[COLUMN] Marty Supreme is a Great American Movie for a Lesser American Moment | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece includes some discussion of the third act of Marty Supreme - and The Brutalist - so if you want to see them completely blind, feel free to bookmark and come back. They’re both great films. I was really charmed by Marty Supreme, which is that wonderful sort of film that manages to feel both classical and modern at the same time, an epic that is also incredibly propulsive. It’s in under the wire as the last film to make my top ten of the year.

Marty Supreme is “A Great American Movie.”

That is not necessarily a qualitative judgment, although Josh Safdie’s solo feature is one of the best movies of the year, garnering rave reviews and performing phenomenally at the specialty box office. It is more of a broader classification. Marty Supreme belongs to a canon of films engaged in an exploration of the American character with a conscious grace and import. It is a movie that aspires to greatness not as a qualitative measure, but as a metric of grandeur.

Loosely inspired by the life of ping pong champion Marty “the Needle” Reisman, Marty Supreme is the story of young twenty-something ping-pong player Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) who believes that he is destined for greatness and who has a natural aptitude for ping-pong. While his family are sceptical, Marty believes that table tennis is the future and dedicates himself to the pursuit of a career in the sport, no matter the cost.

Throughout Marty Supreme, Marty insists that he will make something of himself through sheer force of will. “Do you make money with this little table tennis thing?” asks actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow). “How do you live?” Marty replies, cocksure, “Well, I live with the confidence of if I believe in myself, the money will follow.” When Stone presses him on what he plans to do if that dream “doesn’t work out”, Marty responds, “That doesn't even enter my consciousness.”

However well drawn its central subject is, and however mesmerizing its central performance is, Marty Supreme is about more than just a cocky New Yorker. The film is about America. Marty travels overseas as an ambassador for America, donning a paddle with the stars and stripes. His trademark orange ball reads “Marty Supreme. Made in America.” He suffers his first humiliation losing to Japanese player Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), a huge propaganda victory for postwar Japan.

Reviews for Marty Supreme have rushed to compare it to other recent entries in that “Great American Movie” cultural canon, with film critic David Ehrlich crowning it “One Paddle After Another.” However, the film feels closer to something like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which feels oddly appropriate given that Timothée Chalamet lost the Best Actor Oscar this year to Adrien Brody’s towering performance in that (literally) monumental film.

Like The Brutalist, Marty Supreme is a portrait of the Jewish experience in postwar America that is also the story of a singularly talented artist who quickly finds himself dependent upon an exploitative industrialist. At times, the parallels are almost too close; both Marty Supreme and The Brutalist feature third act sequences in which the artist is sexually abused and humiliated by their benefactor, a controversial rape scene in The Brutalist and a bare-bottom public paddling in Marty Supreme.

Both The Brutalist and Marty Supreme belong to a canon of movies about difficult protagonists trying to find some mode of expression or fulfilment, stories that are essentially gritty fairytales about the American Dream. “Dream Big,” the promotional materials for Marty Supreme urge the audience, rendering the subtext as text. However, there is one big distinction that separates Marty Supreme from The Brutalist and so many of the other entries in these movies about American aspiration.

American cinema is full of singularly talented and difficult men fighting for some greater cause, possessed of some divine gift that they must see through to fruition. There is a fetishization of “the Great Man”, and Marty himself buys into it. “I have a purpose,” Marty boasts to his lover Rachel Mizler (Odessa A'zion). “And if you think that's some sort of blessing, it's not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through, and with that obligation comes sacrifice.”

This sort of rhetoric can feel very earnest and self-important when talking about, say, architecture. The Brutalist is a story about an architect, László Tóth (Brody), who survived the Holocaust who is trying to build a gigantic monument to that massive tragedy that is also an expression of his love for his wife (Felicity Jones). However difficult Tóth might be, there is an understanding baked into the movie that maybe it’s okay to be difficult about something so profound and important.

In contrast, there is a wry playfulness to Marty Supreme given that Marty is evangelizing about table tennis. He’s giving these grand speeches and rationalizations about ping-pong. Part of the magic trick of Marty Supreme is the skill with which it balances its sympathy and empathy for Marty with a willingness to acknowledge the inherent absurdity of believing one’s divine “purpose” and “obligation” is owed to sport that remains remarkably unpopular in the United States to this day.

Ping pong is not the stuff of great sports movies. Discussions of the film tend to cite boxing movies like Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull as among the “several feel-bad, toxic-alpha touchstones swimming around in Marty Supreme’s DNA.” Boxing is a much more mythic sport – an epic contest with a firm hold on American consciousness. It feels notable that, allowing for Balls of Fury, perhaps the most significant entry of table tennis into American popular cinema was as a joke in Forrest Gump.

There is a knowing and winking irony here. “Dream big” as the slogan for a movie about a sport that is effectively a miniaturized version of an older and still more popular sport. If Marty Supreme is “a Great American Movie”, it is one at a very deliberately reduced scale. This feels quite conscious. While the film is showing on 70mm, it is worth acknowledging that Marty Supreme is not being sold on formats in the same way that The Brutalist, One Battle After Another or even Sinners were.

