Good Time

Movie Name: Good Time
Year of Release: 2017
Director: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Buddy Duress, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Peter Verby, Necro, Barkhad Abdi, Eric Paykert, Rose Gregorio, Rachel Black
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 7
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Synopsis and Review

While Benny and Josh Safdie made a name for themselves with some very well received films such as "Daddy Longlegs" and "Heaven Knows What", "Good Time" is the film that finally expanded their features to a wider audience, propelling them to other features, such as "Uncut Gems", which was also met with rave reviews. "Good Time" follows the story of Connie Nikas, whom we first witness getting his brother Nick out of a court ordered therapy session. Nick has some cognitive challenges. The brothers rob a bank, however while they're making their escape in an Uber, the dye pack in the bag explodes, rendering the money unusable. They manage to wash the dye from their clothes but eventually get caught up with the police. While Connie manages to escape, Nick is sent to prison. While in prison Nick rapidly gets involved in a fight which results in a severe beating which sends him to the hospital. Connie in the meantime is desperately trying to find bond money, starting with his girlfriend, whose mother disapproves of their relationship. Connie goes to the hospital and manages to get a police-guarded patient out, whom he thinks is Nick. He manages to get help from another patient who was dropped at home, and plans to spend the night at that person's house, when much to his surprise, the person he helped escape is a man by the name of Ray. Ray recounts the story of his tribulations, and Connie figures out a plan of leveraging what happened with Ray in order to get the bail money he needs. However nothing is as simple as it seems.

There's something quite visceral and also eerily reminiscent of the thrillers of the 1970s in this feature. There's a Sidney Lumet aspect to "Good Time" that makes it that much more endearing, though the Safdie brothers manage to carve out a very authentic piece of the small criminal world of New York, that is very much their own. The journey Connie goes through that one particular evening is very much like an Odyssey, where he has to handle unexpected challenges being thrown at him from all directions. The film manages to have a pulse and rhythm that are quite impressive, in the sense that it feels realistic in its depiction of the characters whose lives are being illustrated, but also in the sense that the film-makers time the events of the narrative to this nightly excursion, and do so almost in real time. The cast is uniformly solid, with Robert Pattinson solidly bringing Connie to life, the same going for Jennifer Jason Leigh and Buddy Duress. However the great revelation from the cast is Benny Safdie playing Nick, who truly gives that particular character an authenticity in his reactions, which includes a sense of genuine bewilderment and constant sense of inadequacy to the events that are occurring in his life (alongside the sense of generally being lost and overwhelmed by life in general). The production team is equally fantastic, including the fantastic score from Oneohtrix Point Never and cinematography from Sean Price Williams. It's a riveting film, one that could have benefited from character expansion, but that is nonetheless impeccably crafted. Worth watching.