There are some films you can just smell. Marty Supreme is one of them. Odours seem to seep from it – sweat, lust, dollar bills, desperation. In fact, it’s an assault on all senses. When it’s over, your ears are ringing from the squeak of sneakers on stadium floors, the barking of an injured dog, the incessant jabbering of a young New Yorker in pursuit of the American dream. And scorched into your retinas are the veins popping from Timothée Chalamet’s neck, the keloid scars forging paths across his hopeful, freckled face and, of course, the hypnotising to-ing and fro-ing of a ping pong ball.
Loosely based on the life of table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is set over eight months of mayhem. It’s 1952, and 23-year-old Marty is working in a shoe shop in New York. The film begins with a tryst in the stockroom and ends with the birth of a child. For Marty (Chalamet), his job as a salesman is beneath him. Yes, he could “sell a pair of shoes to an amputee”, but he prefers to play table tennis, and my god, he’s good at it.
He reckons the sport, surging in popularity overseas, will soon be filling stadiums in the United States. And when that happens, he doesn’t want to be slumming it in his mother’s poky flat on the Lower East Side; he wants to be such a big name in the game that he’s staring out at fans from the cover of a Wheaties box. So he sets out on his mission to make it to the top, in a frenetic series of competitions and ever-spiralling escapades that take him from New York to London and Tokyo and back again.
Marty will do anything to secure his destiny: beg, bargain, steal, f***. He is that bluebottle pounding against the windowpane; profoundly irritating, but you can’t resist wanting to help him and set him free. He lives his life by the fake-it-till-you-make-it mantra, elbowing his way into the Ritz during a London competition, and ordering the beef wellington and the caviar tasting plate because, and only because, “they are the most expensive items on the menu”.
The film hurtles along, screeching and skidding like an out-of-control car on hairpin turns. In one moment, Marty has it all. Next, he’s catastrophically blown it. In a matter of months, he’s caught up in a flood (his bath literally falls through the ceiling of a hotel room when he’s in it), a dog theft, a car accident, a shoot-out, a fire, a film-star fling, and a public spanking. This is cinema! In between all of Marty’s ecstatic highs and crashing lows, the ping pong is spectacular. Chalamet spent six years honing his table tennis skills for the role – he had a table with him on the sets of Wonka, Dune 2 and The French Dispatch, and even removed all his living room furniture to turn it into a makeshift stadium. He plays with genuine flair against real-life Japanese champion Koto Kawaguchi in the movie.
Like all of the best films, Marty Supreme is as crushingly sad as it is funny. A scene where Marty’s uncle stages a fake arrest to try to get him on the straight and narrow had everyone in my local cinema in hysterics. “Love you,” they tell each other, in the end. At another point, we all palpably flinched at a rich businessman’s stunning lack of compassion for Marty’s friend, a survivor of the Holocaust. “My son lost his life liberating you,” he tells him scornfully, as he clocks the prisoner number tattooed on his forearm. Later, Marty, who is Jewish, tells a group of journalists: “I’m like Hitler’s worst nightmare. I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat.”
Marty is not a likeable guy. His ego is the size of a planet and his single-mindedness is soul-sucking. Put it this way, you’d never invite him to a dinner party. And he’s extremely unkind to the women in his life. “I have a purpose, you don’t,” he says to Odessa A’zion’s Rachel, who is a revelation here as Marty’s childhood best friend and the mother of his baby. Gwyneth Paltrow, as a famous actor called Kay Stone, whom Marty latches onto, is also sublime: at first all poise, and then all cracking, reckless vulnerability. I still think of the look of disgust she throws at Marty when she tells him he’s behaving like a child and he retorts: “I’m old enough to f*** you in your hotel room in the middle of your big comeback.” He’s a piece of work, but you can’t take your eyes off him.
One of my favourite things about the film is how Safdie has surrounded his leads with a cast of fascinating faces that look as if they’ve come off the end of Dali’s paintbrush. Beautiful, strange noses; cheekbones, eyebags and jaws as you’ve never seen; a hit of fresh air compared to the yassified homogeneity of modern Hollywood. Chalamet’s face is different to those – he’s just plain pretty. But it’s a face that also stays with you – the way it crumples when he loses, and blissfully slackens when he wins.
Truly, it’s never felt so good – and so exhilarating – to spend time in the company of someone so annoying. I can’t help it. Just like that buzzing fly, I want Marty to win.
