TeaJosh Safdie’s new film has the hardcore energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally with a single player racing around the table. It’s a marathon sprint of gonzo disasters and mayhem, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like Mel Brooks’s – only in place of gags, there are explosions of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic bargaining, racism and anti-Semitism, passionate longing and erotic thrills. It’s a ridiculous race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a foul-mouthed motormouth with an intellectual’s glasses, a movie star’s mustache, and the physique of a short cartoon character. He is loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life American table tennis champion of the 1950s who was given a Bobby Riggs-type trickery: betting, hustling and showy stunts. The film probably earns the price of admission with just one gasp-inducing setpiece involving a whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role, and a dingy New York hotel room. Talk about not being on solid ground. Similarly disorienting is the climactic revelation of Chalamet’s bare buttocks before one of the most disturbing displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson’s If….
Marty is a young Jewish boy working in a New York shoe store in 1952, dreaming of world-conquering success in the emerging sport of table tennis and patenting his own brand of ball called the Marty Supreme. He is having an affair with his married childhood sweetheart Rachel (Odessa Azion) and is saving his earnings to fly to Britain for the table tennis championships at Wembley. (There is an evocative shot of the twin towers of the old stadium, which American audiences may assume is a Tolkien reference.)
Receiving his promised cash is the first of many bizarre upsets, but once in Blighty, brash Marty deliberately startles British sports journalists by telling crude jokes about his friend and fellow player, a Hungarian-Jewish camp survivor named Bela, played by Géza Rohrig (from László Nemes’ Holocaust film Son of Saul).
After running around and banging in an empty room at the Ritz, Marty conceives of an erotic obsession with a fellow guest, retired movie star Kay Stone – the role for which Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement – and Kay’s subsequent Broadway debut is surprisingly realized with a stunned Marty in the audience. Marty’s table tennis match with Japan’s ping pong superstar Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) ends in disaster, and Kay’s husband and Marty’s potential sponsor Milton (Kevin O’Leary) reveals himself to be a fanatic of both Marty and Bella. Back in America, complete chaos reigns, a nonstop hellzapoppin’ meltdown as Marty tries to raise cash for a rematch with his Japanese rival and the charismatic K.
The film’s comedic and absurdist effect lies in the slowly emerging realization that it’s not really about table tennis. Marty Supreme doesn’t behave like a sports movie: There’s no training montage sequence, no scene in which Marty explains his technique in voiceover, no scene in which he either politely listens to some ping pong consultant or oedipally rejects him. And unlike Forrest Gump, who becomes a patriotic celebrity through his table tennis gift, Marty is always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts – though it is arguably his pioneering work in popularizing the game in the 1950s that made Forrest’s ping pong prominence possible in the 1960s.
Rather, it’s that the film itself is ping pong; The rhythm and spirit of table tennis is in every scene and the spectacular, thunderous, dizzying back-and-forth has a mesmerizing effect. Marty is at his spectrum of supreme determination and emotional hurt, and Chalamet hilariously portrays an unstoppable live-wire twitch driven by rage and self-pity. And Paltrow gives us a clever and clever counterpoint to Marty’s intense narcissism; She is amusing and sensual, she sees what Marty is doing and understands him better than she does herself.
By the end of this movie my head was spinning around as if it had been hit with a cymbal. Adversity, stunts, setbacks, terrible desperation, and Marty’s desperate need lead to every important thing in his life being thrown, like the box of Marty’s patent table tennis balls that goes out the window. And yet somehow our diminutive hero always comes back and even achieves a touching maturity in the final shot. Pure madness is a miracle.
<a href=