Good Time (2017)
Directed by Benny Safdie
After a botched bank robbery lands his younger brother in prison, Connie Nikas embarks on a twisted odyssey through New York City's underworld to get his brother Nick out of jail.
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46 films that influenced Good Time
What critics say influenced Good Time
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
Led by Robert Pattinson, giving arguably his most commanding performance to date as a desperate bank robber cut from the same cloth as Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, this is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music, which recalls the great mood-shaping movie scores of Tangerine Dream.
You have to go back into the vaults — maybe as far back as “Dog Day Afternoon” — to find a movie about a New York bank robber more intense than Benny and Josh Safdie’s ironically titled drama “Good Time.”
Their latest seems to take as its model another Al Pacino vehicle of the seventies, “Dog Day Afternoon.”
He's the subject of the movie's biggest, if most improbable, joke as well as its darkest, most despairing one, but Connie is the real star of the film, and the movie's point is his desperation - like Sonny in "Dog Day Afternoon," Connie is always thinking, always looking for the next angle.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
The Safdies are aiming for sensory overload, taking a classic genre of New York moviemaking (following “one crazy night,” like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours) and turning it into the ultimate bad trip.
What follows plays out like a drug cocktail of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and a Michael Mann-directed acid trip.
Good Time recalls the wearily hallucinatory qualities of other one-shot stories like Night on Earth and After Hours, but what the Safdies and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronstein accomplish here is a film of a distinctly filthy ilk.
Good Time is set almost entirely in a single twenty-four-hour period, and its accelerating dive-toward-doom trajectory (screenplay by Josh Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein; editing by Benny and Ronnie; direction by both Safdies) resembles nothing so much as Martin Scorsese ’s 1985 After Hours, albeit Connie is a lot closer to Robert De Niro ’s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets (1972) than to Griffin Dunne’s uptown nebbish terrorized by cool and/or crazy Tribeca women.
The presence in Broken City of Griffin Dunne, as the developer behind the corrupt mayor’s machinations, was a reminder of how far we are from After Hours , Martin Scorcese’s nocturnal SoHo freakout.
Good Time is structured like a “one crazy evening” escapade in the style of After Hours, and the Safdies send Connie on a midnight odyssey that zigs and zags with impetuous abandon.
If the Safdie Brothers' last feature, Heaven Knows What, evoked The Panic in Needle Park with its cinema verite observation of the New York City heroin subculture, their impressive follow-up, Good Time, sees them continuing to draw inspiration from the gritty American movies of the 1970s, albeit with their own distinctive street edge.
As many commentators have noted, “Heaven Knows What,” the previous film by Safdie brothers Benny and Josh, essentially revisited the territory covered in 1971 by “The Panic in Needle Park”—the grim, destructive reality of drug use.
The Safdies are often described in terms of what their movies owe to the city symphonies of the ’70s—movies like Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, to which Heaven Knows What drew more than its share of comparisons.
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
I could say that “Good Time” looks like a movie that Martin Scorsese would have made around that time, pre-”Taxi Driver,” and that is intended as high praise.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
Think Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection.
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But this is also a film from the same people that made the emotionally devastating Heaven Knows What , and underneath this film’s barrage of incident and its screaming score (composed by Oneohtrix Point Never) is a sense of intimacy and emotional vulnerability.
The brothers certainly loom large in the same post-mumblecore nexus as Alex Ross Perry, Arielle Holmes (the star and inspiration for the Safdie’s 2014 addiction drama Heaven Knows What), and cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who must have done an ultra-marathon keeping up with Pattinson on this production.
Still, if there’s a grainy classicism to the film’s craft, balancing the fevered formal poetry of 2014’s heroin love story “Heaven Knows What” with Lumet-channeling tautness, it’s no simple throwback exercise.
Pattinson es la gran revelación de este thriller de los realizadores de Daddy Longlegs (2009) y Heaven Knows What (2014).
Working again with the great cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who shot the Safdies’ “ Heaven Knows What ,” Alex Ross Perry ’s “ Queen of Earth ,” and others), the Safdies give “Good Time” a claustrophobic energy that’s hard to fully convey in a review.
