benny safdie

The Bashing Machines

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There two high-style, blunt-force sports thrillers in theaters right now, neither of which are especially successful. Both Justin Tipping’s football-cult horror curio Him and Benny Safdie’s cinéma vérité MMA story The Smashing Machine reflect on the damage young men accept in their bodies in order to make a lot of money very quickly as wannabe-star athletes. In the fanciful former, that damage triggers a supernatural transformation into a kind of permanently concussed god, and in the more reality-grounded latter it results in a debilitating addiction to opiates. Unfortunately, neither movie is as invested in exploring the nuances of that shared theme as they are in platforming the surface-aesthetic visual experiments of their respective directors and the dramatically severe acting turns of their respective unconventional movie stars: former sketch-comedy clown Marlon Wayans and former professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. As a result, they both look very pretty but ring a little hollow, cushioning the bodyslamming impact of their damaged muscle men with superficial distractions that have little to do with the bodily exploitations of professional sports. Pity.

The dual disappointment of these bone & spirit crushing sports thrillers is mostly due to the high expectations set by the names of the filmmakers involved. Him is especially victim to its own marketing hype, with producer Jordan Peele’s name being foregrounded in the ads to compensate for first-time director Justin Tipping’s professional anonymity. Considering Tipping’s newcomer status, he does fairly well with the material at hand, shooting his football bootcamp torture film with the slick, luxury-brand commercialism of a Nike ad. The rhythmic repetition of its young, concussed football star (Tyriq Withers) suffering seven days of choreographed, ritualistic abuse from his childhood sports idol (Marlon Wayans) gets to be punishingly monotonous by the time it reaches the “Day 5” title card, but the movie does have visual panache to spare. It’s stylish enough in a Martyrs-for-meatheads kind of way that it probably would’ve gotten better reviews if it went straight to Shudder under the title The Goat instead of bearing the weight of Peele’s name in the studio system marketing machine, but instead it’s had the misfortune of being a flashy mediocrity in front of a lot of people. There’s no doubt that Tipping & Wayans’s work in particular could have been repurposed into something truly, brutally spectacular if the quality of the screenplay had matched their gusto.

Speaking of wasted talent, it’s been decades since The Rock has made any notably daring choices in his acting career, with early titles like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain having long disappeared in the Fast & Furious rearview mirror. And even in those early, wild jabs, he was still playing off his larger-than-life wrestling ring charisma to pummel his audience into being entertained. The Smashing Machine is a different beast, asking The Rock to play a real-life, complicated human being under a layer of face-obscuring prosthetics. The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it’s impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career, mimicking the gentle-giant politeness of pioneer UFC fighter Mark Kerr as profiled in the 2002 documentary of the same name. The problem is that there isn’t much else to the movie besides giving The Rock that opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, regardless of how well he makes use of the spotlight. It’s easy to see why director Benny Safdie might have been interested in Mark Kerr as a cinematic subject, given his previous thematic preoccupations with failed athletic gambles in Lenny Cooke & Uncut Gems and with drug addiction in Good Time & Heaven Knows What. He just doesn’t make much of an attempt to communicate why the audience should care about this retired athlete’s unremarkable what-could’ve-been story, besides gawking at The Rock’s acting chops.

Dramatically, there’s a lot more muscle on The Smashing Machine‘s bones than there are on Him‘s. The Rock’s chummy chemistry with frequent scene partner Emily Blunt is mutated into something squirmy & toxic here, with Kerr and his longterm girlfriend prolonging an explosively volatile relationship long past its obvious expiration date. Blunt’s role in that mutually corrosive romance is embarrassingly thankless, since the Mark Kerr story is mostly retold here in service of spotlighting The Rock. Still, the little ways they dig at each other in exponentially violent domestic arguments scores way more in-the-scene dramatic points than the mentor-protegee tensions of Him. Safdie might not arrange those individual pixels into a larger, satisfying picture, but they’ll make for great out-of-context awards season clips as The Rock launches yet another militaristic PR campaign. There’s a version of The Smashing Machine that might’ve been a thrilling relationship drama with the UFC backstory used only as a distant backdrop, but instead the major dramatic payoffs are staged off the back of Kerr’s performances in a career-defining Japanese tournament and the woulda-coulda-shoulda introspection of where he fits into the larger UFC story today. In the end, the movie feels like just as much of a sports-industry advertisement as the stylistic markers of Him, promoting both the UFC and The Rock as decades-spanning sports institutions.

I went into this double feature hoping to see a dramatic reckoning with the physical & emotional toll that professional sports take on young men’s fragile bodies, and I left still craving that reckoning. All that you’ll find here are a few inspired visual choices in how those bodies are commodified in sports-world iconography and a few inspired acting choices in how Wayans & Johnson subvert the more cartoonish archetypes they’re more famous for portraying. That’s all to say that just because neither movie is entirely successful doesn’t mean they’re entirely disposable. To misquote an infamous tweet, why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a muscular bod, huge?

