Review: MARTY SUPREME

 by Rob DiCristino

Dream big!

Returning home to New York after a whirlwind tour as the halftime act for the Harlem Globetrotters, twenty-three-year-old table tennis prodigy Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) hands his mother (Fran Drescher) a gift: It’s a rock, a palm-sized hunk of limestone he’s chipped from one of the great pyramids of Egypt. “We built this,” he says, laying claim to a thousand years of Jewish suffering as easily as he takes a breath. Pig-headed? Self-aggrandizing? Maybe, but that’s who Marty is. “I have a purpose,” he tells his pregnant girlfriend (a revelatory Odessa A’zion), as he walks out on her — he says the baby isn’t his — for a shot at international stardom. “I’m not a shoe salesman,” he tells his uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) when offered — threatened, as far as Marty’s concerned — with a managerial position at his shoe shop. “I am the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” he boasts to a group of befuddled sports reporters in London. Yeah. “He was a son of God,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald about his Jay Gatsby. “And he must be about his father’s business.”

That business, unlikely as it may seem, is table tennis. It’s Asia’s fastest-growing sport — according to Marty, at least — and an ideal opportunity for any American investor who shares the eager young hustler’s dream of, well, seeing himself on the front of a Wheaties box. But is it a safe bet? Can the kid really win? Don’t ask Marty. He’s never stopped selling himself long enough even to consider the possibility of defeat, the possibility that reigning champs like Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) or up-and-comers like Japan’s Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) could ever compete with his raw, God-given skill. His victory is merely a matter of vision, you see, of convincing friends like Wally (Tyler Okonma) and industry magnates like Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary; Yes, seriously) to open their eyes and see the future. That future is now. It’s 1952, for Christ’s sake. The war is over. The Great American Century is just beginning. A generational figure like Marty was not born to toil in a shop, making rent and feeding a pack of children. He was meant, you see, for greatness.

And for the better part of Josh Safdie’s brilliant, blistering Marty Supreme, Marty walks — strides, rather — with that confidence of purpose, that unassailable picture of himself as history’s exceptional individual. It’s the kind of confidence that earns him a chance to compete for the British World Championship, a chance to play mascot for Rockwell’s foray into an unlocked Japanese marketplace, and a chance to bed the inkpen mogul’s fading movie star wife (Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone, another in a long list of shrewd stunt casting choices). That confidence also earns him $1,500 in hotel debt, a ban from official competition, and an unthinkable elimination by the mild-mannered Endo. No matter. There’s no stopping destiny, and no pregnant girls or conniving mobsters (Abel Ferrara as Ezra) looking for their stolen dogs — it makes sense in context — will stop Marty’s becoming. Naysayers like you and me? We don’t rate, as far as Marty’s concerned. We’re collateral damage. Means to an end. And one day, we’ll pay the price for our lack of vision.

Fueled by a Timothée Chalamet performance that makes Uncut Gems’ Howard Ratner feel like the kind of well-adjusted everyman that its title character would happily crush underfoot, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is nothing short of a new American masterpiece, an exhilarating — and, as with the Safdies’ Gems and Good Time before it, often excruciating — interrogation of our national psyche, a lens aimed squarely at the intoxicating mix of bull-headed arrogance and religious fervor that had the U.S. convinced it was the envy of the world. Written by Safdie and longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, it’s also a story about what happens to boys when manhood comes calling, about that fateful day when we’re forced to accept that we’re never going to play Major League Baseball. Never going to invent that million-dollar gadget. Never going to marry that pinup goddess. How, then, do we make our own meaning? How, then, do we find our own bliss? “It’s every man for himself where I come from,” Marty tells someone. How, then, do we know when we get there?

Flittering relentlessly through a series of ever-more-convoluted schemes and swindles — while an inspired selection of ‘80s pop hits and Daniel Lopatin’s synth score flitter relentlessly behind him — Chalamet’s self-styled hero also embodies a crisis of Jewish identity, a particularly insidious brand of post-World War II bigotry that holds the victims of humanity’s most unspeakable evil responsible for the cost of its eradication. O’Leary’s WASPy Rockwell, for example, chides Auschwitz survivor Klezeki for carrying on living after his son gave his life in the Pacific, while Marty’s fleeting dalliance with his shiksa wife points to another social ceiling he’ll never rise above. And then there’s Endo, the symbol of a re-emergent Japan eager to forgive and forget the horrors of war while an entire diaspora of mankind tries to recover its collective dignity. Safdie and Bronstein work with a light enough touch to keep their subtext, well, subtext, but there’s no denying that Marty’s embarrassment on the world stage — especially by Japan — carries a broader meaning.

And while Marty Mouser may share DNA with plenty of other Safdie scamps, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s career-defining performance that truly brings him to gangly, chattering, insufferable life. Chalamet feels looser and more agile than he ever has before, giving Marty an unrepentant guile that Paul Atreides would consider unbecoming. And while Safdie and Bronstein have considerably more sympathy for Marty than for, say, Howard Ratner — it’s easier to blame Ratner’s behavior on addiction, whereas Marty is simply a mirror held up to the striver inside us all — each of Marty’s little failures seems laced with a lively undercurrent of Schadenfreude. Even the film’s competition scenes feel like they’re filmed in air quotes, as if we’re indulging Marty’s sports hero aspirations only insofar as they’ll contribute to his self-destruction. Still, Safdie knows that cynicism is the easy way out, and Marty’s eventual acceptance of his real destiny — hint: it’s not the cover of a Wheaties box — overflows with all the joy and purpose he could never quite find at the ping pong table.

None of this focus on Timothée Chalamet should draw from Marty Supreme’s other virtues, chief of which is a galaxy of supporting faces that includes everyone from Penn Gillette to Sandra Bernhard, each of whom shows up for half a scene — seriously, it’s like Oppenheimer in ‘50s New York — without ever slowing down the film’s breakneck momentum. Darius Khondji’s cinematography is impeccable. Jack Fisk’s production design is lush. Safdie and Bronstein’s editing is note-perfect. In other words, while Marty may see fit to cast himself as the underdog, everything in his world has been precisely engineered to support his journey. Everything has been arranged for his benefit. In the end, the real question isn’t whether or not Marty will become an international sporting celebrity, but whether or not Marty will find a level of humility that allows him to appreciate what he already has, whether or not he’ll get out of his own way long enough to count his blessings and learn his place. That greatness he’s been looking for? It’s been right in front of him this entire time.

Marty Supreme hits U.S. theaters on Christmas Day.