Movie review: ‘Marty Supreme’ full of wit, charm
Josh Safdie’s movies, made both alone and with his brother Benny, create a world where a lost midcentury sensibility rubs elbows with the hyperreal. “Marty Supreme” is one of the most pungent distillations of his style yet: a film perfumed not just by pastrami smoke and pickled East Coast Jewishness, but by the ever-beloved ghosts of the 1980s and even the canned awe of the internet era in Daniel Lopatin’s score.
It’s set in New York in 1952, and the musicians who played on the soundtrack’s stadium-rock hits are just being born as the movie ends. But in an uncanny way, that whole stretch of the 20th century blurs together in Safdie’s skewed mirror until the movie emerges as a lament for a certain grubby realness that went out with indoor smoking.
Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a cocky charmer and rising table tennis star so motormouthed you might walk out of the theater with more game than you came in with. Eloquent, observant and snaky, Marty is a bad liar but a great talker, and you could spend two or three rewatches of “Marty Supreme” picking through the tangle of anecdotes, references and artfully phrased boasts to which he subjects everyone in earshot. (His spiel on the Harlem Globetrotters is the sort of dialogue where you savor every word.)
Yet just as crucial to his personality is what goes unspoken. Marty has a crucial trump card against his enemy Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank”), but he never plays it. The temptation to make a running joke about Marty getting mad when people call his chosen sport “pingpong” instead of “table tennis” must have been strong, but Safdie vaults over this obvious gag to find comedy in Marty’s cockiness instead. The script, written by Safdie and regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein (“Frownland”), is endlessly surprising but consistently true to its characters.
Marty is in a “unique position to be the face of table tennis in this country,” according to his own assessment, and his attempts to scrounge enough money to go to Japan and challenge the unbeatable Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) comprise most of the movie’s plot. Marty indirectly causes several men to be injured or killed during these escapades, though he feels less remorse about them than he does about losing his neighbor’s dog (the neighbor is played by Abel Ferrara, archdeacon of gritty NYC crime cinema and a clear precursor to the Safdie style).
Marty’s priorities are skewed, to say the least, and he reacts to the news of potential fatherhood with his married lover Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) mostly by wondering how it’s going to affect his table tennis career. The final shot implies maturity is on the horizon for Marty, but it could just as easily be the prelude to more misery.
The driving engine of a man repeatedly gaining and losing large and crucial sums of money ties “Marty Supreme” to the Safdie brothers’ 2019 collaboration “Uncut Gems,” one of the best New York crime films ever made, which followed the white-knuckle life of a gambling addict played by Adam Sandler. Sandler’s puppy-dog charm proved useful in scenes where his degenerate wreck of a character might otherwise be irredeemable, and likewise we can’t really get mad at Marty here, especially not when he’s so sweet over the phone to his paramour Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) or takes a chunk of the Great Pyramid home to his mom (Fran Drescher).
It’s hard to say exactly why “Marty Supreme” doesn’t quite reach the same heights as “Uncut Gems.” Maybe it’s because depicting the 1950s as the 1980s isn’t as interesting as “Uncut Gems” depicting the 2010s as the 1970s, or maybe because Marty Mauser isn’t as interesting a guy as Sandler’s Howard Ratner –– or maybe it’s just because Chalamet hasn’t quite transcended this particular moment in film history, the same way Sandler outgrew his original frat-pack fame to attain a certain timelessness that helped him in the role. An older reprobate, with all the stories his survival implies, is usually more compelling to watch than a younger one.
But Josh Safdie can play ball with the best of them, and it’s as exhilarating to watch him in action as to watch his hero conquer the courts. He’s aided by the production designer Jack Fisk, whose work on Terrence Malick’s 2011 epic “The Tree of Life” is superlative in its field, and by composer Daniel Lopatin, whose twinkling synth score arguably surpasses his earlier work in “Uncut Gems.” Together they’ve made a movie unstuck from time, completely of its era while embodying a skunkiness long gone from this world.
‘Marty Supreme’
Stars (out of four): 3.5 stars
Runtime: 2 hours, 29 minutes
Rated: R (for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity)
How to watch: In theaters