This is not to suggest that Marty Supreme hates its protagonist. The film strikes a deft balance with Marty. Like Tóth in The Brutalist or Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) in Raging Bull, Marty is extremely unlikeable. He is obnoxious, arrogant and self-important. He is an incredibly difficult person to like, constantly hustling and manipulating and scheming to get what he wants while antagonizing virtually everybody in his orbit. However, he’s never quite as unlikeable as LaMotta, never as violent.

However, Marty Supreme manages to engender some audience sympathy towards Marty by subjecting him to constant and perpetual humiliation. At one point, on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, Marty is forced to use his gifts to play against a trained seal. At another, he has to consent to a public spanking and a humiliating staged public defeat to convince industrialist Milton Rockwell (Kevin O'Leary) to fly him to Japan for a rematch with Endo.

It is a strange observation to make about a two-and-a-half-hour period piece about American identity that has broken specialty box office records and seems likely to be a major awards contender that involves its lead character stealing stone from the Pyramids while travelling the world with the Harlem Globetrotters, but there is something striking in how deliberately small Marty Supreme feels. This feels like part of what the film has to say about America.

At times, Marty Supreme feels like a Great American Movie about the inevitable American decline. The film is set in 1952, in the midst of the postwar economic boom – albeit on the cusp of a minor recession. “If you are an American and over twenty-five you have taken part, knowingly or unknowingly, in ‘one of the greatest social revolutions in history’,” wrote Peter Drucker in January 1952, almost as if directly addressing Marty Mauser.

Marty Supreme is set at the dawn of what would become known as “the American Century”, the point at which America emerged as the dominant global power. However, the film is haunted by future echoes of that 1950s vision. The soundtrack is saturated with 1980s synth hits, from bands like Tears for Fears, Public Image Ltd. and Alphaville, reinforced by Daniel Lopatin’s synth-heavy score. The specter of a resurgent Japan victorious over America speaks to those 1980s fears of “an economic Pearl Harbor.”

There are more contemporary parallels. Marty Supreme features Kevin O’Leary in a major supporting role as the very literal embodiment of unchecked capitalism, a North American businessman-turned-reality-television-star-turned-populist-right-wing-politician, “Canada’s answer to [Donald] Trump.” This all feels quite deliberate. After all these time periods overlap with waves of 1950s nostalgia in American culture – Reaganism and Trumpism are both nostalgic for some imagined 1950s.

The last few years have seen the end of American exceptionalism, the premature conclusion of the American century and perhaps even a sudden wake-up from the American Dream. This has been a preoccupation of much of the year’s cinema, from Thunderbolts* to A House of Dynamite. Marty Supreme presents a glimpse of that moment in the wake of the Second World War where it seemed like anything was possible, but there is a sense of knowing tragedy.

Indeed, one of the big recurring motifs of Marty Supreme is the idea that the bill comes due, that at some point there is a debt that needs to be settled. In the film’s opening moments, Marty enjoys a casual tryst with Rachel, resulting in a pregnancy that drives most of the movie. Marty runs a huge room service bill in the first act, which results in him having to hustle for the rest of the film. He alienates Rockwell in their first meeting, and so spends the rest of the movie clawing his way back. There is a sense that that postwar boom was perhaps something that always came with a cost.

The 1950s setting is also juxtaposed with a much more modern sensibility. While Marty Mauser arguably belongs in the lineage of the “difficult men” at the center of these mythic American narratives on film and television, he feels like a more modern understanding of aspiration and yearning than somebody like Jake LaMotta or even László Tóth. He is at least as much a hustler and a con artist as he is an actual artist. He also possesses the attributes of the modern millennial aspirant: “the grindset”, “hustle culture”, “the sigma male.”

This extends to the film’s marketing. In place of selling Marty Supreme as an important movie to be seen on premium formats, so much of the marketing has come down to Chalamet himself, as a sort of meta self-aware expression of the film itself. Acknowledging the press tour is “in the spirit of Marty”, Chalamet is hustling like the movie’s lead character, giving interviews about how his performances over the past few years have been “some top-level shit.” He has even rapped.

To a certain extent, this is just part of who Chalamet is. Chalamet is a post-irony generation, and has spoken openly about his desire to be “one of the greats.” He used to be a YouTuber and he’s dating a Kardashian, and there is a sense of that all-encompassingness to what Chalamet is doing. Like Marty, Chalamet does not have an “off” switch. He’s talked about how he empathizes with the line about how failure “doesn't even enter [his] consciousness”, which makes sense. Marty Supreme is an example of a very traditional sort of movie that is very finely tailored to Chalamet’s generation.

After all, this young aspirational and earnest mindset is in many ways a response to the current moment. This is a generation that grew up in a world that experienced any number of “once in a generation” events, has seen their standards of living and their expectations continually revised downwards and have faced the realization that they are likely to have a worse life than their parents. It makes sense that they should be more open about what they want, more ruthless in their pursuit of it, and that their aspirations are perhaps smaller for it.

If The Brutalist was a deliberately classical take on that very familiar template of the Great American Movie, Marty Supreme offers a truly modern interpretation. It is a film in tune with this moment, this generation, this culture. It updates the rhythms and the tempos of that established formula for the modern world, in which the “greatness” to which its constantly hustling and grinding protagonist aspires is a shot in a sport that nobody cares about, and even then they have to compromise.

Marty Supreme is a Great American Movie for a lesser American moment.