Before I started law school, I was one of two film reviewers for what is now the Philadelphia Weekly. My wife’s and my first date[1] was a Saturday matinee of Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. After moving to Charleston in 1992, I did film reviews for a few years for the Post & Courier. I love going to movies, especially with my wife, and especially to early access/sneak preview screenings.
When the Citadel Mall IMAX announced an early access screening to director Luca Guadagnino’s latest, Challengers, the bride and I were all in.[2] A part of me remains a frustrated wannabe film critic. Guadagnino’s movie is about tennis. However, it is also about marriage, particularly heterosexual marriage among the striver class, which is what inspired this blog.
Challengers is mostly, and justly, getting good reviews based on its sexy and charismatic leads—especially Zendaya, who finally gets to play a grown-ass woman—its visually inventive way of filming the narrative-framing tennis match, and its chronologically hopping story. Guadagnino’s films tend to be both erotically charged and very (male) gay friendly. I would not consider him a director who has thought hard about the complexities of heterosexual marriage among the upwardly mobile and ambitious. Yet, in two distinct ways, Challengers appreciates the benefits and fears of the modern, self-actualizing marriage.
In one aspect, the marriage depicted in Challengers hews to a traditional female role in marriage. For Zendaya’s character, Tashi Donaldson, marriage is a way to refocus her thwarted goals onto her spouse, with his success becoming her success. However, this being a modern film depicting a modern marriage, Tashi is in no way subservient to her husband and his goals. The narrative is explicit that her character’s ambition is a motivating force for the two male leads—and when those men either ignore or thwart her ambition, it is they, not she, who suffer.
Because Tashi’s ambition drives the narrative, her husband, Art, played by Mike Faist, comes off as weak and passive despite his outward success: a grand-slam winning Beta male. Absent Tashi’s focus, he likely would have ended up a middling tennis player, much like his brasher and more confident friend and rival Patrick Zweig, played by Josh O’Connor. Challengers understands how, in a modern marriage, a spouse’s support—part life-coach; part cheerleader— can turbocharge one’s path to success. This is especially true for married men.
Challengers further appreciates the dark side of this life-coach/cheerleading: when one’s success is partially (largely?) attributable to the support of one’s spouse, the fear of disappointing that spouse can be psychologically debilitating. Certainly, this fear is debilitating for Art—and how debilitating it is becomes increasingly apparent as the film proceeds. Guadagnino’s deliberately ambiguous final scene is the climax because that is when Art finally breaks free of this fear.
Guadagnino’s focus on the psychological costs and benefits of a self-actualizing marriage was subtext, not text, to Challengers but it was clearly there. For the striver class, the fear of disappointing one’s spouse never abates. Such viewers may justly see Challengers as a very peculiar psychological-horror movie. I certainly did.
[1] January 14, 1989 at the Ritz Theater in Philadelphia PA.
[2] It helps that one of Guadagnino’s previous films, A Bigger Splash, is the only movie I’ve ever seen that inspired me to travel to its filming location, Pantelleria. Highly recommended if the idea of a charming, laid-back, Italian-Mediterranean, beach vacation sounds appealing.
