Good Time

Good Time was Film Comment's number one film of the year. It is a crime film, directed by Ben and Josh Safdie. It came and went last summer, despite great reviews, especially noted being lead actor Robert Pattinson.

Good Time has a plot that is a favorite of film makers, the heist gone awry (they never go as planned, do they?) Ben Safdie plays Nick, an emotionally and intellectually challenged man who is in a program after attacking his grandmother. His slick-talking brother (Pattinson) pulls him out, and the two pull a bank robbery (later Nick reveals that Pattinson had planned to buy him a farm, shades of Of Mice and Men).

I was just reading a statistic that 98 percent of bank robberies are solved. It's easy to rob a bank, as tellers are trained not to resist, but it's god damned hard to get away with it. The brothers have a little problem with dye packs in the money.

Safdie is captured but Pattinson gets away, and he spends the rest of the movie trying to get his brother free, which at first means getting bail. His girlfriend of sorts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, steals her mother's credit card to pay a bail bondsman, but it's canceled. Pattinson finds out his brother is in a hospital after being beaten in jail over a remote control, so there's a long sequence in which he takes him out by wheelchair but then discovers he has the wrong guy. That guy knows of some money from a robbery hidden in a haunted house attraction, so Pattinson is sidetracked by that.

Good Time is basically an urban nightmare in Queens (a good place for an urban nightmare). Pattinson's character, basically a cretin, has only one praiseworthy thing about him--he cares about his brother. He has no problem playing with the lives of other people. In one particularly cruel scene he knocks out a security guard, changes clothes with him, and dumps LSD down his throat, so the police take him away.

The film is in a world where everyone someone knows has been to jail, a step of the socio-economic ladder that I have not visited nor would I want to, except in film form. The Safdie Brothers keep things moving, and Pattinson is riveting. Like his Twilight co-star, Kristen Stewart, he has done a number of micro-budget indies, perhaps to atone for those popular movies, and here, looking nothing like Edward, he slinks through the movie like a hungry reptile. He won't get an Oscar nomination, as the film made no money, but he should get one.

Good Time really is an urban version of Of Mice and Men, minus the rabbits. I look forward to more of the Safdie's work. I hope they don't jump to comic book movies, at least not yet.