UK Edition
Review
Good Time review: a riveting Robert Pattinson lands his best role yet
Dir: Josh and Ben Safdie. Cast: Robert Pattinson, Ben Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Buddy Durress. 15 cert, 102 mins
Wrath of the Twilight brigade be damned: Good Time gives Robert Pattinson easily the best part he’s ever played. We are henceforth, not Team Edward, but Team Connie, a fever-brained small-time crook in New York, who has no kind of master plan, just a series of quick initiatives to save his hide.
Directors the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh – previously best-known for their street-savvy junkie saga Heaven Knows What – have injected the film with a shot of restless narrative dynamism. Like Connie, the film never stays put for long without a nervous eye on its exit strategy.
We start not with him, but on an uncomfortably intense close-up of his brother Nick (Benny Safdie), a brute of a guy with learning difficulties, in mid therapy session. Connie bursts in and takes him straight off to rob a bank. They do this in rubbery black-face masks while the throbbing industrial score rises in a nearly unbearable crescendo. The sequence is gruelling, but it’s funny, too: the notes being passed back and forth between Connie and the unimpressed bank-teller puncture the tension.
Imagine a Michael Mann heist with Tarantino blockheads mistakenly given the duffel bag, or think back to sweating, desperate Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and you get the idea.
Keep an eye on that bag. It will soon trigger a red dye explosion and send the brothers scurrying from arrest. Nick gets caught, Connie doesn’t. And the next half-hour is magnificent. The Safdies stage a chaotic scene with a bail bondsman, when Connie press-gangs his sort-of-girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) into stumping up $10,000 on her mother’s credit card.
The general stress levels are epic, and the soundscape keeps bashing you around, but the Safdies have an especial gift for thrusting us into the thick of situations only these characters might have provoked. Hearing Leigh scream down the phone to her overbearing mum, while also watching all the pleading, calculating manoeuvres on Pattinson’s face, gives you the kind of grungy buzz only old-time American auteurs like Cassavetes and Abel Ferrara knew how to sustain.
Pattinson has admirably tried, again and again, to prove he has something more to offer than an edgy pulchritude, but his chosen projects (Cosmopolis and The Rover, say) have been barren soil, till now. Connie is a weirdo, but not too much of one to ever lose our curiosity. He’s an opportunist with as many killer instincts as bad ideas, and a guy hastily working whatever angles the script throws his way.
Instantly riveting, Pattinson bristles his way through the movie, saying some truly ridiculous things. “Don’t be confused or it will make things worse for me!,” Connie barks at a 16-year-old girl, played by smashing newcomer Taliah Webster, when holed up in her grandma’s house overnight. (He knows neither of them, and the best approach to grasping how he’s got here is simply not to ask.)
His sudden decision to dye his hair is deeply funny, and a twist that’s sprung involving the bandages on someone’s face is so cleverly nested it makes you laugh out loud.
The Safdies are certainly offering a love-it-or-hate-it style proposition, above all with the infernal sound grinding away, and their filmmaking can teeter on the brink of look-ma arrogance. It’s Pattinson here who manages to centre and save it, stripping himself free of artificial mannerism and working beautifully with the non-professionals bulking out the cast. In a good way, you could well believe this was an acting debut.
It has to be said the film’s last third lets it down, in part because the point of view shifts away from Connie at damaging junctures; an amusement park location, with Barkhad Abdi on standby as a hapless security guard, is simply too “genre” in its flashy convenience; and Buddy Duress’s performance as a ranting parolee tends to over-frazzle the energy levels, also barging the terrific Webster character off-screen.
But startling moments do still await during a high-rise police bust, with overhead shots a De Palma might have been proud of. When Good Time’s good, it’s properly electric, and the star turn goes off like an illegal firework.