Big City Bioluminescent Brutalism: GOOD TIME (2017)

Like a gust of the sort of urban interior air we, the hungry and shaking, used to breathe before cell phones, age, rehab, kids, whatever, curbed our kamikaze uptown list-ditch jonesing searches; the sort of air that used to wheeze through our shallow uneasy, smoke-damaged lungs and coke drip-stripped throats, sabotaging any and all attempts to look nonplussed whilst led from the (relative) safety of the cracked sidewalk, into flickering foyers, lurching, cramped urine elevators, into a snaking coffin-width institutional-glazed hallways, by people we didn't know, people with terrible bridgework --all on the off chance of scoring something strong enough to take the shakes away. It's the sort of air we'd smell again, later, in church basement AA "workshops" the ones set in half-condemned storefronts that never quite not carry the smell of cigar butts, urine, heater coil-baked mildew, and smoky jackets. This, the stalest yet most urgent and memorable of junky air, is the sort of air that fills the sails of the Safdie brothers' kinetic chase scene thriller GOOD TIME (2017) and sets it zipping along for one dizzying, hold-on-to-your-meeting-book urban thrill ride.  Damn it's good to remember the lost dingy smell of the chemically-destitute, without having literally smell it again. Can you feel the clammy sweat in your palms just from my vivid description? Can you taste the electric tang?

Occasionally saturated in the kind Day-Glo psychedelic eeriness that somehow heightens the gritty yet warmly soothing dream-like reality of Bronx streets in the dead of night, and of crowded holding tanks, closed amusement parks, public hospital corridors, and bank teller windows, rather than making them too cartoon-like. Amok on 'anything can happen at any time' energy, the molly-shiver cinematography (35mm!) of Sean Price William sends it over into that either/or landscape where delirious surreal pleasure comes oozing out of the most depressing urban blight, as if a manhole cover Oreo squishing out mint ice-cream into the sewer. Chris Doyle himself could surely no better.

From the first moments of Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive ambient score we feel we're seeing part of a wild new direction in cinema, (I mean new post-Giuliani), a hyperkinetic snapshot of logical but inexhaustible desperation: one bright little fucker's off-the-cuff quick thinking ever deepening his hole. So catastrophic in its real time results is his effort that it perhaps makes a fine reflection on America's meddling in third world affairs, so insanely desperate to keep their kid brothers away from welfare socialism that we all but destroy their economy. 

The title is what they call good behavior shortening your jail sentence, and so it is for sketchy quick-thinking newly-paroled Connie (Robert Pattinson), about to commence an afternoon-through-to-dawn nonstop hustling efforts to 'rescue' his mentally-handicapped brother (Benny Safdie himself) from the mental health system, and then from jail after dragging him into a bungled bank robbery. It went well, but the teller slipped a magenta dye bomb into the bag and it explodes over them and their Uber. Down the street they go, trailing electric magenta like they just escaped a Burning Man DMT wormhole, racing down the streets of Queens looking for an alley or bathroom to ditch their clothes and see if there's un-ruined money as real-life passers-by (the Safdies didn't steal their shots, but sure made it look that way) gape at the psychedelic blur, and as Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive retro synths and drowsy ambient pulse drops surge like a cranked up heartbeat guiding them like the current of the third rail guides the 4, 5, Q and R trains.

First winning critical notice with Heaven Knows What, the tale of a junky crustpunk and her quest to score and/or break up with or get back together with her sketchy junky boyfriend, the Safdies obviously know their milieu, the busy urban streets, dilapidated apartments of twitchy girlfriends always starting to crash on whatever was the last of her sketchy stash, and grandmothers you just met on the bus and now talked your way into something between a quiet home invasion and "just being there to use the phone." High-lowlights include a frazzled Jennifer Jason Leigh finding out--in the midst of a panicked Mamet-style shout at the credit card company--her mom canceled the credit card she stole from her purse before Leiigh could even use it. Leigh's escalating tantrum-sub-junky desperation is masterful - she's trying to play her mom and then the credit card company as assiduously as Connie's playing her, to show she's learned from the master, but she's too emotional, too panicked, too easily thrown off. It's easy to let it all crush you, the testosterone-packed precinct holding cell, busy but uncaring late night public hospital corridors, the kind of place where there are so many people on so many different shift schedules, and with no windows and no closing time, the sleep schedule so disrupted that rather than be awake and then asleep at a certain hour, everyone is half and half all the time, helpful in ignoring the junkies and scammers trying to get things they shouldn't all day and night. Connie know (I learned it too) , that if you look like you know where you're going, like you've been there a thousand times you could go there in your sleep, and almost are, you can go almost anywhere. And man, this movie has it all - arcades where kids drop huge amounts of liquid (pre-blotter) acid and play video games; and closed amusement parks, it's got it all, even a momentary pause here and there for some random termite humanity, or a barking pit bull.

