(courtesy IMP Awards)
It is a rare thing indeed in this information-saturated, preview-addicted, spoiler-suffused, endlessly-reviewed digital world of ours that anything subverts and surprises and blows expectations well and truly out of the water.
Marty Supreme, starring recent Golden Globe winner Timothée Chalamet as the titular character, Marty Mauser and directed with frenetically clever, propulsive abandon by Josh Safdie, manages this all-together rare modern feat by taking an ostensibly simply tale of one man’s all-consuming ambition to become a world table tennis champion in the early 1950s and surrounding with all kinds of elements that render it absolutely anything but ordinary.
Much of the hyper narrative thrust of the film comes courtesy of Marty himself who, in the superbly adroit hands of Chalamet, is a young man who believes, without a shadow of a doubt or a glimmer of humility, that he damn well deserves to have the world at his feet.
Part of this driving, almost toxic sense of self belief comes from a desperation to escape the poverty of his immigrant New York City childhood, in which he and his mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher) remain trapped, their only salvation lying in Marty’s uncle Murray Norkin (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) benevolent, of exasperatingly grudging support which is perilously close to snapping.
While Marty has a job in his uncle’s shoe store, and a real talent for getting customers to part with their hard-earned cash for new footwear, he resents it, staying in the job only as long as it allows him to scrape up the cash to fly to London for the table tennis British Open where he is confident that he has the skills to not only win but inspire fellow Americans to take up the sport.
It seems, if you take the trailer as your guiding light to where Marty Supreme may go, that it’s going to be a simple open-and-shut story of one man defying the odds to achieve his dreams and remaking the world in his overly confident image.
Sure, Marty is a LOT but then what budding champion isn’t? Surely a healthy dose of narcissistic intent is necessary to make in any super-competitive environment?
The thing is, as Marty Supreme quickly makes clear, is that the protagonist has more than his fair share of trenchant self-confidence and that he’s so saturated in his vital ingredient for any world conqueror that he ends up effectively sabotaging his own efforts, so consumed with his dream that he forgets that other people matter.
So, instead of co-opting others into his dream, such as childhood friend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion who puts in a superb performance as someone battling some fairly fearsome odds), with whom he is having an affair or high-powered businessman, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, one of a number of deftly cast amateurs who acquit themselves well), whom he actively baits and antagonises, he lies and hustles and spins at every turn, creating a stew of a mess for himself.
It is a masterclass of turning plowshares into swords that you use to stab yourself, beautifully and harrowingly underscoring how extreme narcissism becomes less of an ace up the sleeve than a self-wielded weapon brutally destroying the very thing that means the world to you.
Marty’s chaotically self-serving, and ultimately, self-destructive way of getting to where wants to be drives the plot of Marty Supreme which jumps here, there and everywhere, in a roughly chronological but always surprising manner, its messy energy propelled by a soundtrack that is in itself not even remotely what you might think of a period piece.
Songs like “Change” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears” (1983), “Forever Young” by Alphaville and “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” by The Korgis (1980), pepper the film, their New Wave sounds well and truly decades out of time and yet sometimes perfectly situated in a movie that seems to relish defying any and all orthodox approaches.
This applies as much to tone and feel as anything else.
While the trailer suggests a certainly charming ambition and idiosyncratically fun race to the top, Marty Supreme often dives into some very dark places, taking us into the heart of domestic violence, death by fiery immolation and criminally fuelled shootouts among other things.
While you reach the end of the film and feel gloriously and discombobulatingly punch drunk, flattened against a viewing wall by plot points, music and characters who seem to delight in pushing any and all kinds of buttons, and it takes a while to come back up for air (several days in the case of this reviewer), it eventually strikes you that here is one of the cleverest explorations of the power of ambition and the ruinous reach of narcissism to ever come our way.
Other films of this type are happy to tread a relatively vanilla path to world conquering glory, shearing off all the bruised and bloody ends that might blunt the inspirational power of such a story but Marty Supreme is more than happy to leave all the messy, self-defeating bits in full view, even going so far as to ask whether it’s even possible to reach a happy ending when you seem to be using all the weapons arrayed against you on yourself.
Marty is, by any measure, a supremely talented guy with a lot in his favour but he is also his own worst enemy, only finally finding some measure of joy right at the very end of the film but not even remotely in the way or the arena that you think he will, proof once again of Safide’s desire to take your expectations and dash them upon the rocks of a movie that will not meekly going where it is supposed to.
Marty Supreme is a lot, and it’s a tribute to Chalamet that someone so disassemblingly destructive retains so much likeability and appeal, but once the frenetic dust has settled and the blizzard of seemingly disconnected scenes, which sometimes feel like a bunch of short stories bludgeoned into an inelegant whole, the film emerges as very human, very honest about what it takes to reach the top, and whether in doing everything to get there, you can in fact fail to get there at all, leaving a trail of human wreckage and broken dreams in your wake.