cinema; culture; united states · 9 min
Sharewww.gabrielcerezo.com/article/000014?lang=en
The obvious film to set beside Marty Supreme is Uncut Gems, which has the same director and the same strain of anxiety, kept humming for two and a half hours by a protagonist of much the same type. But I think you get more out of comparing it with Goodfellas. They have nothing in common as genres, though they do share a moral architecture.
Goodfellas is about a guy who comes from nothing and wants everything, gets a fair bit of it, and along the way lets you see how the system he works inside actually runs. Henry Hill might pass for an aberration, but he is America at its most honest, the will to get there by whatever means. The mob in Goodfellas is American capitalism with the varnish and the euphemisms scraped off, and no compliance department either. Scorsese saw this with a clarity that, thirty years on, is still hard to swallow. Josh Safdie saw the same thing and found a vehicle that makes the thesis even harder to ignore, which is table tennis.
Of all the decisions behind Marty Supreme (the casting, Darius Khondji’s cinematography, the anachronistic soundtrack of eighties tracks laid over a story set in the fifties), the smartest was the sport.
Ping pong. In 1952, when the film is set, hardly anyone in America thought of it as a real sport. It was a basement game, a social-club game, something immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side played on makeshift tables. Boxing has its epic and baseball its national mythology, and even chess can claim the prestige of the intellect. Ping pong is a celluloid ball going back and forth over a green table.
Which is why it works. The more trivial the sport, the more nakedly you can see the mechanics of ambition. Make Marty Mauser a boxer and his hunger for greatness slots into a frame everyone knows, the neighbourhood kid who punches his way up, Rocky, Raging Bull and every variation since, and we’d accept the obsession because boxing, culturally, licenses obsession. But Marty wants to be the best in the world at something the world couldn’t care less about. That lays bare what the usual sports story tends to dress up, namely that ambition is a blind internal force, out of all proportion to whatever set it off, and it fastens onto whatever happens to be close by. Marty doesn’t much care about ping pong as such. He cares about being the best, at anything, and ping pong happened to be the channel within reach.
Safdie knows this, so he put the least likely character into the most American story going. A Jewish hustler from the Lower East Side who plays table tennis is about as pure a case study of the American Dream as you could come up with, because he has nothing going for him, no money or connections, and a sport the culture doesn’t respect. He has talent and he has will, and that will have to do. Whether it does, and what it costs, is the question.
Timothée Chalamet disappears in this film, which I hadn’t seen him do before. It has nothing to do with underplaying. Chalamet himself, the looks and the delicacy and the indie-prince aura, gets wiped out behind Marty Mauser, and what’s left is a skinny guy in glasses who can’t stop talking, who walks into every room as if he owned it and lies as easily as he breathes.
Marty speaks in declarations. Every sentence starts with “I” and ends with a full stop, with no negotiating or hesitating in between. He says “I’m the best” with the conviction he’d use to tell you it’s Tuesday. Arrogance doesn’t quite cover it, since arrogance implies a gap between what you believe about yourself and what you are, and Marty has no such gap; to him, believing he’s the best and being the best are one and the same. Confidence is what he runs on, his operating system.
And the film, oddly, won’t decide whether any of this is good or bad. Safdie shoots Marty from the distance a nature documentary keeps from a predator, without judging or condemning him. There he is. That’s how he works. Watch.
Marty robs his own uncle and lies to everyone around him. He gets Rachel pregnant, his childhood friend, who is married to someone else, and when she tells him the child is his, he denies it. He seduces Kay Stone, a retired actress married to a magnate, less out of love than because her glamour pulls at him the way any kind of greatness does. He tells Rachel he has a purpose and she doesn’t. People are resources to him until they get in the way, and then he drops them, with no visible seam between the two. The film doesn’t punish him for it, or not entirely, and that’s what makes it subversive.
In Goodfellas, Henry Hill ends up in witness protection, eating mediocre pasta in the suburbs and pining for the life he lost. It’s a punishment, though an ambiguous one, because what Hill misses is the thrill of the crime, and the film gets the audience missing it too. Scorsese didn’t moralise. He showed how seductive wrongdoing is and left the viewer alone with it.
