Marty Supreme

“Marty Supreme” is designed with 1950s bric-a-brac, scored with 1980s post-disco song ditties and steeped in 2020s moral rot. Societal blight may creep, but personal decay moves fast. Director Josh Safdie along with his screenwriter, Ronald Bronstein, tell the story of real-life mid-century ping-pong champion Marty Reisman at lightning speed. It’s a long film—two and a half hours—but it has a rapid-fire TikTok-style structure and pace. Every image, scene, and performance, especially those by big names in parts too small to register, streak by. I enjoyed more than a few of those flourishes and spurts, but too often I felt like I was dodging bolts per minute rather than watching frames per second.

Marty (Timothée Chalamet) is a high ranked table tennis player who by day works in a shoe store. He aims to make the big league in his chosen sport, and although “big” in table tennis could be measured in units the height of a ping pong net, he strives to score a championship title, no matter the cost. To Marty, there is no such thing as a pyrrhic victory because doing whatever it takes to win is as life-affirming as the trophy itself. So what if the eventual winner leaves behind a trail of malarkey, menace and mayhem; everything in his path is a swattable plastic ball, and Marty is the paddle.

To score enough money to travel to England and challenge Japanese ping-pong champion Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), Marty cons the people closest to him: his mother (Fran Drescher), a neighbor (Sandra Bernhard), his girlfriend (Odessa A'zion) who is married to another man, his employer, his best friend, his best friend’s father, and his customers.

He’s like the compulsive liar, a type familiar to us all, who tells one untruth after another, even when it’s not necessary, just for the practice. When he fine tunes his fat facts, he moves onto bigger prey: a washed-up film actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) looking to make a comeback by starring in a third-rate play and her husband, a rancorous businessman (Kevin O'Leary) who has a “nose for B.S.” and a thirst for vengeance. But the Mr. Potter-styled villainy, despite O’Leary’s adept performance, is more nip than bite. The paddle he delivers to Marty’s naked backside over a cocktail table at a Park Avenue party is more comical than pitiful.

As for Marty, that indignity registers about as much embarrassment as a lost coin toss at the opening of a minor match.

Marty makes his way to England where he not only loses to Endo but gets saddled with a fine for contesting the tournament’s results. Putting himself deeper into a financial hole only motivates Marty to hatch new schemes and to go deeper into sewers of his own making.

He is determined to travel to Japan where he can meet the master on his own turf and challenge him to a re-match. There are a lot of detours along the way most of which involve grifts to fatten his bank balance so that he can afford the trip to Japan.

I won’t get into all the pranks Marty comes up with, some of which he pulls off and many more of which turn sideways. They include an interrupted bath when a tub crashes through a ceiling, a stolen dog trapped in a trigger-happy hoarder’s house, and a hustle in a pool hall that has the snappy pace of a trash film like “Ocean's Eleven,” but none of the moral gravity of the haunting Paul Newman vehicles “The Hustler” and “The Color of Money.” The capers in “Marty Supreme” come at you like darts being thrown by a rapid-arm circus clown. By the time I figured out where the arrows were coming from and where they were headed, another one would be on its way. My moviegoing companion recommended a second viewing to get a better sense of what was happening. All I could say to that was thanks, but no thanks. Most of my dopamine had been spent by the time the credits rolled. Another viewing would have depleted my stores completely.

Having exhausted their repertoire of misadventures, the filmmakers take a step back and hand us a conventional ending, one in which the underdog athlete has his moment in the sun. But ultimately the clouds roll in, and Marty takes a “what goes around comes around” hit from one of his prior victims, the least likely of the bunch to turn the tables on him. It’s the drop-shot of the film’s spinning top narrative, and a great moment.

Josh Safdie knows how to light a spark. Working with his brother Benny, he has made two of the most consequential movies (“Good Time,” “Uncut Gems”) of the last ten years. But, unlike “Marty Supreme,” those had a moral core, and a sense of how the world is a fallen place. I still shiver when I recall the anguished ending of “Good Time.”

Josh’s latest is an amalgam of bad behavior that is summed up by the Tears for Fears 1980s hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” that plays loudly over the film’s final credits. Marty, however, never rules his own world, let alone the whole globe. He abducts it, pillages it, and at times even steals it. But he never makes it his own. I don’t deny that a world in decline is ripe for the taking. The good news is that even a perfect world, the one we call heaven, is, indeed, there for our taking. It was a thief, after all, who stole heaven in his final hour when he asked a man hanging next to him: “Remember me.”

“Marty Supreme” rises above its own muck enough to save it. There is even a lot to recommend it. I admire the smaller performances, especially those of Abel Ferrara as relentless criminal and dog lover Ezra Mishkin, and Odessa A'zion as Marty’s put-upon girlfriend who does a full-gamut performance the likes of which I haven’t seen since Olivia DeHavilland’s complete arc of a woman held in the lowest of esteem in “The Heiress.” Paltrow does her past-her-prime and on-the-edge-of-collapse actress part with an admirable steeliness that is never mawkish or weepy.

Chalamet, cinema’s flavor of the month, okay, a year or two’s flavor, is hard to resist and often a delight to watch. He’s like the bee that keeps buzzing around your lemonade. He’s annoying and nebbishy but he does add a sense of suspense and danger. A little more leading man charm like that of Roland Young and Douglas Fairbanks in “The Young at Heart” or Leonardo DiCaprio in “Catch Me if You Can” would have helped soften his conman’s too-hard edge. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine another actor who could pull off lines like: “I’m gonna do to him (a concentration camp survivor) what Auschwitz couldn’t,” (Marty excuses himself by reminding people within earshot that he too is Jewish) or saying that his ping-pong victory in Japan would be akin to his “dropping a third atom bomb.” Chalamet’s performance might have rattled and irked me, but it never bored me.

Oscar Wilde referred to America as “the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” Perhaps. Decline is evident everywhere, but “Marty Supreme” (unlike the aberration “One Battle After Another”) offers its viewers hope by wrapping its story with Marty’s call to fatherhood. That will be the one game he won’t find so easy to con.

• Vulgar/Crude language: Extreme — • F-words (perhaps 70-80) • S-words (3 dozen) • Sexual activities discussed in detail • Crude sexual remarks • Other vulgar words
• Violence: Very Heavy — • Person shot in the head • Man shot in neck, dying with gasping • Gunfight • Dying bleeding and gasping man • Severely broken arm with portruding bone (CU) • Stabbing • Pregnant woman shot and bloody • Person smashed in face with heavy object creating bleeding and slashed flesh (CU) • Man forced to drop pants in public place and bend over for repeated paddle spanking • Violent domestic abuse of wife
• Profane language: Very Heavy — • J*sus Chr*st • J*sus • G*d d*mn • Oh G*d • For Chr*st’s sake • Holy sh*t • Other profane word use
• Nudity: Moderately Heavy — • Bare male buttocks • Upper male nudity • Men licking honey off a man’s bare-chest
• Sex: Heavy — • Adulterous sex in a shower • Oral sex • Adulterous sex in a public park • Fornication in a stockroom, followed by scene of sperm and egg fertilization • Photos of naked women
• Drugs/Alcohol: Heavy — • Smoking (repeatedly)
• Wokeism: Minor
• Occult: None

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