Marty Supreme
Director: Josh Safdie
I left the cinema with the eerie feeling of having spent two and a half hours babysitting my niece. Typically, my soon-to-be-three-year-old niece loves nothing more than to sit me down and rush at me with every single one of her toys in turn. Each time, I oblige her with a stunned ‘wow’ and turn the toy over in my hands like it’s a piece of the True Cross rather than a glow-in-the-dark hairclip, until she gets bored and hurries off to find the next thing. Finally, with my patience hanging by a unicorn hair, she blinks first and needs a nap, and it’s time to put away the toys. As a ritual, it’s chaotic and structureless and exhausting, but deeply enjoyable nonetheless, because hey, you’re playing with a two year-old!
If only the same excuse could be extended to the creators of Marty Supreme. The plot is, on the face of things, straightforward. It’s the early 1950s and Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), twenty-three year-old table tennis maestro, dreams of winning the upcoming table tennis championships in London and putting American ping pong on the global map where it belongs. But like all young braggarts with a dream, he’s surrounded by naysayers who reckon he’s better off staying in New York and selling shoes. Over the next hundred and forty minutes, then, Mauser must convince those around him to indulge (read: finance) his dream, or risk becoming the Willy Loman of the table tennis world.
Simple enough, no? But perhaps too simple, screenwriter duo Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie seem to have decided. With a small imaginative leap, I find I can picture them in the operating theatre, two surgeons leaning over the unborn script, pondering how to liven up their nascent sports drama. In a sudden frenzy, they graft on an array of gangrenous side stories, none of which take, in the vain hope of pandering to whatever people are into these days — predominantly sex, guns, and Chalamet’s irresistible charisma (never more resistible than here, by the way). How about Mauser acquires and then loses a dog that belongs to a mafioso? How about we make spotty, skinny, ping pong obsessive Mauser irresistible to women? How about we insert a bizarre honey-glazed (don’t ask) interlude about surviving Nazi concentration camps?
These digressions add nothing but runtime. If they sound unconventional, they aren’t as unconventional as the screenwriters’ attempts to endear Mauser to the audience. I’m still uncertain about whether or not we’re supposed to root for him. At least, I’d be uncertain if they didn’t brazenly manipulate the plot to excuse his meanspirited character flaws: he sleeps with and impregnates a married woman, but it’s okay because her husband’s an asshole. He makes a wisecrack about Auschwitz, but it’s okay because he’s Jewish. He makes a separate joke about atom bombs being dropped on Japan, but it’s okay because… well, I forget, but after all it was the early ‘50s, so it was a different time, okay?!
Anyway, we find out in an impassioned dialogue (delivered by Mauser himself) that we’re not allowed to criticize him, because despite his casual cruelty, he’s one of those people with a higher calling — the table tennis, to be clear — unlike the regular Joes around him with their retail jobs and messy relationships and all the other trappings of their banal lives.
Turning, at Mauser’s behest, to the secondary characters, we find ourselves in a largely unimaginative world populated by stereotypes. The English guys have bad teeth and are easily offended. Mauser’s Japanese table tennis nemesis has no personality at all beyond the tricky sponge of his ping pong bat. One of the film’s primary antagonists is Milton Rockwell, a wealthy American businessman in the pen business, played by Kevin O’Leary, a wealthy Canadian businessman in the tech business. Like every successful businessman who’s ever lived, Rockwell comes across badly and takes umbrage with brash young upstarts who won’t fall in with his marketing plans.
One or two characters are painted in more than just monochrome. As pregnant love interest Rachel, Odessa A’zion injects some much needed emotional earnestness and humour into the picture, conjuring something of the spirit of Patricia Arquette’s freewheeling, lovable Alabama from True Romance. Tyler ‘the Creator’ Okonma is another bright spark in the gloomy firmament as Wally, a cabbie and close friend of Mauser. In one entertaining scene (at last!), he and Mauser dupe a group of table tennis aficionados into playing for stakes, which they duly rake in, escaping after the heist in Wally’s taxi.
Finally (and an inescapable weariness grips me even as I begin this paragraph) there’s Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired film star and Rockwell’s wife. Stone and Mauser commence an unlikely sexual relationship which dominates much of the middle of the film, and which seems (from the gratuitously protracted sex scenes) to have been dreamed up by some marketing executive desperate to cash in on the young-guy-older-woman porno trope. The relationship, such as it is, derives on Stone’s side from boredom (Rockwell is presumably too busy fiddling with his nib), and on Mauser’s side from opportunism (just maybe, once he has seduced Stone, he can pawn her jewellery and finance his route to the championships). In Marty Supreme land, this conflict is about as deep as it gets.
In the end, Marty Supreme is a mess, all the more so given the excellent cast and astronomical budget. The frustrating thing is that every now and then we glimpse an idea that might have worked had the director chosen to sustain it for longer than five minutes. Instead, Safdie systematically loses faith in his ideas as soon as he develops them, and rushes to find the next thing to amuse us with. Early on, Mauser and a friend patent orange ping pong balls with Marty’s name on, the idea being to allow contestants to compete in white at their matches (not currently permitted as it makes the flight of the regulation white balls difficult to follow). For a while it seems likely that this novelty, presented with some fanfare at the start of the film, will prove to be Mauser’s salvation. But this narrative thread ends abruptly sometime later with the orange balls being poured out of the window, a waste of time and effort, and an all too apt visual metaphor for the film as a whole.