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #208: Lenny Cooke (2013) & Basketball Docs

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Welcome to Episode #208 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna celebrate March Madness by discussing a handful of basketball documentaries, starting with the Safdie Brothers’ 2013 profile of Lenny Cooke.

00:00 Welcome

07:23 How to Have Sex (2024)
13:52 The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
19:11 The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023)
24:11 Out of the Blue (1980)

30:23 Lenny Cooke (2013)
55:30 Hoop Dreams (1994)
1:19:46 AND1 Ball Access – The Mixtape Tour (2002)
1:40:01 Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Good Time (2017)

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I had no idea who up & coming filmmakers The Safdie Brothers were before seeing their most recent collaboration, Good Time, at the cinema, but by the tail end of the opening credits I was already mesmerized by the talent of Benny Safdie in particular. It wasn’t the fact that Benny co-directed (along with brother Josh Safdie, who penned the screenplay) while also making the risky decision to play a mentally disabled thief in one of the central roles that won me over as a fan. It was actually Benny’s sound editing credit that most caught my attention. From the opening frames of the film it’s immediately apparent that the sound design, which heavily features a synth-soaked score from weirdo pop act Oneohtrix Point Never, is the film’s driving force, the main source of its tension & eerie beauty. In Good Time, even the beautiful things are deeply ugly and the way The Safdie Brothers drown their audience in a nonstop deluge of oppressive sounds is just as painful as it is divinely transcendent. Even if every other element at play were dull or uninspired, the film’s synthy soundscape would be enough on its own to push the film into the Best of the Year conversations, which is not too shabby for a couple directors who’ve seemingly come out of nowhere (i.e. documentary filmmaking).

Robert Pattinson stars as an irredeemable scumbag who lands his mentally disabled brother (Benny Safdie) in jail after a botched bank heist. Good Time mostly follows this despicable anti-hero down a complex labyrinth where he schemes to retrieve his brother from police custody. In his desperation he fails to plan ahead for future mishaps, barely evading police custody at every turn himself as he inches closer to retrieving his brother. Any shred of sympathy for Pattinson’s bank-robbing underdog is near-impossible to hold onto as he consistently steps all over old women, children, people of color, and the mentally ill in his single-minded quest to break his brother out. Occasionally this monstrously selfish mission is interrupted by tangents like a long monologue about the worst acid trip in history or an especially unhinged performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh as a wealthy heiress with a violent chemical imbalance, but Pattinson’s scumbag lead will only pay attention to those distractions for as long as it takes him to figure out a way to exploit them. Like Gravity or Mad Max: Fury Road, Good Time is composed entirely of a series of obstacles. There’s an intense moral conundrum at the core of the plot where you want to see the lead succeed in saving his brother from a prison system he’s not mentally equipped to navigate, but also want him to fail for the sake of the marginalized people he hurts along the way. There’s hardly time to wrestle with that conflict in the moment, however, since each obstacle pummels the screen in rapid succession with full, unforgiving force.

Good Time is essentially a mutated version of Refn’s Drive with all of the sparkling romance thoroughly supplanted with dispiriting grime. Filtering an old-fashioned heist plot through Oneohtrix Point Never’s blistering synths and the neon-soaked cinematography of Sean Price Williams (who also shot Queen of Earth) sounds like it’d be a blast, but The Safdie Brothers employ those electric lights & sounds for a much more grueling purpose. Occasionally, Good Time will introduce a stray element of dangerous fun, like an amusement park funhouse or a Sprite bottle full of LSD, but mostly the directors allow their documentary work to inform the tone of the picture. Good Time is defined less by neon glamor than it is soaked in the economy-driven discomfort of state-sanctioned psychoanalysis sessions or the cold glow of television-lit hospital rooms. There’s deeply uncomfortable sexual & racial context to most of the main character’s crimes, but there’s also an economic desperation in his acts of theft, kidnapping, and breaking & entering that inform his decisions to commit them. In one telling scene, he pauses to watch an episode of the 90s reality show Cops, which similarly repackaged systemic economic hardship as an entertainment commodity, only to be disgusted by the pain on display on the screen. Good Time aims to disgust & discomfort in that same way, offering all of the surface entertainment of a film like Drive without softening its real life implications with the fantasy of movie magic the way that the film does so well.

If nothing else, Good Time is an excellent case for each of its individual players as creative powerhouses to be reckoned with. Jennifer Jason Leigh has already established herself as an actor to beware in titles like The Hateful Eight & eXistenZ, so Robert Pattinson’s role here works much better as a breakout calling card performance (much more so than his own Cronenberg vehicle, Cosmopolis), as despicable as it is. The Safdie Brothers also stand a chance to make names for themselves as actors, writers, and directors in what has to be their widest release to date, especially in the brazen way they dare to punish their newfound audience. If Good Time works as a showcase for any one in element in particular, however, its effect is most heavily weighted in its attention to sound. Benny Safdie’s masterful integration of the tireless Oneohtrix Point Never synths in the diegetic sounds of Good Time‘s grimy crime world environments is truly one of the great marvels of the year, something that deserves to be experienced as big and as loud as possible.

-Brandon Ledet