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esteeb.art · @esteeb.art@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Good Time 9/10

<strong>LSC 10 Week 18: American Neorealism Week<strong> <i>Good Time<i> deals with the trials and tribulations of one Connie Nikas, played by Robert Pattinson. Connie and his developmentally disabled brother Nick, rob a bank together and Nick gets arrested while they attempt to escape. The rest of the movie is the lengths Connie goes through trying to get Nick out of jail culminating in what is a gripping and insane series of events and a desperate scramble as we watch Connie and the Safdie’s seemingly “yes, and…” their way to the movies pretty inevitable conclusion. It takes a minute or two for things to really get going, but once it does this movie does not stop. It feels like the result of John Casavettes and Michael Mann doing a Fusion Dance (John-Michael Mannevettes). The Italian Neorealist movement of the 1940s and 50s was born out of the rubble of World War II. There was barely an infrastructure for human life, much less one like, say, The American Studio System. So people had to do with what they had, and were left to getting real and gritty out of necessity while artists did what artists do: process the emotions and trauma of the society in which they lived. I’m bringing this up in order to draw the specific distinction between that movement and the one we’re looking at here, American Neorealism, in the sense that their catalysts are extremely different. Both, I think, are about the survivors of a war trying to scratch out some sense of meaning and catharsis out of a tragic event that they did not start, but nonetheless suffer for. They are both trying to process the feelings that come from such events and put on full display what those feelings do to people. I would even say that they are both about people who were on the losing side of a war. The distinction is that while Italians were recovering from what was a land war fought between nations, American Neorealism is trying to come to grips with the fact that there was a class war fought in America that started in the 1980s and everyone outside of like 100 guys lost. I only bring all this up because it was learning that these are movements born out of national trauma that really made The Safdie Bros.' <i>Good Time<i> lock in for me. Because without that understanding, at first glance, I was ready to just let this one go as a competently made crime thriller with a healthy layer of modern grime and a compelling lead. It certainly is that, but I think I have better read on the “why” of it all than I did when I watched it (it’s been a couple days mostly because it takes me a little bit to build up to writing stuff). As I said before, <i>Good Time<i> is a hell of a ride that I think benefits from going in blind, but I think one plot point that I think bears zooming in on happens after Nick is already in jail. Connie goes to a lady friend of his, one whom he seems to have made some promises to regarding his impending windfall, and asks her to come with him to the bail bondsman so that she can use her mothers credit card without permission in order to front him the money to free Nick because the money Connie recently stole is unusable. This doesn’t work out. So Connie is presented with what, I think, is the actual inciting incident of film and the best way to understand the movie as a whole, if he doesn’t want his brother to spend an indeterminate amount of time in Riker’s he has to come up with $10,000. $10,000 is an interesting figure isn’t it? When you see it or hear it, statistically speaking, it’s enough to spike your blood pressure but it’s not <i>so much<i> that it feels like it should be impossible to get your hands on one way or another. A fun thought experiment, or terrifying I guess, is to think what would happen if you needed that kind of money. If you needed that money, right now, could you get it? How would you get it? Do you have options? People? Banks? What if you had no good options? What would you be willing to do to get it anyway if it someone you cared about was at stake? These, statistically speaking again, impossible questions are at the heart of the events of Good Times and that of it’s focus, Connie. The text of the film doesn’t give us a lot of explicit details about Connie Nikas before the events of the film, and the more you do glean about the man the more you realize anything you have learned is subject to some scrutiny (which is refreshing as hell by the way). But the point is you don’t really need a lot of explanation, Pattinson’s Connie wears every beating he ever took right on his face. He gives an almost animalistic performance, making Connie seem more like a skittish but bold opportunity predator or scavenger. There’s nothing he won’t do, no one he won’t manipulate, and no one he won’t cast aside to keep himself and his brother out of a cage (literally), even if he doesn’t realize that he’s already in one (metaphorically). He’s a wrecking ball, a mess, a dead man walking, but by the end of the movie you realize that he thinks pretty highly of himself. He thinks his ambition to escape, the drive to survive the wreckage of this war being fought all around him, makes him superior. In this way, I think he is the quintessential left behind Millennial and typifies the sort of post-2008 hustle mindset so many have been poisoned with. You see it in people who turn to MLMs or crypto scams or Culture War Grifting, people who are willing to burn everything and everyone around them down in order to get out. Because there’s still a part of them that believes the game is still functioning. That the battle is still being fought. But the thing that is left unsaid but speaks volumes in Good Time is the theme that presents itself over and over in crime dramas. People like Connie, people like us. We don’t get to break the rules, we don’t get to do what we need to do to survive on our own terms. I don’t know that Connie Nikas is necessarily a tragic figure. He’s a shitty human being really by most metrics as far as you can tell. But what is tragic is the realization that it’s a corner he was forced into. It’s a corner we are all, little by little, being forced into. I see the thousand yard stare on his face at the end of the film and I know exactly what that feeling is. Statistically speaking, so do you. Good movie.

#lsc10 #lsc10 week18 #movie

Published 2025-02-09 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere