Motormouth Marty Mauser is a grade-A shit heel. A 1950s hustler with a tommy gun delivery who won’t take no for an answer. He’s a lithe, wiry, fuck stick, spidering his way through New York city avenues and alleyways, dive bars and flea pits to wrangle 700 dollars to fly to London and win the British table tennis Open.
Bottle top glasses and pock-marked skin aside, Marty is a confidence monster, his sly, selfish, callow nature racing neck-and-neck with his youthful exuberance. He’s out of control, a walking sperm bank with a table tennis paddle and a red ping-pong ball, making out with his childhood friend and lover Rachel Mizler in his uncle’s shoe shop.
Everyone and everything kneel at the feet of Marty, even Rachel when she is at her lowest ebb. Whilst rejecting her, Marty says, “I have a purpose. 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.”
That sacrifice is at everyone else’s expense, abandoning his uncle’s shoe shop even though Marty “could sell shoes to an amputee,” his long-suffering mother, his taxi driver best pal Wally drives off with smashed windows, cuckooing his friend and business partner Dion Galanis, and the latest pair of stooges to feel the blast of Marty’s jet repellent slipstream, faded movie star Kay Stone and her pen magnet husband Milton Rockwel steamrollered into funding a rematch trip to Japan.
For all of Marty’s self-aggrandising bullshit there’s no escaping the fact the schmuck can play table tennis. He’s a pencil-faced whirling dervish glitching across the table like a J-Horror phantom.
Marty’s the anti-Fast Eddie Felson. No looks, no charm but plenty of chutzpah, think Ratso Risso partnered with Woody Allen – but after you knew about his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and the subsequent allegations.
How do you reconcile a bad person making great art? Read Claire Dederer’s electrifying book Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People once you’ve finished the movie, but in the meantime the heir apparent to Leo, De Niro, and Brando, Timothée Chalamet makes us ponder that polemic with his breathless performance as Marty.
Take a scene when Marty is living large in the Ritz with his Holocaust survivor friend and former world champion Béla Kletzy regaling reporters with tone death bravado, “I’m gonna do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t.”
The reporters take a stunned silence before Marty deadpans, “I’m Jewish so I can say that”, announcing himself as “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat.”
Like the reporters we think, did he just fucking say that? Absolutely he did. This scene, alongside a flashback of Béla at Auschwitz, makes perfect sense of Marty’s chaotic worldview. It makes perfect sense why Marty humiliates himself in front of titans of American industry at a swanky party and the half-time crowds at Harlem Globetrotter’s games the world over. Marty didn’t fight in the war and didn’t survive the Holocaust, but he is Jewish and he is alive. And he can get a wicked tune out of a paddle, a ball and a table tennis table.
Marty Supreme is a film making sense of the post-war cataclysm of World War Two, where military might is paired with the soft power of sport. It’s a manic farce, careening at a million miles an hour, creating impossible angles and solutions, anachronistic in its choice of 80s new wave needle drops (yes that was PiL’s The Order of Death you heard). But the 1950s New York milieu is as vividly recreated as in The Godfather or Goodfellas.
Remember that throwaway gag in Airplane when Elaine asks an elderly passenger, “Would you like something to read?” The passenger replies, “Do you have anything light?” Elaine pauses, looks through her magazines and says, “How about this leaflet? Famous Jewish sports legends.”
In the crazy, frantic imaginations of director Josh Safdie and his Oscar-bound star Chalamet, they might just have adapted that leaflet into a truly great movie.