Chalamet and Safdie salute the me-first nation.
Only a country that despises itself could produce entertainment like Marty Supreme. Director Josh Safdie loves grunge, and actor-producer Timothée Chalamet likes showing off, so they collaborate on a biopic about a minor celebrity, the late ping-pong player Martin Reisman, who stopped at nothing to win several international table tennis championships. Son of a New York cab driver, Marty deceives everyone he knows as part of the thrill of winning. He’s not clever or even likable, just nervy — a Millennial version of the old What Makes Sammy Run? Jewish archetype.
Self-centered like Sean Baker’s amoral hooker-heroine in Anora, Marty exhibits all the imperialist aggression that Americans are supposed to hate themselves for. But Safdie, who’s 41, and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronstein, who’s 52, delight in Marty’s misbehavior. They appear to endorse Gen Z’s me-first attitude; they excuse all offenses, perhaps especially when Marty endangers those closest to him. The film is a series of farcical pranks involving his mother (Fran Drescher), his cousin (Sandra Bernhard), his shoe-store-owner cousin Galanis (John Catsimatidis), a mobster (Abel Ferrara), an American businessman named Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) and his gold digger wife and actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and Rachel (Odessa A’zion): the sullen grade school sweetheart Marty recently impregnated.
Safdie mistakes grunge comedy for realism. The faux vérité crime film Good Time, which Josh co-directed with his brother Benny, was produced by Martin Scorsese for the art/authenticity imprimatur. Following the frantic Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme makes an extravaganza of low-life urban-ethnic greed and hysteria. (Gifted cinematographer Darius Khondji brightens the smudgy darkness only when Marty’s duplicity causes a cascade of neon orange ping-pong balls in the night.)
Chutzpah keeps Marty in trouble whether he’s participating in matches across the globe (in Egypt, he chips off a piece of the Great Pyramid of Giza to gift to his mother) or jumping from work as a half-time clown for the Harlem Globetrotters or conning the not-so-upper class when he hustles Rockwell while sexing the entrepreneur’s whorish wife. Rockwell — the film’s putative capitalist villain — attempts to humiliate Marty yet fails to assert moral reckoning. Instead, we realize that Chalamet’s brashness (“I was rude, overconfident, cocky”) never finds the spiritual center of his character, as does, say, Paul Newman in The Hustler.
Marty’s cons expose Safdie and Bronstein’s view of the world. They see everyone as shysters and think it’s funny when Marty’s betrayals confirm this Luigi Mangione–esque dystopia, which features a billiards conspiracy with Marty’s black cab driver buddy Wally (Tyler Okonma) against racist yahoos in New Jersey, as well as Rachel’s instinctive dishonesty that confirms that she’s Marty’s soulmate.
These post–World War II American vagabonds live by Marty’s ruthless creed: “You struck a nerve. I struck a nerve.” They’re a Mazursky duo without Mazursky’s heart. Marty Supreme is overlong (almost three hours), yet Safdie’s hustle bustles. (Safdie doesn’t bother respecting chronology and liberally interjects vivacious — and LOUD — ’80s pop songs into the 1950s setting.) None of this tells us anything new beyond confirming the insidious, treacherous, bad character traits that the millennium so far has showcased.
Safdie and Bronstein close their jamboree by celebrating one American’s sense of entitlement. But this non-conscientious ending backfires. Their conclusion resembles Robert Altman’s The Player yet misconstrues Altman’s scrupulous observation: that the worst people in the world also procreate. The ultimate degradation is Safdie’s hipster fillip that suggests that he learned nothing from ’80s pop besides taking the Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” literally and claiming it as an excuse. A major moral shift in the culture has occurred.
