Marty Supreme

Bluesky

A table tennis ball is possessed of a peculiar resilience. Ignore, for the moment, the ways that regulation and practice define a range of coefficients of restitution, a specific weight, a diameter which was increased (and in the process effectively switched to metric) after the millennium's Olympics. Pass over how contrast and circumstances would make seemingly small differences significant. Think instead, indeed recall if memory allows, how ephemeral they are. My abiding recollection from uncounted games in high school gymnasiums is not the hollow ring of rapid bouncing across somewhat level surfaces but the odd ball broken and empty. What had once been struck and recovered and soared and spun and recoiled and returned and snapped and slapped and smashed and rallied and rushed lies wrecked.

A table tennis ball can take so much until it can't. Marty is not alone in his similarity. Audiences will likely also be divided by being in that club. The film that bears his name is less forgiving than those in his life, unfolding on a trajectory as much biological as ballistic. I adored it, finding in its fastness and looseness a thrill and tension that makes the rollercoaster of Uncut Gems feel like a more sedate fairground ride. While this merry-go-round of mayhem had me dancing to its tune like the waltzers or the teacups it won't be to everyone's taste. More's the pity for them, as Marty is indeed supreme.

Supremely confident, to start with. Timothee Chalamet's twitchy charm doesn't always work; the weirding ways of Wonka were more compelling that dourer doings in Dune, but Marty has it in spades. A key phrase of the lead-up to The Big Short was 'irrational exuberance' and Marty has it in spades. Whatever creek he'd find himself up, one could be sure that he'd have a paddle. He's as equipped by a performance that draws every ounce and advantage from Josh Safdie's direction, co-writing with Ronald Bronstein. Joining those returning, Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, among those scoring. A soundtrack split, roughly, in three. The Fifties, naturally, where we lay our scene. The Eighties, unnaturally, and everything else.

Anachronism, an injection of modernity. In The Brutalist it is a shipping container, only very approximately contemporary, one that in its peregrinations before arriving in the lee of that Golgothan site in Doylestown carried natural gas canisters (uncapped) towards Bolivia. It is an intrusion of futurity, a rectilinear outcrop transposed in the fourth dimension. Marty Supreme doesn't just do so with the strains of Alphaville or locations like London, New York, Paris, Munich; it's in what everybody's talking about. Pop music aside it's in the language: paramedic, unibrow. There's a reference to DNA but in the wider when of Marty's era that's something formless. Rosalind Franklin's x-ray crystallography has not yet brought structure to the substance of substance.

Josh Safdie's film's structure doesn't require quite the same effort and its authorship isn't perhaps as borrowed. It will flash back and across and leap from place to place as surely as those balls and whatever meaning they carry do, and while we might not follow it in flight we can deduce its course from where it bounces. Outcome implies origin. From the off, and in directions unexpected. 2001, after all, just starts with some apes. Uncut Gems is a clear ancestor and the passage of time does different things here. Allows growth, though perhaps not of character. The natural, the naturalistic, the unnatural, the supernatural.

There's a single line delivered by an untrained actor that does more to cast doubt than any reflection or its lack would allow. Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank and Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow would make uneasy bedfellows for anyone else. Rapper Tyler The Creator, Sandra Bernhard, Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette wouldn't make sense anywhere else. I'm not convinced that anywhere other than real life it'd make sense anyway. Everything is true, especially the parts that aren't. This is the magic of movies.

On more than one occasion Marty sets out to have a little fun, and between Schroedinger's armed robbery and infidelity and stage productions and service (room, tennis, personal) there are conversations that end "I love you," and many more that should have stopped long before that declaration. Marty himself is like that paradoxical ping pong tremendously self aware and completely oblivious. When he says that he does not wish to be "reduced to acting like circus clowns," that a particular revelation would "undercut the drama," the line between what Marty and his eponymous story know about themselves gets ever more complex.

Football legend (and Smiths-song muse) Bill Shankly told a story in an interview that when told "to [him] football is a matter of life or death," he'd replied "listen, it's more important than that." Table tennis doesn't require as many men to shift as a piano but the names I've mentioned are a fraction of a cast and crew that includes magicians, puppeteers, fontsmiths and more. Each time the paddle moves it will impart new direction, fresh impetus. At the end there will be a result dependent upon external judgement. That differently fragile ball will move miles across the table and end up more or less where it started. Some will end like those errant balls, crushed, if not deflated. The winning point for others will be the last. Some will roar, and cheer, elated.

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