Safdie does something similar with Marty, minus the rise-and-fall arc that gives Goodfellas its shape. Marty zigzags; he moves forward, hits a wall, bounces off it and moves forward again. He robs his uncle’s shoe store to pay for the trip to London, where he checks into a suite at the Ritz he can’t afford and loses the championship. Back in New York, flat broke, he teams up with Wally to hustle gamblers at second-rate tournaments. An accident puts him in the path of a mobster, then he loses the mobster’s dog, and one thing leads to another and another until the logic of it all piles up into catastrophe.
That structure lets Safdie get at something the conventional sports film misses. A hustler’s life has the shape of a permanent condition, with no dramatic arc to resolve it. Marty stacks his problems up, solving none of them, and keeps going, always, with a resilience you can call admirable or sociopathic depending on where you stand, and the film won’t tell you where to stand.
That refusal is political. It says something about America, about how the American system (capitalism, meritocracy, the cult of the self-made man) really works once you strip away the rhetoric. The American Dream says that with talent and will you can make it. It leaves out what you have to do to make it, and what happens to the people in your way while you do. Marty has talent and will, and he makes it. But the road behind him is littered with people he used, lied to, abandoned or broke, and the film just shows you the road, with no warning signs posted.
Rachel is the character who lets us see what Marty can’t. She’s his childhood friend, his lover and the mother of his child, and she pays for his ambition more plainly than anyone.
Odessa A’zion does something remarkable with the part. Her Rachel has little of the passive victim about her. She’s sharp, has a cunning of her own, has known Marty forever and knows full well who he is. Knowing doesn’t protect her, though. When Marty tells her he has a purpose and she doesn’t, the cruelty of the line lies partly in what it says and partly in the fact that he doesn’t register it as cruelty at all. To him it’s a data point. He has a purpose, she doesn’t, and data points aren’t cruel.
It’s the logic of any high-competition world, corporate or political or, as here, athletic. Whoever doesn’t serve the objective is disposable, and getting rid of them gets booked as efficiency, with no moral cost entered anywhere. Marty is cruel by omission. His field of vision has room for one thing, which is winning, and whatever doesn’t help him win simply isn’t there.
The film doesn’t underline any of this. Rachel turns up with a black eye because her husband hit her, and Marty goes straight for the husband. You could read it as protection, but it plays more like ownership, as in nobody touches what’s mine. The distinction is a fine one, and Safdie leaves it unspoken for the viewer to sit with.
The ending is what finally sets Marty Supreme apart from Uncut Gems. Howard Ratner went out with a bullet in his head. Marty ends up crying at the nursery window of a hospital, looking at his newborn son.
It’s the first time in the film that Marty goes quiet. After two and a half hours of nonstop talk and first-person declarations and perpetual motion there is suddenly silence, and Chalamet, for once in the whole picture, stands still. He weeps, looking at something without working out what he can get from it.
There are two ways to read that ending. The generous one says that Marty, for the first time, sees something bigger than himself, that the child and the new life break him out of ambition’s closed circuit and connect him to something human his obsession had kept out of view. That’s the redemptive reading, and the film gives you enough to back it up.
The less generous one says he’s crying because he’s run out of game. Everything he had in motion is gone, he’s back to zero, and the tears look more like exhaustion than redemption. The machine has stalled for lack of fuel, and tomorrow, once it’s refuelled, it will go back to doing the same thing all over again.
Safdie doesn’t choose between the two readings and lets them both stand. To me that ambiguity is what separates a good film from an important one.
Marty Supreme asks something more uncomfortable than whether Marty is good or bad. It asks whether there’s any form of excellence that doesn’t wreck something, whether you can be the best in the world at anything, ping pong or business, art or politics, without the people closest to you picking up the bill.
The film’s implicit answer is no. Real excellence, the kind that demands total dedication, is incompatible with ordinary decency. The excellent are sometimes bad people, granted, but the trouble comes from somewhere else, from a concentration so complete that everything around it goes blurry and expendable. Geniuses are geniuses partly because they see one thing with a clarity the rest of us lack, and that clarity has its price, since whatever isn’t that one thing drops out of sight.
Scorsese showed this with gangsters. Safdie shows it with a ping pong player, and the choice of a ping pong player makes it plain that the problem lies not with organised crime or the margins of society but with ambition itself, with the very structure of an American Dream that promises everything and never mentions the price.
Marty Supreme, a movie about table tennis starring an unbearable man you can’t take your eyes off, is the best film about the American Dream since Goodfellas.