My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”
This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.
It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.
You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams.
Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough.
Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal. The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no.
Shark Tank!
The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.
Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.”
I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining.
But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”
My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.
As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.
