Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, released last year and now available on Amazon Prime, is ostensibly about the American ping pong star Marty Reisman. It pays far more attention to his inclinations as a hustler rather than to his talent as an athlete. This will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with his memoir, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, upon which this drama is based.
Not having read his book, I assumed that it would highlight his activities as a table tennis pro. Safdie focuses instead on his skills as a showman, which, I admit, was a source of disappointment to me. What I hoped to watch was a movie about an outstanding athlete perfecting his skills.
The late Reisman, who was often referred to as “the needle” due to his slender physique, won more than 20 major titles, including the English Open and two U.S. Opens. He reached the peak of his career in the 1950s and 1960s, when he competed in tournaments around the world.
As far as I know, he was probably the first Jewish table tennis champion from the United States.
In this 150-minute drama, Reisman goes by the name of Marty Mauser and is skillfully portrayed by Timothee Chalamet. Usually clad in elegant suits and hats, he comes across as relentlessly driven and ambitious.
His ascent to stardom is carefully charted.
In the first scene, set in his birthplace in New York City in 1952, he toils in his uncle’s shoe store. In recognition of his work ethic, he promotes Mauser to manager. Mauser protests. He is not interested in spending the rest of his life in a dreary shop. He dreams of becoming a professional ping pong player and travelling around the globe in the lap of luxury.
Looking forward to defeating a particular competitor who happens to be a Holocaust survivor, he boasts that he will do to him what Auschwitz failed to accomplish. It’s an inappropriate comment, but Mauser is obsessed by the prospect of outdoing his opponents.
Chalamet gets into his skin with ease, portraying Mauser as a player who assumes he is unbeatable. He meets his match in a game against a stoic Japanese champion, but he remains cocky and arrogant.
Mauser is also a ladies’ man. He seduces an older actress (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a secondary role) who seems impressed by his audacity. And he impregnates an unhappily married woman whose husband goes ballistic.
In Paris, he meets Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a ruthless industrialist who finances his trips abroad in exchange for certain concessions. O’Leary, a financier in real life, is remarkably fine in this tailor-made role.
Despite Mauser’s success in table tennis, he basically lives a hand-to-mouth existence, living in flophouses and in his mother’s drab apartment. Having returned from a visit to Egypt, he gives her a chunk from the pyramids and says, in a reference to the ancient Hebrew slaves, “We built that.”
The film emphasizes his efforts to achieve upward mobility rather than his attempts to attain stardom in his sport. In this respect, Marty Supreme succeeds in drawing a rounded picture of a ruthlessly ambitious person. He may be compared to Budd Schulberg’s unsavory fictional character, Sammy Glick, in his novel What Makes Sammy Run?
Not an admirable character.