“If you keep going the way you are now, you’re gonna have a Good Time.”
Wow, two reviews of something within two consecutive weeks? Sooner or later I’m just going to become a review website. Hey, maybe if I’m good enough, people will send me free video games to review. Then I could become a Twitch streamer or something and enter the strange, cursed world of video-game-playing professionals. Is professionals the right word for that? It seems like a joke. But that’s all irrelevant, because Good Time is not a video game, it’s a movie directed by Josh and Benny Safdie and starring sparkly vampire man Robert Pattinson. And let me tell you, that movie fucked me up big time.
I watched it this past weekend, and to be fair, I was in a bit of an altered state of consciousness, so my awe of the movie may be due to the fact that I wasn’t quite sober when I watched it. But I thought about that movie for hours after I watched it, and I’ve continued to think about that movie for the last couple days since I’ve watched it, and I figured that I had to write something about it, somewhere. And hey, why not here?
So, I’d never even heard of this movie before I watched it. And the description of it on IMDb did not prepare me whatsoever for this movie. It reads “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.” So what, it’s a new Pulp Fiction? Sounds like a standard crime thriller, maybe a heist-type movie like Oceans Eleven or something. No. God, no, it is none of those things. It’s a fucking mess, in the best way possible. And it’s glorious.
Major spoilers, by the way, for the entire movie. If you want to go in blind, like I did, watch it before reading this article. Then come back and read it! Or don’t, I don’t control your life. But maybe, together, we can help make sense of this crazy fucking movie.
So, the movie mostly follows Connie Nikas (that’s Robert Pattinson), a small-time criminal and sort-of dirt bag, as he attempts to protect his developmentally-disabled adult brother, Nick Nikas (who’s played by one of the directors, Benny Safdie). Of course, he does this is perhaps the worst way possible, by ripping him out of a therapy session so they can go rob a bank. Things start to go south pretty quickly, because, while they successfully rob the bank without shooting anyone, an ink bomb goes off in their Uber on the way out, and the car crashes, presumably killing or at least severely hurting the driver. We never see or hear about the driver, or the bank, again. And that’s a running theme of this movie; once someone is out of the picture, we don’t hear about them again, with the exception of Nick. More on that later.
So, after that, Connie and Nick are covered in telltale red ink. Nick ingested some or something, so they go somewhere to wash off, but on the way, Nick runs straight through a glass door and is caught by the police while Connie escapes. Nick is taken to Rikers island, where he gets in a fight with one of the other inmates. That’s the last we see of Nick until the end of the movie. Connie, meanwhile, attempts to pay Nick’s bail first by using the stolen money; when that isn’t enough, he tries to get his girlfriend to use her mom’s credit cards. This also fails. And that’s another one of those things about this movie, one that kind of goes hand-in-hand with characters just disappearing. Connie seems to have no qualms manipulating everyone around him, friend or stranger, to reach his ends. To be fair, his ends are freeing his brother, but still. Things only get worse.
The rest of the movie basically takes place in a single night, with the only cut in time being when Connie escapes the police and goes to get money for bail. The second hour of the movie is pretty continuous, without a whole lot of anything skipped. Which is good, because it’s some crazy shit that doesn’t get skipped; Connie breaks Nick out of the hospital he was in by sneaking his way around, and then tries to take him home. However, he can’t get home, so he convinces an old woman that he met on the hospital bus to let him stay in her home. He lies about himself and his brother the entire time, and then, once the woman goes to bed, he eats her food, uses her hair dye, and proceeds to make out with her 16-year-old daughter for whatever reason. But then Nick wakes up and it turns out that it wasn’t Nick; Connie took the wrong guy from the hospital. It’s some random-ass other dude.
Anyway, through another series of lies and misdirections, Connie takes the woman’s car and he, along with the random-ass dude, basically kidnap the young girl while they go to look for cash that the other dude stashed in Adventureland Amusement Park. Of course, instead of finding cash, they find a bottle of pure LSD, as in a bottle of the stuff that you use to make tabs of acid. Incredibly concentrated acid, anyway. As they’re trying to escape, they get caught by a security guard, who Connie beats into unconsciousness and the other dude pours pure LSD down his throat. When the cops show up, Connie convinces the cops that the unconscious guard was actually someone breaking in, and in the process, steals the guard’s ID and goes to his house. The guard wakes up and is taken to an ambulance while he screams maniacally as he presumably hallucinates his balls off on about 500 times the standard dose of acid. Oh, also, the young girl gets arrested for no apparent reason, and Connie does nothing.
Later, Connie and the other guy break into the security guard’s apartment, where the other guy and Connie argue and eventually try to sell the bottle of LSD to another criminal guy. But the cops show up, guns are drawn, the deal falls through, and Connie flees out the building. The other guy, however, tries to escape by the apartment window ledge. And, after Connie gets caught, we see the other guy fucking fall off the window ledge and die. Finally, there’s a scene of Connie in the back of a police car, and then we cut to Nick in a group session for developmentally-disabled adults. The credits roll, some weird song plays, and that’s the end. The movie’s over. Go home.
And that’s it. It fucked me up, because the whole time, I expected there to be some sort of happy ending or some sort of closure or resolution for anybody. But no, no one is happy, every character in the movie is either dead or worse off than they were before, several people have had their lives ruined by the conman, and he didn’t even succeed in helping his brother. Connie’s whole goal was to make enough money for him and his brother to leave the US, or something like that, and in the end, they both end up worse-off than before. At least Nick doesn’t get put in jail for the bank robbery, and that’s about the only sense of solace the movie offers.
