Dark horses destined for a long run

The Toronto International Film Festival just ended, which means awards movie season is officially underway. It's ridiculous to contemplate statue winners that won't be decided until the dead of winter in this sweltering heat. However, this time of the year is always good for a few dark horses; left field entries into the awards sweepstakes that most of us forget by Christmas, or stuff that flew so far below the radar we didn't even hear of it.

Filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie's Good Time made waves in May when it walked away from Cannes with a Palme d'Or nomination, and Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick became the summer's word-of-mouth juggernaut for its refreshingly relatable central romance. These are the movies that could come back to haunt bloated, self-important prestige releases come voting time.

In Good Time, Robert Pattinson puts the final nail in his Twilight career coffin. His post-sparkling vampire choices have been aggressively diverse, with increasingly convincing performances in films by David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis) Anton Corbijn (Life), and James Gray (The Lost City of Z) among others. Here Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a petty criminal who relies on street smarts and a disregard of ethics to survive on the fringes of New York. His only real connection is to his learning-disabled brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie), and when a bank robbery goes wrong, Connie spends a long, gruesome night trying to raise bail money.

At the other end of the spectrum, The Big Sick is, essentially, a boy meets girl, boy loses girl to coma, boy gets girl back love story, based on real-life incidents. Pakistani-born, Uber-driving, aspiring standup comic Kumail (director and co-writer Kumail Nanjiani) meets grad student Emily (indie darling Zoe Kazan) after she heckles him at a gig and it's the beginning of an epic romance. Except for the fact that he can't tell his parents about the non-Muslim white girl he's dating, and that her parents are suspicions of him when they meet at the hospital.

Both films are the kind of low budget, low-key independent films, often overwhelmed by men in tights. And that's a shame. The New York of Good Time is the one rarely seen on screen: grimy, underserviced and depressed. And the desperate lengths Connie goes to, his willingness to exploit someone lower on the social ladder than he is, drives the bleak narrative. Reminiscent of scrappy 1970s crime dramas like Dog Day Afternoon, Good Time has the same stylized focus on one misguided soul - right reasons, wrong methods - and it's Pattinson's job to bring us into this world. He does so deftly, and watching him navigate and manipulate other desperate "losers" is mesmerizing. He can't save the film from some of its excesses (a monologue by Buddy Duress as a petty crook mistaken for Nick is indulgent) but he does keep it from completely going off the rails. We know where this is going, and we know there's going to be collateral damage, but Pattinson keeps the journey engrossing.

By contrast, Nanjiani isn't the strongest performer in The Big Sick, but he is its most endearing, and in a rom-com that's essential. Nanjiani and cult comedy director Michael Showalter don't really break any rom-com rules here, but they certainly bend them to their extremes, least of all by normalizing a mixed-raced relationship - the kind that happens every day in places like Chicago.

The unassuming Nanjiani has a great cast to back him up, and though it's not laugh-out-loud hilarious, the film's wit and insight is in the little details: Emily's mother Beth's (Holly Hunter) dead-eyed stares, her dad Terry's (Ray Romano) awkwardness, Kumail's brother Naveed's (Adeel Akhtar) prickly realism, the weekly attempts by his mom (Zenobia Shroff) to set him up with a "nice Muslim girl".

The Big Sick doesn't reinvent the rom-com wheel, but by plugging its unconventional characters into the genre's well-worn molds finds its own kind of revolutionary grace.

(HK Edition 09/22/2017 page9)