Marty Supreme

 The "Marty" in Josh Safdie's 2025 Marty Supreme is self-evidently Marty Scorsese, a director whose fingerprints and influence are visible in every frame of this picture.  Simply put, Marty Supreme is the Raging Bull of ping-pong or table tennis movies.  This is a little hard to comprehend and, I admit, I wasn't enthused about seeing this picture since it is ostensibly about ping-pong, a mild activity that people play in their basements for genteel amusement.  In fact, Marty Supreme is a raw, bare-knuckled narrative about gangsters and poverty -- the film is shockingly violent and seems to have been made in a kind of feverish frenzy.  

Set in 1952, the film explores the ethnic slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a kind of ghetto full of aggressive, hustling Jews whose businesses are tribal -- the workers in these little airless shops are all relatives, uncles and in-laws.  Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet ) is selling shoes and banging his married girlfriend back in the inventory stacks.  She gets pregnant and Mauser decamps to London where he is enrolled, as it were, in an international tennis tournament.  The contrast between the genteel, aristocratic sportsmanship and noblesse oblige of the tournaments and the hard-edged Yiddish milieu of the Lowe East Side where everyone is always yelling obscenities at everyone else is central and thematic to the film.  Marty almost wins the tournament but is defeated by a deaf Japanese player Endo (he lost hs hearing in the great Tokyo Air Raid) whose use of spin overpowers Marty's brute power approach to the sport.  When Marty loses, he pitches a fit and throws a waste paper basket, earning him a 1500 dollar fine from the tournament sponsors and the international association.  This fine will be the central catalyst for the action in the last two-thirds of the movie.  Marty is brash and self-confident although he's only 23.  He seduces a much older Hollywood actress, now unhappily retired, just to show that no woman can successfully resist his charms and blandishments.  The older actress played by Gwyneth Paltrow is married to a successful businessman who makes pens and Marty courts him, as well, hoping he will sponsor his table tennis career.  In London, Marty also spends like a sailor and incurs huge debts, lodging in imperial-sized hotel rooms full of lavish art and furniture.  

Marty is desperate for another shot at defeating Endo and tries to raise money for a trip to Tokyo.  He gets into a bad scrape with a hideous gangster.  In a flophouse hotel, where Marty is hiding from his pregnant girlfriend and her cuckolded husband, Marty takes a bath.  The bathtub falls through the floor and crushes the gangster, almost cutting off his arm and injuring the thug's loyal dog.  The hoodlum tells Marty to take his dog to the vet.  Marty's girlfriend has been beaten by her husband and has a swollen face and black eye. (Marty later bludgeons the husband with one of his bronze table-tennis trophies.)  They go to the house of a friend, a fat business associate who is helping Marty to hawk "Marty Supreme" orange-colored ping pong balls.  There's a big fight there and Marty appropriates his uncle's car (the fat guy is Marty's cousin) and with his girlfriend they go to a bowling alley in New Jersey where Marty sandbags the local table tennis champs and, by virtue of side bets, makes $1500 dollars to pay off the fine so he can enter the Tokyo tournament.  Marty still has the gangster's longsuffering pooch with him and has no intent in taking the dog to a vet.  The aggrieved table tennis gamblers from the bowling alley chase Marty in their pickup trucks and there's another big fight -- this results in a gas station being set on fire and exploding.  The gangster's dog runs away, darting through the smoke from the blast.  Marty has lost the money to the thugs who knock him around and take the cash.  So he goes back to Manhattan and decides to blackmail his movie-star girlfriend who is trying to make a comeback on Broadway courtesy of her husband's money financing a production of some sort of Tennessee Williams play featuring a young cock of a method actor modeled on Marlon Brando.  He has sex with the actress and steals her necklace that seems to be set with diamonds.  Unfortunately, it's just costume jewelry and worthless.  Marty then makes a Faustian bargain with the actress' husband.  If the husband will finance his trip to Tokyo, Marty agrees to play an exhibition game with his nemesis Endo and commits to throwing the game in Endo's favor so that the businessman can curry favor with the ping-pong mad Japanese public. (The businessman, Rockwell, plans to corner the Japanese pen market).  Marty's pregnant girlfriend tries to extort money from the gangster saying that she is holding his dog for ransom.  This is a bad idea and leads to the gangster stabbing some people.  The gangster, then, takes Marty and his girlfriend to Jersey where Marty says he can find the dog.  In fact, Marty knows the dog has been seized by a hillbilly farmer who is heavily armed himself and ready to defend his property.  The gangsters attack the hillbilly to get the dog and there's a shootout that leaves all the hoodlums dead as well as the farmer -- the dog flees again.  Marty has insulted the businessman (played with sinister aplomb by Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank) and the pen merchant refuses to give him any funds.  Marty's actress girlfriend has been humiliated herself -- the reviews for her comeback performance are awful and we last see her weeping with her female friends in her big Manhattan townhouse.  (She has earlier given Marty a valuable necklace but when the two of them get caught having sex in Central Park, they are blackmailed by some corrupt cops and she has to buy her way out of the scandal by giving the police the diamond necklace.)  Marty finally has to plead with Rockwell to take him to Tokyo.  Again, Rockwell exacts a price in humiliation -- he makes Marty drop his trousers and spanks him on the bare butt with a ping-pong paddle.  This sets the stage for Marty to travel to Tokyo where he is supposed to lose the match with Endo.  And, of course, after the manner of all sports movies, there is a climactic table tennis duel for real stakes between Endo and Marty.

The movie is made with great craft, lots of whiplash camera movements and writhing violent tableaux.  The faces and figures of everyone in the movie are East Coast ethnic, dumpy, slovenly, people with huge hooked noses, and slatternly women -- it looks like the extras from Raging Bull, presumably all dead now, have been resurrected for this movie.  The film is a sort of raucous comedy and, in fact, features a specious redemption scene in which Marty weeps over his infant son -- in the frenzied and violent last half of the movie Marty's pregnant girlfriend gets shot and, then, delivers her baby after the gun battle over the dog.  Oddly enough, the movie's sound cues feature old Doo-wop and crooner tunes from fifties and 1980's pop songs -- it's an odd combination but it works well.

Marty Supreme is exhausting to watch, but it's wildly inventive and brilliantly acted and made.  There are some staggering visuals.  In one scene, Marty's obese cousin hurls a box of Marty Supreme orange ping pong balls out a window and we see hundreds of them bouncing on the street.  Another scene features a completely gratuitous but extremely moving flashback to a concentration camp.  A former Auschwitz survivor, now a washed-up table tennis professional, persuades Marty to travel with the Harlem Globetrotters giving exhibition matches at half-time.  (They play pingpong on a miniature table, with pots and pans, and, even, with a seal who uses his flippers to bat back the ball.)  The Auschwitz survivor in the flashback to the camp finds some honey when he is defusing shells in a woods.  He smears his body under his ragged camp uniform with honey and lets the starving men in his barracks lick the honey off his body.  It's a strangely powerful and sacramental image that has nothing to do with the film but which is intensely memorable.