Marty Supreme
by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein and An Incredible Team
Here’s a tiny comics connection: Sammy Harkham (whose Crickets 9 just came in the mail and I will share my thoughts on soon) worked on the movie.
When I watch movies I tend to be as obsessive as I can about the setting. At home, I tend to keep the lights low and the sound up and prefer to sit directly in the middle of the screen. I tend to do the same in theaters, sitting in the middle, preferably halfway from the back wall, but given less choice, I’ll move back rather than forward. I get annoyed with people being too loud (except genuine reactions to the film unless the movie is boring and they are very funny). I practically lose my mind if something goes wrong with the screening (the sound dropped out during Asteroid City and when they stopped and restarted it without going back, we walked out and went to a showing the next day). I am picky and obsessive and it would take something unique to get me to break my self-imposed rules.1
I saw Marty Supreme two weeks ago after managing to get on an RSVP list for a screening.2 I was one of the last to be let into the screening, which was first come, first served. I had decided that if I were stuck in one of the front rows, I would skip the screening. I ended up a few more rows back, so I stayed. The lesson I learned was that for Josh Safdie, I want to be farther back. The intensity, the extreme close-ups, which in large part make the film was it is, are as overwhelming as they were in Uncut Gems and Good Time, and it triggers my stress response. I’m glad I’d watched those two previous films at home, where my not-very-big-screen tv is not so oppressive.
Another movie watching fetish I have is ignoring press and trailers for things I know I want to see. I will close my eyes, put my fingers in my ears and la la la my head until a couple minutes pass if I’m in the theater. I was really glad I got to see this knowing almost nothing about it.3 For my own hatred of spoilers, I encourage those who feel the same to stop reading now. It’s part of the reason for this extended preamble, even though I’m going to try to avoid any major spoilers since the official release is weeks away. There are few plot spoilers, but character arc spoilers abound. Reader beware.
The Safdie stress effect is relentless. It is interesting that as the movies each get slightly less stressful (my experience with Good Time to Uncut Gems to Marty) they get better each time as he layers in some more complex emotions than AAaAUuUUggGGhHHh!!! I was really struck by how skillfully the tone shifted at key points and how he let some characters redeem themselves after we’d grown to hate them. And thank god for the dozen or so laughs.
It was perfectly cast. It’s hard to complain about nepo babies among young actors when the babies are so good, and there are few directors who cast actors with little experience as well as Safdie. Many of the great supporting roles really put to the test the believability of how a modern actor with modern cosmetic work seems out of place in a period piece.4 Some people just have 21st century faces and Safdie finds many that do not.
This is nominally a sports movie, allowing it to build some sports-movie-style suspense, but is really a character story rather than a sports movie.
Chalamet was fantastic. I hated Marty for making me so anxious, but wanted to keep watching him. Part of the magic of the story is that Marty wants to be Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) and Milton Rockwell is just Marty who lucked out. They share the intense confidence in believing they deserve everything and one thinks he’s already got it and the other knows he’d kill himself trying to get it.
Ultimately, I wonder how much of Marty (and *shudder* Rockwell) puts me on edge because we share one character trait, the belief that we deserve great rewards for our work. I don’t have the maniacal focus on one thing that Marty does, but I do relate to the unearned sense of being destined for recognition. That Marty manages to make good choices in the end redeems my satisfaction of watching him repeatedly climb onto metaphorical tightropes over pits of alligators throughout the film, and I shared his tears of acceptance when he got there.
I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen Kevin O’Leary before until I sat down to write out what I thought, because I have avoided much reality tv.5 I’m impressed that Safdie convinced him to just play himself and made him the most unrepentant villain in a film full of people with questionable moral choices. Problematic billionaires are all over fiction (lol) these days, but the idea that billionaires, just by factor of their existence, are problematic, is exemplified by Rockwell.
Gwyneth Paltrow was fantastic, she hits a higher nuance-per-minute of performance than anyone in the film. She is famous for many things, but manages to fit the early-Hollywood performer, even managing to overcome her own cosmetic modernity. Odessa A’zion was new to me and compelling and I look forward to seeing more. Koto Kawaguchi did a lot with essentially no dialogue and a very understated performance.
As if I wasn’t already scared of Abel Ferrara from his own filmmaking, he starts strong and ratchets up the intensity.
There were so many other great actors who made their few scenes work that I kept wishing for more time with them, even in a movie that was long enough already. Standouts not limited to: Fran Drescher, Tyler, Luke Manley, Ratso Sloman, Ralph Colucci.
I spend so much more time thinking about books and comics that when I spend time thinking about a movie I end up working my way through all departments and admiring the incredible work of so many collaborators. I was really impressed with the makeup work on Marty’s face. It took me twenty minutes of close-ups to realize that it was make-up and not his own post-adolescent face. I’m sure the make-up for the broken arm was just as good, but I avert my eyes when there’s realistic gore.
The CG for the Ping-pong scenes was slightly obvious (clearly there was no ball they were hitting and it was added later), and I’d imagine people will pull some awkward screen grabs when 4k streamers get released, but overall it worked pretty well. I think I’d seen too many modern videos of champion Ping-pong (thanks to my oddball video algorithms) to be convinced that these guys were really playing, but it worked for the movie. It almost seemed like the antiquated techniques were what made it look odd.
The score helped set pace and tone and was insistent on its presence while never distractingly so. There are ‘80s songs peppered in that somehow never felt too anachronistic to work in a movie that takes place in the ‘50s. Usually ‘80s music in any movie is grating, especially since they mostly pick popular songs that have a single lyric removed from context to fit the scene they’re in, but here they worked really well. The final needle drop (Everybody Wants To Rule The World) didn’t hit for me as much as others seem to love it, but that may just be because it’s a song from my youth that I’m tired of hearing, because every bit of the lyrics and tone fit the story.
If you have seen Good Time or Uncut Gems, I think you’ll have a good idea of what you’re in store for here but will be impressed with the expansion of tone. If you liked but didn’t love those, this might be the Safdie movie that you’ve been waiting for.
My favorite local theater (River Oaks Houston) has two small upstairs screens that are perfectly comfortable for front row viewing because there is a large gap between that row and the screen.
Looks like my patronage of Letterboxd has finally returned a $15 movie ticket after a few years investment. Just kidding, thank you A24, I kept your embargo as asked.
I knew it was about a ping pong player, and I knew Penn Jillette and Chalamet were in it, then I saw Tyler on the poster the week I saw it. Once I knew it was Josh Safdie and rumored to be good, I avoided anything else.
I know I’m in the relative minority here, but I can’t see Margot Robbie existing in the era of Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, much less Babylon, even if she did a great job in both.
I know this seems like virtue signaling or humble bragging or bougie disdain to say that, but I have long been uninterested in reality tv. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of bad options that I watch unironically (I recently watched Now You 3 Me in the theater, by choice.) This is not value judgment, “reality” is a genre that I don’t enjoy.