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.