We Can’t Work It Out

All’s still fair in love and war. Just check out Chloe Domont’s steamy sour-grapes workplace thriller Fair Play, a wickedly fun look at a clandestine relationship turning into a scorched-earth bad romance. Its battle of the sexes take place in the trenches of a heartless hedge fund firm called One Crest Capital, and its corporate-ladder-climbing sweethearts are high-stressed low-rung analysts just a few years into their jobs.Luke Edmunds (Alden Ehrenreich) is the Yale-educated broheim with a handsome grin and a pouty dark side who landed his gig thanks to someone calling in a favor. Whip-smart, he is not.

FAIR PLAY  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Chloe Domont
Written by: Chloe Domont
Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan, Rich Sommer
Running time: 113 mins

But his down-low girlfriend Emily Meyers (Phoebe Dynevor) is the real deal, a Long Island self-starter who landed a scholarship to Harvard en route to stints at Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Pressure is the firm’s oxygen, and the only time the pair can breathe easy is in their secret relationship. So when Luke pops the question, Emily happily says yes.

But then one of their superiors gets fired in a spectacular meltdown that involves some serious demolition to a Bloomberg terminal. Who’ll get the promotion? Emily overhears a rumor that it’ll be Luke. They have vigorous premature-celebration sex. “I’ve got to mark my territory, piss on my tree,” says Luke to his future wife. “You’re my tree.” Cute. Except that Emily gets a 2am call summoning her to a posh bar where their menacing boss Campbell (Eddie Marsan) awaits. She orders a Diet Coke, then notices the boss’s sneer and switches to a Macallan 25—neat.

She gets the gig. “I’m sorry,” she says to Luke when she comes home, reflexively apologizing for her well-deserved accomplishment. “I’m happy for you,” he lies, kickstarting an epic streak of self-pity. Compounding her discomfort? Campbell confided that the underperforming Luke is a dead man walking. “He’ll get the message,” he hisses. “They all do.” So begins Domont’s lit-fuse look at two delectable downward spirals that will inevitably, unavoidably, and maybe even a little too predictably collide.

Luke stews in his inadequacy, diving into an online self-help executive leadership program called “Reclaiming the Narrative” that sets him back a few thousand bucks. “Presentation is everything,” he parrots to Emily, who sees through the bullshit bromides. “That’s a lot of money for a pat on the back,” she eye-rolls.

But she’s got her own insecurities, from having to one-up her wolfpack colleagues with third-eye profitable predictions to outdrinking all of them at the bars and strip clubs where they insist on unwinding. She keeps wanting to rekindle Luke’s flame with increasingly bolder sexual advances. But his professional impotence is seeping into the bedroom. And that overall haplessness keeps festering with every cringe-worthy decision he makes—especially one spectacular stock-pick whiff that costs Emily $15 million of the company’s money.

Domont’s debut film turns professional advancement into a juicy character study of bruised egos and personality distortions, examining with tendon-tingling precision the ways in which even a twentysomething generation of presumably progressive men and women continue falling back into outdated preconceptions of gender identity.

The film’s extremes are a delight, even though such deliciously harrowing behavior requires the characters not to develop much beyond their initial shock at the power imbalance in the relationship. He stays sulky, she stays soused. When a movie starts and ends with blood-stained protagonists—first through menstruation, then through the blade of a knife—it’s inevitable that complexity eventually takes a back seat. But Fair Play has enough ferocity and verve—and, to be fair, enough sympathy on both sides—to make for a meaty meal of all-too-human foibles.