I’m not really sure what this film was about. For a while it looked as though it was going to be captivating. Then it wasn’t. Then you can’t help thinking that bloody Marty has got a lot to answer for. Because it’s not a bad film, it’s got an edginess, which the camera captures, it’s got an energy, it feels for a long time that it’s going to be about what it means to be young and scared and lost in this modern world, and then all of a sudden you realise it isn’t about that at all. It isn’t really about anything. It’s just about a guy who wants to rob banks and isn’t very good at it. The film never really tells you why he wants to rob banks, and drag his mentally disabled brother into it, what he wants to do with the money, what he’s running away from or where he thinks he’s running to. All of which might have been helpful. It just depicts a vaguely charismatic man who must surely have been able to find a better way to use his talents than holding up a bank with a degree of incompetence which is impressive. There’s a hint of Victoria in the set-up, without the parallel romantic sub-plot, which was the thing that gave Victoria its charm. Like the German film, Good Time takes place over the course of a single day/night and ends in anti-climactic disaster. Like Victoria it also benefits from some astute camerawork and a striking lead performance. However, the longer the film goes on, the more hoops Pattinson’s protagonist is made to go through, the less convincing it becomes; and the lack of any kind of driving reason for the action we’re watching becomes more and more apparent. Maybe US filmmaking is reducing itself to a grammar of dramatic beats; which becomes the raison d’être for the experience of watching the film. No-one cares what it’s about anymore. Watching movies has become a purely visceral process; in which case the Safdie brothers might well be destined for a long and successful career. At the same time, if I had the time and/or energy to indulge in a more adventurous interpretation of the film’s narrative and what this says about cinematic storytelling, I’m not sure there would be anything there; life is a series of tweets that constantly provoke the next reaction; we are all Pavlov’s dogs. (Which is completely unfair as there was clearly a great deal of artistry in the creation of Good Time, but that made it, for this viewer, all the more frustrating that there wasn’t more ambition concealed within the film’s ostensible premise.)
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Since writing the above, in transit, I’ve read reviews which praise the way in which the film captures New York’s racial diversity and the inherent racism of the US, noting that Pattinson’s Connie Nikas befriends a Haitian refugee (I didn’t get that she was Haitian when watching it) and manipulates the fact that the security guard he assaults is of Ethiopian descent to get himself away from the police. Retrospectively, I can just about get this; I can also understand why the film was praised and seen as evidence of a fresh and distinctive new voice. I can get all of these things, but it doesn’t alter that fact that there’s something mundane and implausible about the narrative, that the film appears to aspire to emulate Scorsese or Cimino or even Five Easy Pieces, but to this viewer’s eyes it lacks both the pathos and the narrative risk-taking necessary to pull off the comparison successfully. However, let’s not deny that I looked at the film from a glass half-empty perspective, rather than a glass half-full. Good luck to the brothers; I know I’ll be curious to see where they go next, and, in the context of my recent London industry weekend, I’ll be prepared to pay my tenner at the box office to find out. Which is as big a win as anyone can reasonably hope for.
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