Like the directors' previous feature, Heaven Knows What (2014), this presents New York's lower depths with lots of energy and imagination; the athletic camerawork, jumpy editing, and eerie electronic score (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) combine in a heightened, queasy atmosphere that's never less than commanding.
The film, by Boston University grads Benny and Josh Safdie, is imbued with the type of on-the-street grit that made Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” so indelible, and the riveting electric score by Daniel Lopatin notches up the emotional disarray in every frame.
Good Time is set almost entirely in a single twenty-four-hour period, and its accelerating dive-toward-doom trajectory (screenplay by Josh Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein; editing by Benny and Ronnie; direction by both Safdies) resembles nothing so much as Martin Scorsese ’s 1985 After Hours, albeit Connie is a lot closer to Robert De Niro ’s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets (1972) than to Griffin Dunne’s uptown nebbish terrorized by cool and/or crazy Tribeca women.
Think of the Safdie brothers’ pulsating new drama, Good Time, as Of Mice and Men meets Mean Streets.
One scene elicits memories of “ Dog Day Afternoon ,” while others recall “ Midnight Cowboy ,” “ Mean Streets ” and “ Panic in Needle Park .”
Think of that in the sense that an early 1970s movie like “Mean Streets” showed New York guys getting into a fight.
Estelarizada por Robert Pattinson, inquieto y determinado, quien entrega la mejor actuación de su carrera con todo y peróxido en el cabello, la película es una trepidante exploración urbana que remonta a Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973; After Hours, 1984; Bringing out the Dead, 1999) en su veloz pero detallada radiografía sociológica movida por un objetivo claro: en este caso, el poder recuperar al hermano de Pattinson (Safdie) quien padece una discapacidad intelectual.
Of course it’s possible to make a compelling film about a morally bankrupt and recklessly violent criminal sociopath, but Connie is such a small-time loser, and he is so repulsive in his brutal treatment of decent human beings (an alarming number of whom are women and/or minorities), that unlike, say, the Al Pacino character in “Dog Day Afternoon” or the bank robbers in “Heat” (to name just a couple of far superior heist films), it’s nearly impossible to feel any empathy for this guy.
Something like this probably shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of the movie, but knowing that the Safdies programmed a series of films that inspired Good Time that included some of those very classics, such as After Hours, 48 Hours, Jackie Brown and Michael Mann’s Thief and Heat, just makes their film more of a letdown.
In the annals of the crime film, the pulpy “Good Time” is roughly the opposite of something like the uber-professional thieves of “Heat.”
Movie bank robberies have grown increasingly technical over the decades: enough blueprints, hardware, sangfroid, and hours in the library researching metals and we could all be Robert De Niro in Heat .
Nick is mentally disabled; Connie has vague, "Of Mice and Men" dreams of getting enough money to buy a farm somewhere, or at least to get the two of them as far away from Queens as possible.
Connie and Nick were raised by their abusive grandmother, and there’s an “Of Mice and Men”-type bond between the two brothers, with Connie looking out for the hapless Nick.
Robert Pattinson stars as the scuzzy Connie Nikas, who harbors a misguided “Of Mice and Men” fantasy about moving to a farm in Virginia with his developmentally disabled brother, Nick (played quite affectingly by co-director Benny Safdie.)
The setup has faint echoes of Of Mice and Men, but the movie does not aspire to that level of human dignity, and in any event, the script separates the two characters in short order.
In “Good Time,” a variation upon a theme of John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men,” Pattinson plays Constantine “Connie” Nikas, the not-much-smarter Queens, N.Y., brother of occasionally violent, mentally handicapped Nick Nikas (co-director Benny Safdie).
What starts out feeling vaguely like a modern take on "Of Mice and Men," however, becomes something different entirely when a botched bank robbery sees Nick thrown in jail.
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Something like this probably shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of the movie, but knowing that the Safdies programmed a series of films that inspired Good Time that included some of those very classics, such as After Hours, 48 Hours, Jackie Brown and Michael Mann’s Thief and Heat, just makes their film more of a letdown.
The holdup couldn’t go worse if they were Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run (“I have a gub.”)
It doesn't bode well that the exchange of written notes begins to look like the famous scene in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run - "I have a gub, what's a gub?" Almost miraculously they get out with some money but things unravel.