Bounce

Movie Review
Marty Supreme
Directed by Josh Safdie

JOSH SAFDIE’S Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming ping-pong player. Marty, to put it mildly, likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange ping-pong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) for sex at the shoe store’s back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London — to be fair Uncle Murray’s hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty’s mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher).

Timothée Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse, unbuttoned to reveal the sweat-soaked undershirt, and glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut — to declare “fuck you!” at anyone who dares object to his grating personality. It’s perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet’s less-than-charming persona to a T, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect through the thin cotton.

It’s a vibe, I suppose. Helps that Darius Khondji is the cinematographer, with his shadowed aesthetic developed from his time with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection), through his time developing the look and feel of David Fincher’s signature features (Se7en, Panic Room), to his time applying richly textured layers to James Gray’s visual palette (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z, Armageddon Time), to his time illuminating the Safdie brothers’ shaky-cam aesthetic (Uncut Gems, this film), lending them more gravitas and solemn beauty than they actually deserve. For this production, Khondji adds a sumptuous glow about Chalamet’s tousle-haired head, suggesting he’s more “Fast” Eddie Felson than Ratso Rizzo (we’re not totally fooled, but Khondji for a few moments at a time manages to leave us confused).

It also helps that the legendary Jack Fisk is the production designer — he grew up in 1950s Illinois, is adept at creating worlds set in the past (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, Killers of the Flower Moon), the relative present (The Straight Story, Carrie, Mulholland Drive), and the nightmarish subconscious (Eraserhead). Fisk’s work here is so immersive I can believe it helped settle and modulate Safdie’s usually frenetic camerawork, from the near-incomprehensible near-hysterical gibberish Adam Sandler spouted in Uncut Gems to the comparatively sedate rat-tat-tat delivery of 1930s screwball comedies (transposed here to early ’50s).

Does the film work? To a point. It wants to be The Hustler, to beat that film at its own game of taking up a relatively lightweight game (billiards) by employing a sport even lighter in weight (table tennis) to pronounce on matters as momentous (At what point does selling one’s honor, dignity, soul for the umpteenth time become too much? Who in this dog eat dog world does one care about, dig in one’s heels for, and why?), but lacks Robert Rossen’s lean elegant visual storytelling, lacks the dark Mephistophelean figure played by George C. Scott as counterweight. Marty stands alone in a world of fools and suckers and that I suspect is how Chalamet (who’s never been shy on the subject of his ego) likes it, and that’s likely why this film fails to touch its intended level.

This Marty isn’t even half as interesting as the real deal — Marty Reisman, on whom Chalamet’s character is loosely based, was a table tennis player from the age of nine, won his first city championship at the age of 13; he hustled for money and, yes, toured the world as the opening comedy act for the Harlem Globetrotters, often visiting Hong Kong, and (a detail omitted from the film) smuggled gold and Rolex watches out of Asia into the United States. He won the 1997 US National Hardbat Championship at the age of 67, and in 2008 demonstrated on the Late Show with David Letterman that he could split a cigarette with a ping pong ball. On archival video footage Reisman looks improbable, with limbs longer and lankier than Chalamet’s (you can believe he can cover a ping pong table with arms outstretched), his onscreen manner is far more charming and charismatic — if he ever approached me for financing production of thousands of orange ping pong balls with his name printed on them, I’d seriously consider his proposal.

This isn’t Safdie’s best work either — that would be Uncut Gems, co-directed with his brother Benny, in a milieu the brothers grew up in (the New York Diamond District), with real stakes (loan sharks, a gambling addiction, a crumbling marriage, millions in rings and gems and unsecured loans), with Adam Sandler sweating the kind of desperation Chalamet can only fantasize about. I am usually not a fan of the smash-n-grab handheld frenetically cut style the Safdies excel at but in this one case they may actually have a point, and so does the film — an icepick of a point, driven into your skull between your eyes.

And this isn’t even the ultimate table tennis saga — that would be Masaaki Yuasa’s Ping Pong: the Animation, with visuals that make the Safdies look like on quaaludes, and a narrative that goes into power dynamics, players’ psychology, the significance of the sport to various countries’ cultures (specifically Japan and China), the pitfalls and virtues of both victory and defeat. Would I consider Marty supreme? Wouldn’t call it bad, but would definitely rank it fourth.