The immediate reaction to this excellent movie – which on its surface is about an arrogant young American table-tennis player’s attempts to attend two world championships, one in London and the other in Tokyo, in the early 1950s – seems to be that no one wants to watch a movie with an unpleasant lead character, regardless of its excellence. Marty Supreme is indeed excellent, with an unusually lived-in feel for its historical setting and an extremely good central performance from Timothée Chalamet. It is also about the kind of arrogant white man that the world is currently pretty tired of hearing from, which is to say someone who believes his talent is so unignorable that his personal behaviour should be irrelevant. And yet Marty Supreme is unignorable. The fact that it tells an unpleasant story in a difficult and alienating way is pretty arrogant, but it’s not arrogance if you can back it up.
The key to Marty Mauser (Mr. Chalamet) lies in the gift he gives his mother (Fran Drescher!) on his return to the Lower East Side after months incommunicado playing table tennis on tour. First he yells at her for leaving a glass in his bedroom, then he presents her with a little piece of rock that he chipped off one of the Great Pyramids for her. This is a priceless and irreplaceable gift, albeit one he had to deface a world monument in order to get, but that kind of gesture redeems a lot of awful behaviour. Better that he hadn’t done it, but he did, so what can you do but appreciate it. Only someone with Marty’s sense of entitlement and willingness to take risks can give you a gift like that. And boy howdy is Marty willing to take risks. Whether that’s holding a gun on a coworker to access some withheld wages, or belittling the war service of the dead son of a wealthy businessman, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), who is offering Marty sponsorship terms he doesn’t agree with, Marty is prepared to go much further than most people would even dream of. For him, every setback and/or rejection is a personal insult. And of course it is an insult, as he tells Rachel (Odessa A’zion, fantastic), because he has a talent for table tennis and he owes it to that talent to take it as far as it goes.
When he says this to her, Rachel is eight months pregnant with a baby Marty denies could be his, although everyone in the world knows it’s his except Rachel’s horrible husband (Emory Cohen!!). Through a series of dramatic and dangerous circumstances, to earn airfare to the championships Marty and Rachel end up trying to scam a wealthy drifter over a dog, one that Marty lost after successfully hustling an entire bowling alley’s worth of people at table-tennis. Circumstances have consequences, but Marty’s ability to steamroller everything in his way helps him avoid them, up to a point. And the thing is, Marty is world class at table tennis, so people are prepared to stand by him because of what they get out of it. And it must be said he is fairminded, generous and charming to everyone on his side, as long as they stay there. Rachel is his match in quick thinking, ability to maintain a lie, and willingness to manipulate others for her own ends, which is why Marty likes her.
But nothing is simple when the stakes feel this high. In London Marty catches the eye of Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow!!!), Rockwell’s wife and a famous though past her prime actress. Marty is able to seduce her through a combination of chutzpah and flattery, and Kay lets him because her marriage is as awful as Rachel’s (and he’s good in bed). The key there is something Rockwell says in passing in the big finale, which Marty wisely doesn’t take literally, but which makes very clear Rockwell is in his own powerful position because as a young man he was as bad as Marty is. A lot of men of all ages are even worse than Marty is. And smart and beautiful women like Kay and Rachel and hungry young men like Marty understand that even if the game is rigged, you can’t win it unless you play.
Director Josh Safdie, who cowrote the script with frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein, has an exceptionally clear-eyed understanding of the games people play. To achieve power of any kind, whether in table tennis or independent cinema or anything else, you need a combination of arrogance, financial backing, ruthlessness and charm. Talent is only the beginning. What Mr. Safdie’s career has focused on so far is how the unpleasant sausage of power is made, and he must therefore cope with people focusing on the ingredients instead of either the craft (superb!) or the final, delicious outcome. His movies also clearly center sports because that is one of the last places in American society where raw talent alone can elevate someone into a position of power. Whether or not they stay there depends on their combination of arrogance, financial backing, ruthlessness and charm, and this is the lesson that Marty spends the length of the film learning.
This is Ms. Paltrow’s first role outside of the MCU in which she is not playing herself for a decade, and someone as business-savvy as her must have appreciated the message of the script to the bones in order to break her acting retirement. Mr. Chalamet has never been better, weaponizing all his attractiveness so unattractively that you just can’t look away. It’s a bold choice, and he knows it, which gives the whole concept its edge. The smaller parts are a murderer’s row of talent used in unexpected ways, including Abel Ferrara, Géza Röhrig, Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler the Creator), Sandra Bernhard, David Mamet, Penn Jillette and most surprisingly writer Pico Iyer as the head of the International Table Tennis Association and therefore Marty’s nemesis. None of those people are fools, and all of them know that it isn’t arrogance if you can back it up. And say what you will about Marty, as a table-tennis player he can absolutely back it up. The scenes with Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Röhrig doing various table-tennis tricks are a simple and delightful way of showing how much fun world-class talent can have making difficult things look very easy. Marty Supreme is a priceless and irreplaceable gift from world-class talents making a difficult thing look and feel very easy. If you want to reject it that is up to you, but you’d be missing out.
Marty Supreme is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the official website for the title.
You might also like…