Outside the ATP Week 2: Challengers

Thoughts on Tennis Cinema

An Emergency Trailer Review

Alright, that was, admittedly, a pretty fun first week of grass court tennis. Congrats to Francis Tiafoe for taking the title in Stuttgart. We now have multiple American men in the top ten for the first time since 2012—when Mardy Fish and John Isner were doing their best mortgage broker cosplays. Look out for Big Foe to make a deep run at Wimbledon.

For today’s column I was meant to get back to an essential subject—gear—and cover the political implications of string choice. However, urgent news has broken in the tennis world. The first trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s tennis dramedy Challengers just dropped and I need to weight in.

General Thoughts:

The bar for tennis on the big screen isn’t particularly high. Our sport rarely gets the feature treatment, and when it does the actual tennis depicted usually doesn’t look very good. While other sports movies[1] can draw from a deep enough bench of actors who can convincingly throw a baseball or hit a jumper, the tennis eye test is tough to pass[2]. King Richard probably did the best job in recent memory, but pulling off basket feeds isn’t quite as hard as scripting and shooting a convincing pro match. That was a challenge famously taken on by Wimbledon, which features many prominent scenes of a sport on tennis courts with tennis racquets, but physics and sound effects that more closely resemble badminton.

Like Wimbledon, Challengers appears to be a (sort of) love story. However, whilst that Kirsten Dunst tennis classic hits all the traditional rom-com beats, Challengers is going for a bit more of an A24-meets-tennis take on the genre. Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s a cucking picture.

Here’s the gist:

Young, electric star of the WTA, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), gets into a love triangle with Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), two young players who are close friends. Patrick appears to be the “bad boy” of the pair and starts dating Tashi, but he knows Art is into her too or whatever. Years pass. In that time, Tashi suffers a “major”[3] knee injury and retires. Art cucks Patrick and marries Tashi. Tashi retires to a new role: Art’s overbearing coach. She helps him achieve wild success, including a grand slam title, but with his career now stalling out, she has him dip down and play a challenger, where they encounter Patrick, who’s been languishing all these years on the minor league circuit. Plot Happens—will Art save his career? Will Patrick exact cucking vengance? Will Tashi do more than look intensely in different directions while wearing sunglasses? We’ll have to wait to find out.

For now, let’s perform some critical analysis.

Premise: Ehh?

A struggling former grand slam champion plays a challenger to gain some confidence. Sure! Totally! That’s actually something that happens. Hell, Andy Murray played a couple last year. So did Dominic Thiem. For that matter, knowing the term Challenger is winning the script some points in my book. And the tennis world seems, on the surface, rich ground for Guadagnino’s visual touchstones: breath taking settings and gaunt brunettes in an open short sleeve button downs. The tone does seem a bit sincere and Soap-y, and I can’t say the snippets of dialogue here give much confidence in Justin Kuritzkes’ script. Should things skew camp in the actual cut, though, it might be a fun enough little movie.

Tennis Action: Continental Grip!

The above still (a poster!) is, I’m sorry, simply inexcusable. You aren’t even trying at that point. A fucking AI could do better than this. Zendaya’s serve in live action doesn’t look much better, sadly, but her groundstrokes seem passable enough and she nails the “come on.” We don’t get much of Patrick or Art on court, which gives me pause too. I know Brad Gilbert was the on-set tennis consultant, so it’s possible the cast took the tenants of Winning Ugly a bit too literally.

Tennis Culture: Why are they so…normal

The real issue appears to be that Challengers has fallen into the DFW trap: projecting the intellectual, complex anxiety of watching tennis on to those who play it. Successful tennis pros tend to be self-assured morons, not self-aware nervous Normal Guys. American Men’s Tennis Players, in particular, are deeply weird individuals. Neither Patrick nor Art seem like creepy youth pastors, used car salesmen, club promoters, EDM Enthusiasts, Joe Rogan Listeners, Anti Vaxxers, etc. Furthermore, tennis pros who date other tennis pros are even weirder. Need I even mention Tsitsidosa. These aren’t people who have cogent, rational conversations about their relationships. These aren’t people who become calculating coaches in their mid-20s. They are middle-schoolers in the bodies of super athletes. The script could be infinitely improved by making them all way dumber. I want horribly failed attempts at profound musing. I want to hear the phrase “tank tree.” I want to know which fake online high school they attended. And, given the era, I need a goddamn faux-hawk.

Also, speaking of super athletes, I’m calling bullshit on Tashi’s career being ended by a shredded knee. Yo Nishioka came back from a torn ACL in like 3 months and that guy is like 5’4 and his entire thing is being fast. Federer made a Wimbledon semi on a bum knee in his 40s. While I’m down with the premise of a career cut short by injury, the actual injury chosen reflects a basic mechanical and spiritual misunderstanding the way tennis works.

What is…Tennis?

If the Challengers trailer presents any coherent position on tennis, it’s that the characters do not seem to fully understand what tennis is. At one point, an astounded Art tells Tashi “I mean, it wasn’t even like tennis; it was a totally different game.” What a patently insane thing for a professional tennis player to tell another professional tennis player. It’s also not even like this is set in an area where the boundaries of the women’s game are being re-defined. We are explicitly placed in the mid-to-late aughs. The power revolution already happened! Or do Venus, Serena, Davenport, Capriati, and many others, simply not exist in the universe of Challengers? Furthermore, even if we are to entertain the notion that Tashi Duncan plays tennis in some unfathomably original way (which she doesn’t, at least in the tennis we see here), that would still be like making a basketball movie where Brittney Griner pulls Steph Curry aside and goes, “what you were doing out there…that wasn’t even basketball.” While Steph has certainly changed the game of basketball, what he’s doing out there is very much still…playing basketball. What game does Tashi’s tennis conjure for Art? Ice Hockey? Jai alai? Pickleball???

Later in the trailer, we get some kind of hint at the film’s thesis when Tashi, musing about the nature of the game, says via voice over to some anonymous other, “you don’t know what tennis is…it’s a relationship.” Is it? Really? The sport notorious for being chronically isolating? Or do the filmmakers just not know what tennis really is.

Next week…string (for real this time)

-ATP Insider

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[1] Which, to be fair, frequently don’t look great either

[2] Which is why someone needs to make a Timothy Olyphant tennis movie. He can actually play.

[3] More on that later