A Review of Marty Supreme
Never has a movie about ping pong been so epic in scope. The Safdie brothers might be some of the only millennial auteurs working in American cinema who are in the process of achieving truly iconic status. I believe that the film catalogues of their peers, Greta Gerwig, Ari Aster, Damien Chazelle, or Robert Eggers (as they are now) will not be seriously treasured in decades to come but will instead be viewed as curious artifacts from a time of cultural malaise. And more generally, millennial narratives are distinguished by their emasculated male characters, monotone dialogue, onanistic fixation on pop culture references, and a halfhearted approach to triumph, honor, or heroism. We won’t even go into how the visual quality of most film photography and production design has rapidly declined.
So as cinematic quality declines across the industry, the Safdie brothers seem like a shocking exception, young directors who are not just making bold stylistic advances in visuals and editing, while also delivering narratives that strike at the emotional core of American masculinity. Their work regularly depicts a desperate striving for victory by men who may not deserve it. A primal need for glory. Their work sheds new light on classic archetypes of the outlaw and the hustler, and the experience of Jews, in particular, caught up in that intense compulsion to win in American society.
Josh Safdie’s recent release Marty Supreme is truly an epic, not just because of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime and classic framing device of athletic championship, but also on account of its surreal, virtuosic meditation on the lives of midcentury New York Jews. Classical epics recount the glorious deeds of heroes of your nation. Marty Supreme is an ironic twist on this.
The solid core of the movie is its main character’s chutzpah. He is utterly shameless in the pursuit of victory. Marty is not a Christian hero in the slightest. He is a hustler willing to lie, steal, and burn any bridge to get what he needs to play in the ping pong championship – yet always maintaining a sort of magnanimity and charm that keeps him from being utterly loathsome. His lovability comes from his unwillingness to quit. He always doubles down. He always moves forward. He never doubts for a second that he will win.
This is a breath of fresh air for a generation of young men who have only ever been bombarded with narratives of masculine hesitation. Of protagonists who are either brooding self-doubters or gormless conformists to a status quo set by effeminate ethical experts.
Ethnic solidarity is a recurring theme in the film. It is portrayed as useful, perilous, and humorous. Marty and his patron-turned-antagonist initially bond with each other over a recognition they are both New York Jews in London. Family members are portrayed as overbearing and effusively argumentative, fitting the stereotype. Another character vividly recounts a flashback story of his time in the concentration camps, smearing his body in a honeycomb and then sneaking back into Dachau to let his fellow prisoners lick his body clean for nourishment, as the camera hysterically zooms in on their tongues dragging over his dripping body, an absurd parody of over-the-top Holocaust anecdotes.
“I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” says Marty. “Just look at me. I’m here. I’m on top. I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat.” At another point, he chips off a chunk of an Egyptian pyramid and brings it back to his mother as a gift. “We built that!” he declares.
This is paralleled with the solidarity that the Japanese show for Marty’s aloof, deaf rival, Koto Endo. They are shown to be one harmonious people, to roar when their champion wins and weep when he loses. As a Japanese broadcast states: “Behind him, 83 million souls join hands with the determination of a nation reborn.” The movie suggests that this is what it means to be a worldwide athletic champion: to test your nation’s biological potential for rapid reflexes and decision making, even within as comical and constrained a playing field as ping pong. In contrast to war, a world ping pong championship exists to peacefully prove that, in some small way, your people can stand at the pinnacle of mankind, superior to other nations.
Yet due to his constant bad behavior and bridge-burning, Marty is disqualified from that world championship. He must reinvent the conditions by which he can prove himself. He’s only able to take on his rival once again through sneaky means, by arranging a promotional event that is supposed to be a staged failure and then demanding an honest match from his rival once he’s there.
A great strength of the film is that for long stretches it doesn’t focus on ping pong at all, but instead on Marty’s quest for the money he needs to get to the championship, and the appalling ways he uses the women in his life to get it. (Just as the women, in turn, attempt to use him for their own cunning ends.)
Some of these schemes are ripe with allegory. Marty and his black friend, Wally, run a con on a group of young men named Christian, Roger, and Clark. “Not everyone’s as nice as Christian,” says Clark at the bowling alley. Wally pretends to lose all his money to Marty and plays on the sympathy of the American youth to get them to put up a bunch of money on a bet that one of them can beat Marty at ping pong and win this poor penniless black the fare back home.
Later in the night, a group of cornfed young men pulls up on them in the bed of a truck and, having discovered the con, smash the glass out of Marty’s car in an attempt to seize the money back. Only Christian tries to hold Roger and Clark back from assaulting them in vengeance. Marty sprays gas on everyone and drives away, leaving the gas station a burning wreck. A dog, named Moses, leaps out of the car and goes running off into the night.
At a later point, a Jewish gangster and a farmer in a cornfield kill each other disputing over Moses. Moses is left barking in an empty farmhouse, surrounded by the corpses of everyone who wanted to own him, as Marty drives off with his injured baby mama, Rachel. What a symbolically loaded statement on the inheritance of biblical law in our culture and the ethnic tensions between American people groups, all in one riotous subplot that has very little to do directly with the ping pong championship. Because it’s not about the ping pong. It’s about needing to win.
Much of the drama lies between Marty and a billionaire, Milton Rockwell, whom Marty cuckolds while also manipulating for as much patronage as possible. Actors Timothee Chalamet and Kevin O’Leary’s antagonistic chemistry is some of the best back-and-forth seen in recent cinema. “I was born in 1601; I’m a vampire,” says Rockwell, sarcastically, but seething with rage. “I’ve met a lot of Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me. They weren’t straight, they weren’t honest. And those are the ones that are still here.”
Marty Supreme is an ironic epic of one’s people. The Safdies show a love for their Jewishness while remaining fully willing to display its extremes, foibles, and moral failures. The film thus enters into a growing canon of classics that quirkily recount the ethnic experience of Jews in midcentury America, along with the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelman’s.
By the end, Marty’s ceaseless grasping for glory has disqualified him from what he wanted most. He beat his rival, but only in a way that no one else will care. He’s ruined almost every opportunity he has ha,d either for world fame or for peace and stability. He comes back from Japan with only a sense of private triumph. He visits Rachel in the hospital and finds that despite all the chaos he has left in his wake, all his failures, all his absurd amoral striving, God has given him a son.
Image Credit: Unsplash.
