOOD TIME isn’t terribly different, even with the backing of serious money and Hollywood talent. An intense footchase sequence early in the film stands as a great example: though production had obtained permits to shoot there, they didn’t lock down the location from the public. Instead, they peppered a few strategic extras and stunt people throughout the crowd and sent Pattinson careening through them. Bystanders who couldn’t see the camera shooting from a distance would see a real police chase instead, to the extent that a few even physically tried to impede the actors dressed as policemen from catching up to Pattinson and Benny (1). These “candid camera” moments further distinguish the Safdies’ filmmaking approach— where others would readily opt for the artifice of a fully-staged environment so as to avoid the potential liabilities of involving unwitting participants, Josh and Benny are quick to embrace admittedly reckless techniques in the pursuit of the visceral, chaotic immediacy that is so central to their storytelling.
Far more than another case of a self-aggrandizing filmmaker using shock value for its own sake, the extreme nature of the Safdies’ filmmaking is crucial to the themes they wish to explore. While an anxious, stressed-out tone and a fundamental empathy for society’s “unpleasant” fringes have always defined their work, GOOD TIME sees the emergence of a grander throughline, with much wider resonance to general audiences. One might call it the sheer desperation of modern American life, or the ultimate absurdity of late-stage capitalism. The middle class has been undergoing a hollowing out for decades, but it lately seems to be accelerating at an alarming pace. Anyone who’s filled up their car at the gas station or gone out to fill their fridge with groceries can speak at length about the nauseating totals that tally up with staggering speed. If you’re not part of the 1%, you’re being continually squeezed from all sides: student loan payments, medical bills, credit card debt, runaway inflation, constant workforce reductions, everything. The cost of living has skyrocketed while wages remain mired in the muck of corporate greed, and we are desperate. Though the Safdies have had a much more fortunate upbringing than most, they clearly sympathize with a situation that has no end in sight. The escalating absurdities that sculpt GOOD TIME’s plot are a reflection of this sympathy— Connie and Nick were dealt a rotten hand in life, denied a lot of the smaller privileges that might let them scratch out a modest, but legitimate, future for themselves. A melodramatic gesture like robbing a bank becomes something of a last-ditch play for a livable life, but it only opens the door to a whole new set of problems: the predatory nature of the bail bond industry, for instance, or the relentlessly invasive tentacles of the police surveillance state. It’s only natural for GOOD TIME to adopt the framework of the suspense thriller genre, because in many ways, that’s exactly what our lives have become.
Acquired by A24 several months before its Palme d’Or-nominated debut at Cannes, GOOD TIME’s success seems like one of those foregone conclusions. Pattinson’s star power, especially within a buzzy, image-defying role, promised to draw audiences from a much wider pool than the Safdies had previously commanded on their own. One of the perks of the Safdies’ prior success is that their primary audience was comprised of arthouse enthusiasts and adventurous fans of their scrappier work— thus leading to a more-positive reception on the whole. Bigger audiences, where those experiencing the Safdies’ abrasive storytelling style for the first time are naturally going to make up a larger percentage, will also mean a wider range of reactions. The reviews bear this out; Variety’s Guy Lodge would praise the film’s combination of “messy humanity with tight genre mechanics”, whereas The New York Times’ A.O. Scott found GOOD TIME to be “stale, empty and cold”. At a certain point, art’s value stems not from its perceived “quality”, but whether or not people get it. Was the artist, through whatever chosen medium, ultimately able to communicate the message or sentiment at hand? By that metric, GOOD TIME is a success even when not taking its respectable box office performance into account. It’s “a film about destructive love”, writes Emily Yoshida for Vulture, “and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them”. Such sentiments strike to the heart of the Safdies’ storytelling, and the perverse apparel therein. We’re all looking to love and be loved in return— a simple quest nonetheless complicated by our flaws and self-destructive impulses. In indie film as in life, we have to do the best we can with the tools we’re given. How we go about doing that is what makes the story worth telling.
GOOD TIME is currently available on high definition Blu Ray via LIONSGATE.
Credits:
Written by: Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Produced by: Terry Douglas, Paris Kassidokostas-Laisis, Sebastian Bear-McClard, Oscar Boyson
Director of Photography: Sean Price Williams
Production Designer: Sam Lisenco
Edited by: Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Music by: Daniel Lopatin (as Ohneotrix Point Never)
References:
- IMDB Trivia Page
- “The Pure and The Damned: Good Time”- making-of documentary on GOOD TIME Blu Ray
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