Good Time

GOOD TIME is the fifth feature from sibling filmmakers, Josh and Benny Safdie. It is also a return for them to the fertile territory of New York City’s felonious underbelly as they follow two criminal brothers, Nick and Connie Nikas, as they ricochet through an eventful day and night following a bungled bank robbery.

Pleasingly novel for a pre-heist sequence, the film opens with the camera finding Nick, the younger brother, mid psychiatric assessment. Cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, offers up extreme close-ups, considered and lingering shots to great effect, creating an intimate and challenging location for the introduction of the one of the main characters.

The scene imparts key information about Nick, played with great restraint and subtlety by Benny Safdie, revealing an un-disclosed mental health condition. A calming therapeutic setting is cleverly conceived into which Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, can explode, dragging Nick out, under the cloak of brotherly protection. The film is about to ratchet up the energy - and the action.

For a crime thriller, the ‘one last job’ is a predictable premise and yet, human fallibility is ridden with clichéd behaviours, and the filmmakers manage to circumnavigate tired crime plotlines and produce some genuine, and very satisfying, twists and turns.

It is not all brutal realism. There are humorous moments but they tend to arrive in tragi-comic form, often illuminating how ludicrous decisions, give birth to ludicrous situations.

An urban noir wash, saturates the screen throughout the film, in one sequence a neon light continuously flashes across the forlorn face of Crystal played by Taliah Webster, giving the scene a 1970s’ crime film quality.

Written by the Safdies’ and their long-term collaborator Ronald Bronstein, the naturalistic dialogue is expertly observed, and cements the credibility of the characters and their situations. Similarly, the characters they have drawn have a true depth, assisted no doubt by the filmmakers’ enthusiasm for creating meticulous back stories for their actors.

A barely recognisable Robert Pattinson, turns in a first-rate performance as Constantine “Connie” Nikas. A wary, low-level crook, Pattinson conjures a hawkish watchfulness that makes you pity those who he’ll get the better of. The actor ably pulls off his character’s complex personality, he’s languid and edgy, egotistical yet weak. Connie blends seamlessly into his environment, it’s his home, it’s his neighbourhood, but despite all his street smarts, the streets will always claim him as their own, and fantasies of escape, remain just that.

Connie’s impatient hustle of Corey, an older woman with her own set of problems, is played with exacting pathos, by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Corey is Connie’s ‘go-to-woman’ for quick cash, this time he needs it to bail out his brother from jail. The two characters invoke a mesmerising portrait of desperation and vulnerability. Leigh’s cameo serves to support the main narrative, but the screen relationship is so finely tuned and the performances so arresting, their storyline feels as if it has been cut short.

Barkhad Abdi, also turns in a notable performance as Dash, the night security guard at an amusement park, who takes a particularly nasty beating for being in the right place, at the wrong time.

There is a cohesion of writing, production design, cinematography, and performance, that holds the film together, and despite the occasional test to the boundaries of realism, it still manages to retain its authenticity.

What surprises most is the emotional connections the Safdies’ have established towards their flawed characters, within a fast-paced structure, adding a depth and texture, not often found in the genre.

A glint of hope flickers for Nick, but GOOD TIME ends as it started, showing that the desperate and the degraded in society, rarely win out in the end.