The movie itself isn’t particularly long, but the scenes in it are, and that’s one of the reason that I think it struck me as different from any other movie I had seen. There’s only two real cuts in the action, the one I mentioned at the beginning and a brief flashback. Otherwise it’s a continuous forward drive into oblivion, and in this movie, you see everything. Connie and the other guy struggle to find the bottle of acid. The EMTs struggle to subdue the acid-dosed security guard. You watch Connie flee from the point of view of the other guy, for quite a while. Watching the movie, you see every step Connie goes through in his plan. Nothing is left out or left to exposition; everything is shown, every mistake and every “triumph.” Connie’s silver tongue and sharp wits dig him deeper and deeper into trouble, and the whole time, he drags everyone down with him, all for an ostensibly noble goal.
A brief list of Connie’s crimes: bank robbery, putting his developmentally-disabled brother at risk, killing or maiming his uber driver, trying to steal money from his girlfriend’s mom, breaking into a hospital, breaking someone out of a hospital, tricking someone into harboring a fugitive, committing statutory rape with a teenage girl in order to distract her, breaking into an amusement park, beating up and then driving the security guard to insanity, getting that teenager arrested for no reason, stealing the security guard’s identity and breaking into his apartment, attempting to sell illegal drugs, fleeing the police, and indirectly, causing someone to fall to their death. And was it all worth it? No. Not at all.
One of the reasons, I think, that this movie affected me so much is that it feels like, simultaneously, the most realistic and most unrealistic movie I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is grimy, dirty, full of violence and people trapped by circumstance, and seems to capture the sense of being stuck with no way out. Especially the sense of being stuck in a justice system and a society that doesn’t care about its poor or disabled. And those long scenes make the movie seem less like a movie and more like something really happening. There’s no easy escape routes, convenient happenstance, or cheesy one-liners. Besides maybe Connie’s insane quick wits, this isn’t a movie with movie magic. This is a movie with what would happen if real people were in situations like this, in one continuous stretch. And the worst part is that there are people in situations like this.
Sure, there are some unlikely opportunities and Nick’s disability is a little bit hamfisted and not an entirely original treatment of developmental disability, and the plot is a little insane when you boil it down, but overall the movie feels deeply real. It’s fast, it’s dangerous, it’s unsettling, and it doesn’t play violence or crime for laughs or jokes. The Safdie brothers said they wanted to make a crime movie that felt dangerous, and they succeeded in spades with this. And it’s gorgeous, to boot, with amazing visuals, cinematic shots, and an awesome soundtrack. It just feels so different than any other crime or action movie I’ve seen, and maybe that’s why it fucked me up so much.
I keep thinking back to all the terrible things that Connie did to help his brother, but throughout the movie, I kept forgetting what his goal even was. Just like characters, events get forgotten as the movie trainwrecks forward, and eventually you’re left wondering what it’s even all for anymore. What good did smashing in that security guard’s face do? Killing the uber driver? Letting that man fall off the side of a building? The security guard and the falling off the building are heartbreaking scenes, and are just downright uncomfortable. They’re what I keep coming back to. Connie singlehandedly destroyed the lives of about six people, himself included, in just one night. It’s eerie, it’s devastating, it’s desperately human. In a world like this, for some people, there is no way out. Or if there is, it’s very fragile and easily destroyed.
In a certain way, it feels like a modern Of Mice and Men. Two men, one of whom is mentally disabled, struggle to survive in a world that doesn’t care for them. At one point, Nick mentions that they were going to buy a house in the woods, not unlike Lennie’s dream of a farm with rabbits. They’re both works about trying to survive, doing whatever it takes, and ultimately, the mistakes that lead to crushed dreams. Sure, George doesn’t kill Lennie in Good Time, but the movie doesn’t seem to imply that Nick being stuck in a group home is much better. Ultimately, the fate of all characters involved in unavoidable, despite the best intentions and the best plans, the protector can’t save those he loves, dreams fall apart, and the unlucky are left to fall. Neither works are particularly inspiring.
Obviously the two aren’t direct analogues, but it seems to me that they share similar themes. I don’t know if that was intentional on the part of the Safdie brothers, or if I’m just pissing into the wind, but it struck me as a fitting comparison. Because after watching this movie, it didn’t feel like Goodfellas or a heist movie or anything. It felt… different. I’m still kind of reeling from the whole thing, not sure how I feel about it, but I know that this movie made me feel as strongly as I’ve felt about any story I’ve read, seen, or played. It made me feel hopeless, lost, and a little broken, and I felt those emotions as keenly as I think I could have. And at the end of the day, what more can you ask of a movie that being something that resonates with you on a deep emotional level? Good Time does this. It does it so, so well.
I’d never heard of this movie until this weekend, and now I’m going to recommend it to anyone who needs a good crime or thriller movie that’ll stick with them. I haven’t even dug into everything about this movie, like the last song or the race relations. But I’ll be damned if I don’t think about this movie for a while. I’ve been hesitant to watch the Safdie brother’s most recent film Uncut Gems, because it stars Adam Sandler, a man whom I can’t forgive for the vaguely transphobic Jack and Jill and should only have ever been in Bedtime Stories and Hotel Dracula. But now that I’ve seen Good Time, maybe I’ll suck it up and give it a try. I can deal with Adam Sandler for a couple hours if that movie’s as good as this one. Go watch it. You (probably) won’t regret it.