This is a certain strata of outer borough living a lot of us 'aging hipster' New Yorkers don't really get to know anymore, not since the advent of cell phones made drug buying a "we come to you" thing, not a "let's take a subway up to the shadiest section of the Bronx and see if that guy who knows that guy is still there' kind of thing, the sort born of wearying teenage invulnerability. But now those neighborhoods are torn down,  rents rise, the lower world dregs are continually pushed farther and farther uptown, and marijuana more and more decriminalized, whole generations of will never know the way these sorts of hustlers sweep you up in their drama so fast that what started as you buying a dime bag and getting the hell back to your friends downtown before you get jumped becomes taking your dealer's friends to a hospital ER waiting room, hoping to get him admitted before the cops show up and you have to run, and you're too young and/or naive and/or nice and/or stoned to figure out how to make your goodbyes and extricate you from this hustler's Jenga hodge podge of quick fixes before it topples down into handcuffs or a bullet. It's a thing that used to happen to us all, once. And if we keep our head on straight, if we're smart, we soak the lesson, and get out fast, apologizing while you're already halfway down the block.

On the other hand it's far more entertaining than most such evenings, more riveting and propulsive, druggy and psychedelic while being utterly real (most scenes shot on the fly in real locations with passers-by who just happened to be in the shot) without the consequences or interminable length or waking up with your wallet and TV gone. It's a headlong zig-zag firefly race into the abyss that shows the devastating dry wit and talent for fly-on-the-wall naturalism the Safdies are second to none, locked in on a street-level substrata that few genuine artists quite penetrate deep enough to feel anything other than a pose. Christ, who would want to go this deep? Only real artists who, unlike so many others, actually may have a flag to plant.

MASKS

The big psychedelic payoff is what puts this movie into the pantheon, including a wild inherently disturbing scene that trades on one's familiarity with the drug so in question. I.e. if you've ever done liquid or blotter LSD ever, you know that pouring a a goodly third or fourth of a full Sprite bottle of pure acid down some poor security guard's throat to render him incapacitated is a Black Mirror kind of evil, the soul trapped for all eternity screaming, even long after they finally come down. If you don't even know you got there or what just happened, you basically ensure they never come back, jumping through fifth story windows to stop the insane visions, even if they pump your IV full of enough Ativan to drop a mating season moose.


Hmmmm - moose-dropping Ativan IV - almost sounds worth it but no matter how much you may love it, if you know its force, the strength of a single drop to send grown men screaming into the ER begging for a 'stick' to ease the demonic rainstorm tearing their flesh and mind apart, then that Sprite bottle reverberates like a the mouth of Hell itself. Suddenly we look around at the glowing, surreal landscape - both beautiful amniotic, terrible and we are totally unmoored. We've let crazy Connie warp our world around him.

In the end though there are four elements that make Good Time work so indelibly well, the first is Pattinson, proving once again he's been criminally underrated as an actor (see this the same night as Cosmopolis and see what I mean). As he did in 2014's The Rover, he knows how to convey the half-strutting/half-defensive body language of a far too tightly-strung marionette hoodrat, but this is a whole new hood for him - you can tell he's been doing research hanging out with ex-cons and visiting prisons as this is leagues away from the usual Hollywood "street"kid. You can see it in the shots below - the wild animal aggression and just fucked-up tiredness of his hustler - the way everything from coming onto older girlfriend Leigh, to scaring people into line his way of thinking - are all just means to an end, something he's so convinced is 'love' for his brother he never questions it even as it turns everyone's life he runs across inside-out, brother included. He doesn't even realize how animal crazy his eyes look when peeking up from the bushes to clock the five-oh. He'd at least be nominated for something for it, but he's too good and too young and famous to be noticed. He'll have to get lionized in France first, like his ex, dear Kristen. 

The second is Williams' photography--35mm, blazing with rich saturated druggy colors that never deviate from the expected but get Day-Glo powder and paint mileage out of the inside of cars and spooky carnival rides at night; third is the sheer momentum, the snaking cool of all-night anything-can-happen urban amok mission following; fourth is Oneohtrix Point Never's score, both nostalgic to the horror films of the 70s and 80s and forward to the post-clubland post-industrial urban Black Emperor future. Never incorporates the ambient sounds of the narrative, the city sounds into the music so much there's a feeling of reality and this ambient post-rock score fusing in ways I usually only feel when driving to the airport at night in the rain listening to trip hop. For example, he incorporates the key of the hydraulic bus lift into part of the score for the scene it's used in: "My thought was that if the music could somehow be in concert with the key of the hydraulic lift, it's going to be subliminally cool. That kind of sonic language embedded in the film also refers to those New York textures. It makes New York feel like this bioluminescent, science-fiction, sentient being, even though it's real brutalist."

Dude's as termite as it gets. So's the film. It begs all sorts of indulgences for lack of higher purpose but then, as the end sinks in and you go about your business, the deeper meanings of all that's gone by in such a rush sinks deep into you. This is the kind of film that manages to do both, be a dirty vivid urgent urban race through acid-drenched nightmare grandeur, but then a truly great, resonant film at the same time. It lingers in the mind until its genius closes like a velvet trap around your cortices, illuminating a strange redemptive figure eight over the holy cross of anonymous acts of selfless kindness. You never know what form it will settle on while you're following crazy Connie through the dead of night system, but you know it's going somewhere new. Isn't that, in the end, why you never made a quick excuse and ran off when dragged into your dealer's scabby shenanigans deeper and deeper? You just couldn't go back to the normal schedule without finding out how deep the grimy rabbit hole goes now while you have a grimy rabbit to follow.

NOTES

1. see also: Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser - my review of The Big Cube - for more on this scary subject)