More Like Extreme
Whatever controversies were manufactured, The Oscar wipeout remains a movie theatre experience.
Marty Supreme
Director: Josh Safdie • Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Tyler Okonma, Kevin O’Leary, Koto Kawaguchi
USA • 2hrs 30mins
Opens Hong Kong March 19 • IIB
Grade: B
Marty Supreme is one of those movies that, by the midway marker, you’ll either be vibing with it enough to continue through to its (personally) unearned conclusion, or you’ll reach the breaking point that has you throwing up your hands while declaring, “That enough. Can’t take any more!” Basically, take Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time and Uncut Gems and dial those up to about 12 and you’ll have an idea of what you’re in for in Marty Supreme. Judging from the gaping chasm separating this and the younger Benny’s solo work, the conventional and aimless The Smashing Machine, Josh is the gritty nihilist who revels in uncomfortable storytelling about unlikeable characters.
And Marty Mauser is an intensely unlikeable character, whose misfortunes and catastrophes are entirely of his own making, and Safdie takes great pleasure in centring this selfish waste of space by marvelling at Marty’s unshakeable faith in himself. He is the ultimate mediocre white man who perpetually fails up, much to the detriment of almost everyone around him. It’s a ballsy, discordant message give the state of the world, and Safdie delivers it wrapped inisde propulsive 16 and/or 35mm film grain – hyperactively shot by Gems and Mickey 17 DOP Darius Khondji – with a side of anachronistic 1980s pop bangers that somehow work perfectly. Marty Supreme is a bold bit of filmmaking, there’s no denying it, but it’s also incredibly taxing. No one would hold it against you if you walked out.
Get that ballet out of my face
Much of that has everything – and nothing – to do with Timothée Chalamet as Marty. Chalamet goes all-in as the aspiring, ultra-competitive ping pong champ (and this is where many will say “Mediocre? He’s a champion!” Yes. At ping pong) who sabotages himself with his blazing ambition. And for the record, he didn’t lose his Oscar because he slammed ballet or opera. He didn’t lose it because he’s a cocky little shit. He lost it because his peer group thought Michael B Jordan was better (can a brother just get credit for his good work without caveats?). If there absolutely has to be a reason, maybe it’s because Chalamet is relatively young and – checks notes – Marty is a cocky little shit and he lost because he played himself. Not much acting there.
But all that hoo-haa aside, we meet Marty (loosely based on actual table tennis player Marty Reisman) working in his uncle Murray’s (Larry Sloman) shoe store and sneaking a tryst with his married girlfriend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion, Until Dawn) in the stock room. After work he plays, no he trains, in table tennis with his buddy Wally (Tyler Okonma AKA Tyler, The Creator) and pulls some stunts straight out of The Hustler to make some cash for his burgeoning international ping pong career. It’s on this quest for greatness he meets Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, aloof), a rich retired, married. actress who Marty also has sex with, and whose husband Milton Rockwell (de facto tech bro, MAGA enthusiast and supporter of American annexation of Canada, Kevin O’Leary) is a garden variety bizniz guy who bankrolls Marty’s career for a bit.
Marty Supreme finds itself in the details. The tactile 1950s New York streets teeming with immigrants and flowing with accents. The dimly lit smoky-sweaty ping pong clubs you can almost smell. The howling physicality of friends and family living in tight quarters, who know everybody’s business. The faces on the sidelines that add colour to the world Safdie’s imagining, among them director Abel Ferrara as a gangster whose dog Marty loses, author Pico Iyer, designer Isaac Mizrahi, playwright David Mamet, Hollywood scion Levon Hawke, and NBAers Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker as Harlem Globetrotters. And the pristine otherness of post-war Tokyo that Marty disrupts (surprise!) when he finally gets a chance to face off against his arch nemesis, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, an actual table tennis player and an actual hard of hearing person) – who’s compelling enough in a handful of scenes you kind of want a whole film just about him.
But it’s about Marty, and about the kind of all-consuming ambition that only gets in the way and burns everything to the ground. You may like Marty, and that’s fine. You may hate him. Also fine. Marty Supreme isn’t trying to win him any fans, it’s simply a blistering, funny, sad, infuriating portrait of one of those guys – and we all know one – with the creativity to match Marty’s chaos with the film’s aesthetic, and it would hold together even better without the Hollywood ending that suggests redemption for this POS. And here we thought Benny was the conventional one.