Fair Play Review: Chloe Domont’s Gripping Depiction of Shifting Power Dynamics

Dramas set in the world of finance have become a genre unto themselves. Their tropes are similar to those of films about poker players, as both often feature men spewing a mixture of profanity and jargon that may sail over the audience’s head while money and power shift with intoxicating suddenness and ease. Transmissions of power are dramatic whether or not we can elucidate the finer points of, say, a hedge fund or a royal flush. These stories allow us to be vicarious gambling junkies and usually sexists, grooving to the misbehavior until the third acts scold everyone on screen for doing everything that you paid a ticket price to see them do. You get your kicks and go home with a clean conscience.

Chloe Domont’s Fair Play throws a monkey wrench into this formula that’s so shrewd and inevitable that it’s astonishing that a film hasn’t tried it before. Dumont merges a finance drama with a romantic thriller, implicitly telling men in the audience that there’s no escaping the emotional demands and nuances of a wife or girlfriend for even a few hours. Dumont, who’s directed episodes of Billions, Showtime’s addictive drama about high finance in New York, knows how to stage the propulsive clichés that have sprung from films like Wall Street and Boiler Room. The camera darts through the halls of a sleek glass-and-chrome high rise while bros kiss up to their king, Campbell (Eddie Marsan), who forgives no losses and pushes his underlings to dig for more information on corporate capital. People crumble, kings smugly swig their priceless bourbon, and profanity and praise mix uneasily. So far, so typical.

Well, not entirely typical. Women are among the bros now, and the winds of the Me Too movement have wafted into even these amoral halls of power. The guys can’t openly say what they used to say about women anymore, and so they’ve added passivity to their aggressiveness. When one of Campbell’s analysts, Emily (Phoebe Dynever), is promoted to portfolio manager in the wake of a typical meltdown, it’s widely assumed that she slept her way into the role. She’s young and attractive and, the other analysts might as well say, this is a job for men. The twist is that her secret fiancée, fellow analyst Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), essentially subscribes to the same philosophy. He feels he’s to the manor born and that the PM position is his to lose. It quickly becomes evident that Emily is the shark of the couple, and the suspense motor driving Fair Play is the question of just how badly Luke is going to handle this revelation.

Domont has cleverly turned a genre stereotypically associated with male fantasies into a story of emasculation. With Fair Play, the filmmaker has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test. As confident as Domont is with high-finance gamesmanship, she’s sharper as a dramatist of premarital decay among millennials. So sharp that, for a while, she resists the impulse to turn Fair Play into a fashionable treatise on the awfulness of men.

Luke is an all-too-recognizable creature: a mediocrity in love with an idea of himself, who discovers that his lover is operating at a higher level of instinct and ability. Rather than score points on Luke, Domont is aware of the pain that’s inherent in such a rude awakening. Nothing is more painful in the film than Luke’s contrived attempts to behave as the supportive fiancée even though he’s roiling with disappointment and bitterness. While Emily enjoys privileged partying with Campbell and the other PMs, Luke weathers repeated humiliations as the office punchline. He’s so eager to please that he’s attending self-help seminars.

It’s risky for a youngish actor with eyes on stardom to play pathetic, but Luke brings Ehrenreich to life as a performer. Once Emily’s career ascension begins, there’s always several different things going on in Luke’s voice and demeanor at any given time, and Ehrenreich fluidly communicates these contradictory shifts in mood. In particular that voice, which keeps alternating minutely from authentic to disingenuous supportiveness. This nimbleness brings to mind Leonardo DiCaprio, who gave a similarly raw performance in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road. As Luke, Ehrenreich gets at something unusual: how men can believe their own gaslighting. When Luke begins to undermine Emily, first with criticisms of her wardrobe and drinking, Ehrenreich shows the audience how desperately he needs these observations to be true. He needs any win, however paltry. It’s petty, yes, and all too human.

Emily requires perhaps an even greater level of empathy than Luke to play, and Dynever invests the role with a different kind of pain, not of rejection but of the sudden realization that her life is about to be thrown off balance. Emily’s dream is also temporarily dwarfed, as she can never admit to enjoying what she’s worked toward since she was an adolescent prodigy. Emily is pressured to constantly sympathize with Luke, which, if she’s being honest with herself, she doesn’t, and so they’re both trapped in playacting a “healthy” response to her promotion that quickly estranges them. Throughout Fair Play, Dynever’s gestures are also weaponized, also imbued with vast and conflicting meanings, particularly as Emily goes from supportive to faux-supportive to resentful to disgusted with Luke’s weakness over a span of seconds.

Luke and Emily’s tête-à-têtes have an intimate, livewire ferocity, serving as mini-surveys of how sex, power, and intimacy comingle. Embarrassed and feeling inferior to Emily, Luke pulls away from her sexually, which she greets with an aggressiveness that exacerbates his humiliation, an effect that’s partly intentional. Domont homes in on male sexual insecurity in an age that expects the genders to be equal but that still essentially equates manliness with money, power, and sexual prowess; inevitably, these contradictory messages become entangled in a neurotic thicket for many of us. Luke’s need to withdraw is passive aggressive and panic-stricken, reflective of a yearning for solace, while Emily’s need to pounce is aggressive-aggressive and born of a desire to connect with the love she’s losing. At its best, Fair Play abounds in the sort of irreconcilable impulses and needs that define a stable relationship let alone a troubled one.

Domont has built the foundation for an emotionally astute erotic thriller in a self-consciously progressive age. This is a significant accomplishment, except the filmmaker ultimately backs away from her most disturbing and resonant idea. As Luke becomes more unhinged, he grows more dangerous and insufferable, yet this volatility also potentially turbocharges Luke and Emily’s sex life, investing it with danger and allowing it to give physical voice to their resentments. As he goes off the rails, in his selfishness, he becomes a primordial, take-what-he-wants man again. These textures are present in a bathroom standoff late in the film, but Domont doesn’t leave these ambiguities hanging. Ultimately, she can’t truly confront the idea that a woman might be physically turned on by that which also repulses her.

Instead, Domont comfortably demonizes Luke, rendering him awful enough so that Fair Play may serve as a course correction for the macho finance dramas and misogynistic stalker thrillers that have preceded it over the last many decades. In its way, this ending is as pat at the psycho-killer hijinks that allowed Adriane Lyne to sidestep thornier material in Fatal Attraction. Rather than predictably lamenting male cruelty, Domont nearly fashions a film rich in the ungovernable ironies that spring from the collision of lust, status, and rationality. At the last minute, though, Domont can’t help but steer her film into moralistic waters. Fair Play is a terrific movie, but it sends audiences home with a clear conscience.