Marty Supreme, which opens Thursday in Israel, is a chaotic movie infused with manic energy. While I was watching it, I was thoroughly entertained, but later, when I thought back on it, I wasn’t quite sure why it grabbed me as much as it did.
It was directed by Josh Safdie, one-half of the Safdie brothers directing duo that made Uncut Gems. Safdie and Ronald Bronstein wrote it, and it has a similar vibe to the previous movie.
Marty Supreme is loosely based on the life of US table tennis champion Marty Reisman and stars Timothée Chalamet in the title role.
Last year, Chalamet shone as Bob Dylan in the biopic A Complete Unknown, and here he gives another engaging performance, playing a self-absorbed young man again. This time, though, his anti-hero is obsessed with a ping-pong career rather than music.
To enjoy Marty Supreme, you have to give yourself over to this abrasive protagonist, whose self-image is as towering and narcissistic as Jay Gatsby’s, but who is never allowed to forget that he is a poor, Jewish outsider.
The life of Marty Mauser
The movie follows an exhausting few months in the life of Marty Mauser, who, when it opens, is completely focused on making enough money to compete in the world table tennis championship in London in 1956.
Table tennis was not taken seriously as a sport in the US, and it’s Marty’s fate to be one of the best players in the world at a game many consider a joke. For Marty, everything is about getting that cash, and later in the film, it’s all about how he will find the money he needs to make it to Tokyo for another tournament.
The Japanese champion he faces off against is respected by his countrymen; Marty often has to hustle arrogant but ungifted players to make ends meet with his friend, Wally (Tyler, the Creator).
At one point, he takes a job as a halftime attraction for the Harlem Globetrotters, where he plays against a seal, among other humiliations.
It seems clear from the get-go that no one has ever really cared for Marty and that he learned long ago that he can only rely on himself. His father is long gone, and his needy and deceitful mother (Fran Drescher, light years away from The Nanny, but very good in this part), feigns illness and has no interest in his ping-pong career.
She wants him to keep working in his uncle’s shoe store, and his uncle (Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman) refuses to pay him, hoping he will forget table tennis and keep caring for her.
On one level, it’s about an ambitious kid, and on another, it can be seen as a story of the emergence of Jews as full contenders on the American stage following the Holocaust. In one scene, he tells a journalist he is “Hitler’s worst nightmare.”
He has a friend, Bela, a fellow table-tennis champion who survived Auschwitz, played by Géza Röhrig, a Hungarian poet and actor who starred in Son of Saul. The Nazis respected Bela for his playing skills and allowed him an easy work detail in the forest, where he used his good fortune to help his fellow inmates, which is shown in a hallucinatory flashback.
The inclusion of this moment and this survivor cannot be coincidental, and it’s clear that Bela is far more relaxed about competition than Marty. Maybe it’s meant to show that Marty still needs to learn what Bela already knows: what really matters in life.
Fueled by Chalamet’s accomplished performance, Marty joins a line of fictional Jewish strivers, so convinced of their own greatness and struggling to convince the rest of the world of their importance – like the protagonist of Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run? – that they justify any action they take in pursuit of their goal.
In his quest to make it to London and then to Tokyo, Marty commits so many crimes and misdemeanors, both legal and moral, that he’s constantly fleeing from somebody. In most movies, there is one or two antagonists. Here, Marty manages to make an enemy of just about everyone he encounters, since anyone who can’t help him is an obstacle to be trampled upon.
Among the people he encounters and uses is Rachel (Odessa A’zion), his childhood best friend and now his lover, who is married to a boring, brutal guy. Early on, Marty gets Rachel pregnant.
Rachel is the most compelling character in the movie besides Marty, and while her pregnancy and creepy husband might have made her into a victim, she can pull a con when needed, either to help Marty or to help herself.
Marty may be attached to Rachel, but when he glimpses Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading 1930s movie star married to a venal businessman (Kevin O’Leary, an entrepreneur who appears on Shark Tank), in London, he is instantly drawn to her gentile goddess vibe and improbably talks her into bed.
Kay is an oddly conceived character, and she and Marty seem to have zero chemistry, but maybe that’s the point. Paltrow does give her all as a woman who made a compromise and married for money, while Marty has a hard time making any tradeoff that might get him out of all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. The movie rushes from scene to scene, frantically, until it ends with an unconvincingly upbeat climax.
Many characters come and go, and the supporting cast is packed with memorable character actors.
Director Abel Ferrara has a showy sequence as an intermittently menacing dog-owning gangster, whose missing pooch Marty locates, hoping for a reward. Among the blink-and-you ’ll-miss-them cameos are David Mamet, Isaac Mizrahi, Penn Jillette, Sandra Bernhard, grocery-store magnate John Catsimatidus, author Pico Iyer, and Philippe Petit (the tightrope artist who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974).
The frantic action throughout brings to mind some of Martin Scorsese’s movies, especially After Hours and the last third of Goodfellas, which looks at one day in a gangster’s coke-fueled, highly pressured life.
Scorsese’s influence is also evident in the soundtrack, which includes many songs from the 1980s, such as Alphaville’s Forever Young and Tears for Fears’s Everybody Wants to Rule the World. It’s a bit showy and a lot of movies use the gimmick of anachronistic songs these days, but for the most part, it works.
Just as with some of Scorsese’s heroes, like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, at times I wondered why we were being asked to care about this often annoying guy, but Chalamet eventually won me over. The best compliment I can pay this movie is that, although it has a running time of two and a half hours, which is de rigueur for Oscar-bait films these days, I was never bored.