Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

Despite enjoying the director's previous work, I found Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme to be overblown, gaseous, and empty. It doesn't matter to me that the ping pong prodigy played by Timothée Chalamet is unlikeable, but I found the character to be fatally uninteresting. Chalamet has proven he can play a Jewish hustler with his impersonation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, but Marty lacks the charisma and chutzpah of a Dylan or a Sidney Falco or Sammy Glick. I think that Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein wanted to capture the Jewish magical realism found in works like Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, but the results are neither magical nor realistic. Safdie shoots the material with lots of close-ups, trying to give this period film immediacy. In this he partially succeeds, but at the cost of giving his film a realistic framework. The use of circa 1980 pop songs indicates he wanted to conjure something more timeless and mythic, but the character of Marty is not interesting or heroic enough to support the stuff of legend.

Safdie continues to be interesting in his handling of his players. I especially enjoyed the efforts of Odessa A'zion, Abel Ferrara, Penn Jillette, and Pico Iyer. However, a number of talented performers are stuck in cliched roles or ones that barely register, such as Fran Drescher, Kevin O'Leary, and Sandra Bernhard. Gwyneth Paltrow is promisingly cast as a Grace Kelly type figure, but has little to do except act bemused by Marty. I did enjoy the Tennessee Williams take-off, but too much of Marty Supreme, like the Moses the dog subplot, is overly convoluted and arbitrary. Marty's actions are rarely consistent with his character. While Marty Supreme has some interesting moments sprinkled throughout its two and a half hours, overall I found it to be a disappointment. 

Backrooms

Whatever their artistic merits, the commercial success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession is a truly heartening sign of life for the American film industry. Before the summer onslaught of sequels, retreads, and video game adaptations, it was very pleasing to film buff Biff that two original films from newcomers are runaway box office successes. After viewing Backrooms, I was particularly chuffed that such an abstract and avant leaning film has been embraced by the US public, particularly by those 35 and under. It is A24's biggest hit to date, already outgrossing Marty Supreme. Backrooms has a plot, but its chief attribute, which commences once Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers a portal to a parallel world in the basement of his furniture store, is Parsons' camera prowling the negative space of a world redolent of corporate offices and strip malls. This conveys a sense of dread that lingers despite the narrative seeming like a distended Twilight Zone episode. 

Ejofor plays Clark, a frustrated architect living in a mythical city in 1990 who manages a pathetic furniture store for his daily bread. He has recently undergone a painful divorce and attends therapy session with his doc, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). After Clark discovers the portal, he enlists two collegiate videographers to document what he has discovered. Unsurprisingly, the duo become the film's sacrificial lambs for a monster lurks in the maze of this mysterious kingdom. Mary Kline becomes concerned about Clark and stumbles upon the portal. Flashbacks of her childhood, when she was a prisoner in the house of her mad mother, illuminate her struggle to metaphorically and literally walk through windows. A single survivor is left at film's end. A high tech firm has been monitoring the parallel world and is able to make an extraction. A company pooh-bah (deftly played by Mark Duplass) debriefs the survivor, functioning much like Simon Oakland's character in Psycho. As in Psycho, the explanation given mystifies rather than clarifies.

The visual landscape of Backrooms is a picture of suburban desolation and anomie. Indeed, the suburban strip malls of America in 2026 are even more empty after the rise of internet retailers. As the musical group Priests put it:

                           I was jogging to a strip mall

                           I felt nothing at all

                          Nothing I can recall

                          Besides Dollar Tree, Sears and Thai Bistro

Even before we enter the film's Interzone, the portrait of 1990 America is depressing. The colors of the costumes and decor are subdued and ugly. The film is a symphony in taupe and off white. Even when a color like blue is used it is a subdued blue rather than a vivid one. This fits the emotional tenor of the film. Clark and Mary both live a lonely existence, each haunted by the demons of the past. Ejiofor and Reinsve limn their characters' stress and isolation superbly. I was somewhat distracted by Reinsve's Norwegian accent, but that is a very minor complaint.  

Master Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have extrapolated Backrooms from Parsons' YouTube series of the same name. However, the idea for this project did not just emerge full blown like an Athena from the cheesypastaverse. There are antecedents. Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 horror novel House of Leaves has a similar premise. While Parsons' characters travel horizontally into an alternative multiverse, Danielewski's descend vertically into darkness. With its labyrinthine tracking shots, Backrooms reminded me of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the labyrinth is the one of the central motifs in Kubrick's oeuvre. Regardless, I feel Backrooms can stand on its own. I don't think it is a great film, but it is a startling debut. 

Downstairs

Virginia Bruce, Paul Lukas, and John Gilbert form a triangle in Downstairs

Monta Bell's Downstairs is a fitfully entertaining 1932 drama released by MGM. Leading man John Gilbert has penned the screenplay in the silent era and then dusted it off in the hopes of reviving his flagging career. Gilbert plays the part of an unscrupulous chauffeur newly hired by a German Baron (Reginald Owen). Gilbert arrives on the wedding day of two members of the Baron's staff, Paul Lukas' butler and Virginia Bruce's parlor maid, and promptly establishes himself as a total cad by hitting on the bride. Bruce initially is able to resist Gilbert's advances, but comes to realize that he floats her boat more than the upright Lukas. Gilbert's chauffeur is such a total rotter that while he is making time with Bruce (soon to be the fourth Mrs. Gilbert), he is also coming onto the households' aged cook. The cook's appeal to him lies not in her feminine charms, but in the bankroll secreted in her stockings. Amidst these shifting and shifty alliances, the Baroness (Olga Baclanova) has a lover on the side. A situation the chauffeur exploits for blackmail.

Downstairs is an weird film that wizzes by at 77 minutes utilizing odd juxtapositions and iris dissolves. It is handsomely appointed with cinematography by Harold Rosson and art direction by the ubiquitous Cedric Gibbons. However, Monta Bell's direction never finds a consistent tone. The film veers from comedy to near tragedy without ever finding its footing. What makes the film palatable is its superior cast. Owen and Baclanova are one of the most hilariously mismatched couples in the history of cinema. Bruce and Gilbert generate a scent of eros. Bodil Rosing, best known as the maid in Sunrise, is affecting as the cook. Best of all is Paul Lukas who makes the stock role of the cuckolded husband believable. Downstairs also features Hedda Hopper as a former employer/lover of Gilbert's, Otto Hoffman, Lucian Littlefield,  and an uncredited Karen Morley in the final scene.

On a personal note, I can attest that the notion that the chauffeur was the great god Pan of the 1920s and 30s was not pure fancy. My wife and I were gifted a box of linens by my mother. They had lain in a closet in my parents' house since the death of my mother's aunt a decade earlier. When I opened the box I spied a selection of monogrammed hand towels. They bore an initial I did not recognize. Apparently, my great aunt had had a first husband who was not mentioned in my presence. When I queried mom about it: "Oh, yes", she replied, "she ran off with her chauffeur."