Fair Play: A Promising Pitch, But Falls Short Of Closing The Deal

THE most revealing scene in Chloe Domont’s bad romance Fair Play arrives right after financial analyst Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) gets a promotion that her fiancé and co-worker Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) expected would go to him. Rather than rejoice in the good news, Emily postscripts it with an apology. She is sorry she got the promotion. She is sorry he didn’t. Above all, she is sorry for being better at her job than he is. Luke congratulates her. “I’m so happy for you,” he says with a smile, but it can’t hide the discernible sadness leaking down his face. The next day, Emily reassures him, bandaging his wound with the insistence her promotion will be mutually beneficial, so his disappointment doesn’t curdle into resentment and sour their relationship. Not unexpectedly, as the false equilibrium of traditional gender roles gets disrupted, aggressions inflame from veiled to vicious to violent. The disruption exposes the fragile threads that weave a male ego. Which, when deflated, needs constant massaging and patching up. Which, at its toxic worst, can hold captive a woman’s sense of self-determination.

By pitting two lovers against each other in the ruthless world of high finance, Domont weighs up the high personal price women are more likely to pay for their career success. Fair Play starts off nippy and nerve-wracking with a nice sense of economy. Until its inability to figure out which screws to tighten dull the edge of its cutthroat setting and dampen its dramatic intrigue. In corporate-speak, it serves a good opening pitch but fails to close the deal.

RELATED | Critic's Notebook: The Foul Truth At The Heart Of Fair Play 

Certainly, the world of Wall Street presents an idyllic arena for a thriller. For Emily, being a woman striving to rise up the ladder of a hyper-competitive boys’ club riddled with intimidating jargon, she lives with a lingering threat of a tiny mistake undoing everything she has worked hard for. Through her eyes, we get a fascinating peek inside the C-suite of One Crest Capital, a hedge fund firm which has a strict no workplace romance policy. Emily and Luke are mindful of the fact that if their colleagues were to find out about their relationship, it could derail their careers. So, the couple keep it a secret, going so far as taking separate routes to work every day.

Driven though Emily and Luke may be, the two are also quite besotted with each other. When we first meet them at a friend’s wedding, they are hooking up in the bathroom. The quickie ends with his lips and their clothes marked with period blood — a red auspice of the ill-fortunes to come. Seconds later, he makes an indecent proposal. She accepts. The two are engaged but seem committed to supporting each other’s careers. That is of course until Emily becoming his boss destabilises their relationship.

By the same token, the bathroom quickie could be seen as a baseline for their relationship and how its dynamics flip. At the outset, Emily and Luke have sex as equals on a level playing field. Once there is news of a promotion, it places the two on an unequal footing. But this isn’t apparent right away. When the two believe the job will go to Luke, the sex feels like a joyous celebration of a shared triumph. When the job goes to Emily, she returns home the first evening to find there is no one to celebrate with her. Luke is instead at a bar drowning his sorrows. As she becomes his boss and her star rises within the office, he attempts to exert power over her by declining sex. When she responds by assuming control, he is peeved by the emasculation, which goes on to manifest as impotence.

With the status quo disrupted, tensions boil. Being assigned work by his fiancée makes Luke bitter. Waiting for her to come home after late-night drinks with the top brass stirs up envy. Seeing her fraternise with the boss Campbell (Eddie Marsan in a scene-stealing turn) brings out the spiteful misogynist. He convinces himself she got the promotion by sleeping her way to the top. When he starts to undermine her quite militantly, she must fight back. In the consequent psychological warfare, Domont unpacks the fragility of men who somehow feel prostrated upon ceding power to women. Luke knows Emily is more deserving of the promotion. Yet he can’t just be happy for the woman he supposedly loves. Because he feels he has been left behind, betrayed by social progress.

While Ehrenreich gradually reveals the bruised pride beneath Luke’s pathetic defence mechanisms, Dynevor gradually reveals the hardened calculating intelligence beneath Emily’s building rage. Initially, Emily is guilty of feeling guilty over being promoted. The more Luke wallows in paranoia and self-piteous indignation, the more she realises that guilt, at least in his case, is a wasted emotion. When one of his hasty schemes ends up costing the company several million dollars and he escalates his brazen attempts at sabotaging her career, she decides to go on the offensive.

It is hinted that Luke was born into wealth and privilege, while Emily wasn’t. Being a woman, she had to overcome all kinds of barriers to empower herself and get to where she is. On making it to the top, the pressure lies in playing a dirty game — whose rules are made by men — to stay there. When Emily joins her male colleagues at a strip club, her discomfort is visible as they recount the most revolting locker room stories. But she is forced to grit her teeth and laugh through it all, so she can be treated as one of the boys. The tell-tale smudges left behind on the shattered glass ceiling signal how a toxic work culture calcifies into a system, making even a strong woman like Emily not only complicit but also an active contributor to it. Instead of digging deeper, the movie however opts for a much safer route, leaving us with an investment that doesn’t entirely pay off.

Stream now.