It feels more like providence than serendipity to note that the recently sundered Safdie Brothers filmmaking team has now produced two movies about real-life sports figures whose forceful personalities up-end their competitive effectiveness. However, in the case of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (which opens in Japan in May), the titular MMA fighter’s problems as an athlete have no venal attributes. If anything, his drawback is that he’s too compassionate for someone whose job is to maim and mutilate his opponents. Josh Safdie’s protagonist, Marty Mouser (Timothée Chalamet), on the other hand, is a hotshot table tennis player whose win-at-all-costs sensibility is not only too intense for the powers that run the sport, but dangerous to all he comes into contact with, including loved ones and sponsors. Anyone who has seen a Safdie Brothers film will agree their aesthetic is highly visceral, and what’s perhaps ironic when you compare their respective solo debuts is that the ping-pong movie is a lot more driven and violent than the one about the cage fighter. 

Mouser is based on actual table tennis champion Marty Reisman, a larger-than-life character who didn’t quite make his chosen sport into an American obsession despite a heroic effort to do so; and it is this obsession alone that Safdie is interested in. Marty’s closest cinematic cognate is the title character of the 1974 Canadian film, based on a Mordecai Richler novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, who, as played by a young Richard Dreyfuss, is the ultimate Jewish hustler, a motor-mouthed con man who always needed to stay one step ahead of his crazy schemes in order for them to work the way they were supposed to. We first meet Marty in the early 50s as an effective Manhattan shoe salesman in his uncle’s store, banging his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) between the shelves in the back room right before he hits up his uncle for an advance of funds to get him to the world table tennis championships in Europe. The movie immediately sets up the character as a slave to appetite, and when things don’t always go the way Marty wants them to go, he invariably comes up with a wilder, more desperate plan to get what he needs, and in almost every case someone is screwed. Marty barely makes it to Europe, where he immediately blows his chances by offending the worldwide ping pong organization, seducing a washed-up Hollywood actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose rich husband he boldly hopes will bankroll his dreams, and then losing very ceremoniously to a deaf Japanese star (real life champion Koto Kawaguchi) in a final that exposes him publicly as a loud-mouthed boor and reduces him to playing the heel in theatrical exposition matches as a warmup to the Harlem Globetrotters. The rest of the movie is one breathless attempt after another for Marty to redeem himself as not only a real champion, but a human being worthy of respect, and it becomes supremely clear early on that he may accomplish the former but never the latter. He’s just too pathologically willful.

Just as Marty lacks the ethical facility to understand how his machinations ultimately harm the people who admire and rely on him, Safdie lacks the capacity for restraint that might make Marty’s story more nuanced as a portrait of blind ambition. The difference is that Safdie is endeavoring to make a movie, not a personal impression, and while his creative bullheadedness is reportedly the quality that prompted the split with his brother (over Josh’s use of an underage actor in a sex scene, no less), he’s obviously the one whose more responsible for the relentless momentum of movies like Uncut Gems and Good Time. Marty Supreme not only fits snugly into this oeuvre, but outstrips it by a mile. 

In English, Japanese and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shibuya Parck White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Marty Supreme home page in Japanese

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