Good Time

 Connie, a penny ante hoodlum in Josh and Benny Safdie's Good Time (2017) makes a lot of poor decisions in the course of this 101 minute film.  The movie's plot mirrors his fecklessness -- it strings together one absurdity after another.  This is the sort of movie in which the characters behave with incomprehensible stupidity against a scrupulously observed, and seemingly, clinically realistic background.  For the movie to work emotionally, the viewer needs to be invested in the deeds of the film's hero, Connie.  But the guy is such a fool that the audience just watches his antics with bemused horror.  The movie is so energetically manic that viewers can't catch their breaths -- and this means that the film's ridiculous plotting isn't really evident until you think back on the whole thing.  

Connie's brother is mentally challenged.  He's hair-triggered emotionally, cries and rages at the drop of a hat, and seems to have mind of a dimwitted six-year old.  In the opening scene, we see this guy struggling to interpret such axioms as "Don't count your chickens until they hatch" and shedding tears because he can't figure this out.  Connie shows up at the Social Worker's office and "rescues" his brother from what he characterizes as abuse.  The film, then, barrels into motion with its first and supreme absurdity -- Connie enlists his brother, who can barely talk, as his accomplice in an ill-fated bank robbery.  Of course, things go wrong.  The money bag is booby-trapped with a charge that sprays both of the idiotic robbers with red dye -- actually a kind of stinging red dust.  In the ensuing chaos, Connie's mentally defective brother gets arrrested and is sent to a holding cell on Riker's Island full of vicious criminals.  The hulking manchild gets into a fight and is slugged repeatedly in the face.  Meanwhile, Connie, a man of limited means shall we say, is trying to raise $10,000 to bail out his brother.  The cash from the robbery is all stained with dye and useless.  Connie gets his hysterical girlfriend to loan him a credit card, but her mother (who heartily and justifiably dislikes the criminal) has shut off the money spigot.  Connie, now, has learned through the ugly bail bondsman, some kind of Honduran Jew, that his brother is in a Queens hospital.  He rushes to the hospital and, in the film's second big improbability, manages to abduct his unconscious, heavily bandaged brother.  Hitching a ride on a bus transporting people home from the hospital, Connie and his unconscious brother seek refuge with a kindly Dominican woman.  In the another absurdity, the woman allows Connie and his brother slumped over in a wheelchair to stay in her apartment with her sixteen-year-old granddaughter.  Connie dyes his hair a fetching blonde and tries to statutorily rape the little girl.  The unconscious man wakes up and, when the gauze covering his face is removed, we find that Connie has kidnapped the wrong man.  Indeed, he's managed to abduct the only person in the Five Boroughs of New York City who is even more frenzied and stupid that he is.  The injured man turns out to be a dealer in LSD who escaped from a police custody by diving out of a speeding cop car, unfortunately, landing on his face at 40 mph.  The drug dealer is either high or crazy or both.  He recalls that he's stashed some money, enough to bail out Connie's brother, in an amusement park, specifically in some kind of ride featuring a chamber of horrors.  Connie and the drug dealer go to the amusement park and look for the money but the dope addict is too strung out to recall where he put the cash.  There's a confrontation with a security guard.  They beat him up and pour a half gallon of LSD down his throat for a good measure.  Then, when the cops show up, Connie dresses in the man's security guard outfit and blames the gibbering victim for the break-in.  The junkie and Connie go to his apartment.  And, then... here I fell asleep for a couple minutes, exhausted by the film's hectic style.  I woke up to see the junkie scaling a wall about sixty feet above the ground -- this doesn't end well.  Connie goes to jail.  Connie's brother, presumably determined to be non compos mentis, ends up where the film started -- he's in a Group Home setting where a nice therapist is working with a number of mentally challenged individuals.  The Social Worker at the beginning of the film makes an appearance and wishes the man well -- Iggy Pop growls some morose lyrics over the closing credits.  

In most classic Hollywood pictures, close-ups are used sparingly.  In this film, everything is shot in a huge in-your-face close-up.  The first two-shot with a discernible background occurs about ten minutes into the film.  The effect is initially frenetic and gripping, but, as the hysteria continues (and increases), the film's hectic shot/counter-shot editing, all  in huge close-ups, becomes fatiguing and monotonous.  The effect is somewhat similar to being buttonholed by a crazy drunk in a bar and, then, harangued with conspiracy theories -- it's fascinating for the first couple minutes but, then, you just want to escape.  The movie is crammed with picturesque low-lifes and the family dynamics on display would make the master of dysfunctional families, Kira Muratova, blush.  Everyone spits insults at everyone else, sobs and weeps and screams.  (A very hardened-looking Jennifer Jason Leigh is excellent in the role of Connie's longsuffering and hysterical girl-friend.)  Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, is handsome but obviously a cretin and its enormously difficult to sympathize with a man who would bring his mentally retarded brother along with him on a bank job.  Connie lies about everything and the film raises the question of whether a successful movie can be made with a cockroach in human form as its protagonist (This statement is unfair to cockroaches who are industrious and intelligent bugs.).  The Safdie brothers resort to an unfair tactic:  the Social Worker therapist in the opening scene looks ridiculous -- he's an old man with an elaborate perm and looks a like an scarecrow-like Nicholas Ray.  The man's appearance is so strange that we're put off by him and feel relief when Connie comes to rescue his brother.  But, of course, the rescue results in hideous problems for the childlike man and, at the end of the picture, we're relieved to see the Social Worker with the weird hairdo re-appear.  Clearly this therapist and the woman conducting group activities with the other simpletons are intended to be the real heroes in the film -- the trick has been making us sympathize (if only just a little) with the loathsome Connie.  There are many things to admire in the film --- the acting is good, if monotonously manic -- and there are several clever plot twists that, although improbable, are cunning and surprise the audience.  The audience's reversal of sympathies is similar to the trick that Bertolucci uses in 1900 -- we see Donald Sutherland being murdered horribly by peasants with pitch forks in the film's opening scene.  But three hours later, we have come to understand that Sutherland's character richly deserves  his fate -- we see the same footage but have a wholly different emotional response to it.  On a minor scale, the Safdie's accomplish something similar here -- far from being his brother's rescuer, Connie exploits him and is the instrument of his doom.  A clue to the film's hepped-up style occurs in the very first shot -- we see a typical drone image of Manhattan, but the camera, instead of slowly approaching the buildings, rushes toward them so swiftly that we fear that there will be a collision that will smash the lens.