Can you say you have a winner’s mindset? Are you a slave to the grind, are you the master of your own fate, do you have what it takes to turn haters into waiters, using and abusing your peers and rivals like they were one indistinguishable resource to tap until you took your crown? Do you have the winner’s attitude, ie. project ambition and success at every juncture despite, unequivocally, being a loser? Do you know the exact right moment to start lying to your loved ones, badgering them, manipulating them, abandoning them for a cleaner shot at the crown? Once you get your shot, and if you are beaten and bested, are you ready to call foul at the drop of a hat, to act like some lesser individual is more deserving of your failure, like the shame of non-success is more of an aesthetic discomfort—it just doesn’t suit you—than a true reflection of your ability?
If the above paragraph exhausts you—to say nothing of its queasy moral implications—then you’re probably the target audience for Marty Supreme, the latest, ping-pong-focused iteration of the “scumbag on a sprawling, selfish urban mission” mode of filmmaking from the Safdie brothers—correction: one of the Safdie brothers.
Like The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme is the story of an early pioneer in an easily dismissed but soon-to-be major sport whose personal issues get in the way of their ambitions, but MS is the work of elder brother Josh Safdie, while TSM was by Benny Safdie. Intentionally or not, Marty Supreme nods towards the disunion of Safdie brothers with the repeat casting of Mitchell Wenig, one of the short, balding New Yorker twins with a grudge against Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, who appears here, symbolically, without his uncannily similar-looking brother Stewart.
Drawing conclusions about each brother’s unique skills by comparing their first solo directing effort feels like easy and incomplete criticism, but the comparatively mute and inert The Smashing Machine feels even more baffling after watching Marty Supreme’s mile-a-minute odyssey of grindset maximalism. Certainly, Marty is more bullish in his assertion that he deserves fame and success, and clarifies that The Smashing Machine is more about knowing when to tap out than the fight itself.
Whether it’s the freedom of not making a biopic or the involvement of co-writer and co-editor Ronald Bronstein (who fulfilled the same duties on Good Time and Uncut Gems), Marty Supreme has a secret sauce, fulfilling its guffaw- and anxiety-inducing potential as a blockbuster-appropriate expansion of the Uncut Gems formula, lavishly bringing to life an imagined 1950s America that sees its newly refurbished Dream crash head-on with the nasty, territorial nature of its society.
It’s 1952, and Marty Mauser (Chalamet, acting exactly how you’ve seen him on the awards circuit of late), is picking up shifts at his uncle’s shoe store so he can pay his way to the ping-pong world tournament in London. His uncle is an asshole, though, and he only makes it to the capital by the skin of his teeth and some dubious pressuring—but he feels no fear of repercussions. Marty’s certain he can defeat everybody, including the ferocious, disciplined Japanese champion Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), and return a rich, successful hero—without having to worry much about his long-suffering mother (Fran Drescher) or Rachel (Odessa A’zion), the married pet store clerk he inadvertently impregnated before jetting off for London.
Bad news, Marty, because consequences come knockin’, and Safdie slips into his comfortable style of escalating stakes, increasing the number of eccentric faces and voices on screen, and letting his abrasive hero gamble other people’s security against his own selfish determination. It’s initially quite jarring to realise that, after spending its first act building up Marty Supreme as an underdog sports story, perhaps even a mock-biopic, where a fictional sports hero built an unorthodox path to greatness, the film collapses underneath its myopic protagonist, keeping him low to the ground and on the backfoot as he pursues a second chance he may not rightly deserve.
Marty is forced to roam recklessly across New York City, strapped for cash and strong-arming his pregnant lover, his taxi driver bestie Wally (Tyler, the Creator), and one-time business partner Dion (Luke Manley) into helping him. There are cons, hustles, desperate pleas for sympathy, and two chaotic altercations that, frustratingly, culminate with the exact same explosive act of violence, and redundancies like this can’t help but place Marty Supreme on a lower tier than the uber-urgent Uncut Gems, like a fantasy satirising the contemporary tics and neuroses of post-war, self-conscious American exceptionalism.
As entertaining as this retrodden ground may be, Marty’s journey is richest when he’s contending with the film’s wealthiest, most hardened characters—pen manufacturer Milton Rockwell (real-life tycoon Kevin O’Leary) and his long-suffering Hollywood actress wife Kay Stone (Gwenyth Paltrow) who Marty seduces for the hell of it as much as he is actually attracted to her.
O’Leary and Paltrow each give the best supporting performances in the two-and-a-half-hour film—O’Leary practically salivating over the smug capitalist material, and Paltrow rich with a woozy, playful cynicism that dances with Chalamet’s electric charisma. But they’re also pivotal to the film’s assessment of Marty’s “ultimate winner” mindset, offering parallel visions of melancholy, jaded success and acting as obstacles that the lanky antihero can’t vault as easily as he does his working-class compatriots and opponents.
From this ill-fated wealthy couple, an uncomfortable epiphany is extracted, and whether or not Marty truly takes it to heart is up for debate, even after the film’s euphoric final moments: success is actually incredibly malleable, and if you want it badly enough, you could be willing to change yourself in order to get there. By contrast, failure is fixed, permanent, and undeniable.
Marty spends so much of his film running—escaping from peril, from a too-punishing and mundane urban life, towards the shining, exemplary destination that he’s valorised his head. But if you spend your life in motion, things can get very blurry. Marty has the branding, the sharp tongue, the myth of a self-made success story—he thinks exactly like a winner is expected to. But is it all in service of him treating others like losers?
