MOVIES/ENTERTAINMENT/OPINION
The Ending of the Movie “Challengers” Got Different Reactions From Us
My partner and I took away slightly different things from the ambiguous ending, and I want to talk about that
Warning: Spoilers from the movie “Challengers” with Zendaya (Tashi Duncan), Mike Faist (Art Donaldson), and Josh O’Connor (Patrick Zweig).
If you haven’t heard about this movie or seen it yet, the basic breakdown is that this movie centers around a finals match between two old friends/tennis double partners, played by Faist and O’Connor, who are fighting over the affection of an up and coming star in Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan. The movie explores several different themes about friendship and love and even has a few steamy scenes between the two men fighting for the woman’s affection.
The end of the movie reaches quite the climax though. After telling her husband, Art, that if he loses to Patrick in the Challengers final, she will leave him. He has been wanting to retire for a long time now and she has been his coach and has continued to press him to get back to form after a losing streak.
We find out throughout the non-linear storytelling of the movie that Tashi still has a thing for Patrick Zweig, who is trying to make a comeback at this point in his life. He convinces her to give him a shot by coaching him to a proper comeback at the age of 31. She vehemently denies him but keeps his number anyway because we see she still cares for him.
The night before the match, we find out that Patrick slept with Tashi again. This was after she told Art she’d leave him if he lost. Therefore, she’s shown that she can be unfaithful in her relationship with Art. My sense here is that she wants to be with a winner and Art isn’t that. He’s not as confident as Patrick, and he’s always followed Tashi’s lead, which is not necessarily a strong suit for Tashi.
Near the end of the match, Patrick reveals to his old friend, Art, that he has slept with his wife again. He does the symbol with the ball and the racket that was relevant to them 13 years prior when they were teenagers. He realizes what this means and gets furious and this fury causes him to lose the point. But then his anger fuels both of them to their best tennis in years and the volleys and rallies are intense and just great tennis.
Something, in the end, suggests that Patrick and Art have found their way back to each other through this revelation and the great tennis they’re both playing. The ending though, doesn’t reward us with the winner. Maybe the winner doesn’t matter at this point? It seems that these two have found their way back to each other as friends after years apart because of a girl “wrecking” their friendship.
When we watched this and realized that the winner wouldn’t be revealed and that all we got to see in the end was them embracing and Tashi screaming, “Come on,” from the crowd, we realized that the ending is left up to interpretation.
This is where Mike and I diverged. My partner feels like the ending was a cop-out and that they should’ve resolved the match and shown the fallout from the match and the infidelity. I think that their resolving the match would’ve given the ending a bit of a downer because all of them lost at something.
Tashi has a successful career as a coach but is unfaithful to her once-successful tennis husband who wants to settle and be a family man. I feel like Art lost too because he loved Tashi and stayed with her despite her picking Patrick first when they were teenagers. Patrick loses because he really needed that connection with Art to succeed in tennis and Tashi is just using him.
In the end, many people I’ve talked to were either upset with the ending or coming up with their conclusions about what happened. Whether you think resolving the ending more would’ve mattered or not, the movie ended where it ended, and that was a directorial choice. You could call it a cop-out and unnecessary ambiguity like my partner did. Or you could say that the movie ended because of the revelations and the embrace at the end.
Not to discount my partner’s opinion, but I like being able to craft my ending for this movie. I want to think that Art left Tashi after the match, win or lose. I’d like to think that he and Patrick mended fences and became friends again, realizing what Tashi had done to drive them apart, and they both moved on from her and enjoyed their lives as friends again, both playing professional tennis.
What do you think? Do you think that the ending was abrupt and too ambiguous? Or do you like where they ended it and come up with your own continuation of the story? If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I’ve spoiled quite a bit, but let me know if you’d want to see it now after I broke it down a bit.
