Marty Supreme is a good movie. I watched it with my friends, and they enjoyed it, even the sober ones. Timotheé Chalamet is a good actor and I liked his rap song. He really likes the New York Knicks and is dating Kylie Jenner. The bald guy from Shark Tank is in the movie and he spanks Timotheé Chalamet. Josh Safdie used to make movies with his brother.
Now he doesn’t.
“It’s just every man for himself where I come from. That’s just how I grew up.”
During the filming of the Safdie brothers’ 2017 film Good Time, a 17-year-old girl was cast to play a sex worker in a scene that involved simulated sex with actor Buddy Duress. Duress, just released from prison, exposed himself and asked the girl if he could “stick it in,” sources told Page Six Hollywood. Josh was aware of the girl’s age on the day of production, and kept the cameras rolling, while Benny only found out five years later, soon cutting artistic ties with his older brother. The two went their separate ways: Benny released The Smashing Machine, a melancholic film about the human cost of life as a fighter (and a commercial failure), and Josh made Marty Supreme.
“Everything in my life is falling apart but I’m going to figure it out.”
Marty Supreme is both a sports movie shot with the frenicity of a coked-up skatepark videographer and a character study in the mold of middle period Scorsese. The film veers from set-piece to set-piece—from screaming to fucking—so smoothly that formal comparisons to a ping-pong match come naturally. Winning a table tennis match isn’t really a problem for Marty Mauser—getting to the court is. At the onset of the film, Mauser’s just another New York Jew. He’s a stringy smooth talker working at his uncle’s shoe shop and having an affair with his childhood best friend. After stealing 700 dollars from the company safe, he suddenly boards a plane for London in pursuit of table tennis glory. He stays at the Ritz, has an affair with a movie star, and becomes a media darling. The rest of the film feels like Mauser’s attempt to recapture that first half-hour. It’s not just him—we all want Marty Mauser to become Rocky Balboa. We also know that he can’t.
“I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries.”
There are many easy analogies for Marty Supreme. Mauser is post-war America (fine). Mauser is the starving artist (yawn). Mauser is the tech bro trying to get funding for an AI B2B SAAS start-up (God help us). All of them are right, and they’re right because there really are only two stories in art. There’s the story of the man who tries and fails, and the story of the man who realizes he needs to stop trying and go home. It’s Icarus and the Buddha. It’s the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s Benny and Josh Safdie. Some say there’s a third story, that of the man who tries and succeeds, but that’s just a story cut off halfway. Michael Jordan ended his career as the greatest of all time (sue me), and all he wants to do in his retirement is “take a magic pill… and go out and play more basketball.” Alexander wept, for there were no worlds left to conquer.
Marty Supreme is that second story. In the end, Mauser doesn’t play in the championship; he gets banned from all professional table tennis competition. He wins a near-meaningless exhibition match, comes home in a service-plane and, finally, sees the newborn child that’ll consume the rest of his life. Cue “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” There’s no glory for Mauser, but also no real defeat. He’s done with the game, like a college athlete who plays one last match and walks into a Wall Street office, content.
“I give you meaning, and he gives you money.”
What I’m left wondering is why this is the story that’s dominating our culture. Marty Supreme might not win Best Picture, but the past three winners have shared this same gist: they’re about giving up the struggle, about youthful dreams. Everything Everywhere all at Once is a domestic superhero film, its most famous line a paean to “doing taxes with you” (what would Byron have thought of that?!); Oppenheimer is about being powerless in the face of one’s creation; and Anora tells us you can’t really escape your economic conditions.
There’s something lulling about this plot. It leaves the feeling that we in the audience, with our accidental kids and messy marriages, are doing as well as we can. It can’t get better than this; Mauser tried, and he’s right where you are. I could segue this into some take on late capitalism, but it feels simpler than that. 130 years on from the birth of cinema, the art form, at least in what it presents to the broader public, has lost its fire. We know how to play with emotions, to construct immersive sequences of action and write brilliantly quotable dialogue, but we don’t know what to do with it all. I hope Josh Safdie figures it out some day.
Marty Supreme is a good movie.
