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\n Photo: A24\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Marty Supreme.<\/p>\n
All throughout Marty Supreme<\/a>, things happen that are hard to believe. Here\u2019s an incomplete list of Marty Mauser\u2019s (Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/a>) high jinks: sleeping with movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), falling through the floor of his motel room in a bathtub and not being injured at all, blowing up a gas station and seemingly killing a bunch of people. Marty gets away with basically everything \u2014 theft, manslaughter, international incident \u2014 with a flippant \u201cI love you\u201d and a hasty retreat. But nothing in Josh Safdie\u2019s new film is as far-fetched as its final minutes, which ask us to believe that Marty would, at the sight of his newborn child, turn into a blubbering mess of emotional overflow. This guy? The movie never gestures at Marty having enough emotional interiority to be moved by suddenly becoming a father. The film\u2019s conclusion is as much of a cop-out as Marty\u2019s own exits.<\/p>\n Much of Marty Supreme plays out like a critique of American exceptionalism, powered by Chalamet\u2019s most bombastic performance yet<\/a>. Chalamet plays<\/a> Marty as Icarus, burning brighter and faster as he chases his dream of being the best Ping-Pong player in the world; practically no one else is convinced of his fated success except for him. As Marty schemes to make his way to the British Championship, he\u2019s an avatar of everything wrong with the American belief that we\u2019re somehow inherently better than anyone else and therefore can do whatever we want \u2014 he steals money from his relatives, spends money he doesn\u2019t have because he believes he deserves a luxury-hotel stay, throws temper tantrums during matches he\u2019s losing, and insults the table-tennis federation\u2019s representatives. He\u2019s a typical Safdie<\/a> protagonist<\/a> in that he makes reckless, selfish choices that negatively affect other people and has no regrets about them whatsoever. He has no filter, and no limits, and he bounces back from every obstacle like the Ping-Pong ball he paints orange and tries to sell to fund his journey.<\/p>\n This all feels completely detached from how filmmaker Josh Safdie has been describing Marty Supreme, and how it\u2019s been marketed<\/a>, as a movie dedicated<\/a> to dreamers. Safdie seems to see himself in Marty; in an interview<\/a> with GQ, he describes the difficulty of making Uncut Gems in a way that evokes the character: \u201cAnd when someone doesn\u2019t take your dream seriously, it makes you believe in it a lot harder because every moment that you aren\u2019t being believed in, every moment that that dream isn\u2019t being realized, there\u2019s an urgency. The dream is deflating and the dream could die. So every moment becomes a do-or-die with that dream and you have to get as many people to believe in it as possible.\u201d That\u2019s exactly what Marty does as he hustles, double-crosses, and debases himself to make it to Japan to take on table-tennis champion Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) in a rematch. He runs from the cops, gets shot at by people he owes money to, and is publicly spanked by Kay\u2019s millionaire husband, ink entrepreneur Milton Rockwell (Kevin O\u2019Leary<\/a>). Every scene is another challenge for Marty to bust through like the Kool-Aid Man, and Safdie intends for us to marvel at the intensity of his dream and the purity of his ambition.<\/p>\n The issue with Marty Supreme isn\u2019t that it\u2019s about a protagonist who is probably a bad person. It\u2019s that the film never slows down long enough to suggest that Marty has the ability to reflect on anything. Without that, how can we believe that Marty would ever look upon someone other than himself and feel anything at all?<\/p>\n Even Rachel (Odessa A\u2019zion), Marty\u2019s neighbor who has been in love with him her whole life, rarely registers as a blip in his priorities. Marty has a tendency to casually tell people he loves them after they do something for him, but when Rachel says it back to Marty, she means it; she\u2019s been besotted with him forever. She sticks by him even after he gets her pregnant and denies being the father, and even after he suggests she give the baby up for adoption. Rachel is presented simultaneously as Marty\u2019s tether to his \u201creal\u201d life and the person whose admiration buoys him most, but that relationship is so lopsided \u2014 so weighted toward Rachel\u2019s endless defense of Marty and her willingness to do whatever for him, including hitting someone with her car and setting up a bizarre ransom plot \u2014 that Marty\u2019s affection always feels explicitly dependent on her belief in him rather than any genuine interest he has in her. That\u2019s all part of what makes the film\u2019s finale feel so inauthentic to the character we\u2019ve spent two hours with and so frustratingly redemptive.<\/p>\n The scene plays out like this. Marty gets to Japan on Rockwell\u2019s dime by agreeing to play an exhibition match against Endo, but when he learns that the table-tennis federation is sticking to its decision to ban him and won\u2019t let him play in the next championship, he realizes that the friendly game against Endo is the only way to regain his pride. So through some bluster and bravado, he goads Endo into playing a real match against him and wins, of course, to the shock of the Japanese crowd and the delight of the spectating American soldiers. After flying back to the U.S., Marty then goes straight to the hospital, where Rachel has had their baby. He announces himself as \u201cthe father,\u201d suddenly embracing a role he had previously rejected; goes to Rachel\u2019s bedside, kissing her and telling her he\u2019ll never leave her again; and then he goes to see their baby. In what\u2019s meant to be an emotionally climactic finale, Safdie frames Marty\u2019s meeting of the child with a close-up on Chalamet\u2019s face, which immediately bursts into tears once he makes eye contact with his child. The camera looks up at Chalamet\u2019s face as if from the newborn\u2019s perspective, and Safdie holds the shot for so long as if to convince us of Marty\u2019s own rebirth. Here is Marty taking responsibility, the film seems to be saying, and from this moment on he is going to change. When I saw the film with an audience, I heard multiple people describe this as a happy ending. But the arrival of a baby Marty didn\u2019t want isn\u2019t enough to realign the priorities of a narcissist, nor does it redeem all the solipsistic things he did before abruptly deciding he wants to be a father after all \u2014 who\u2019s to say Marty doesn\u2019t see this child as just an extension of himself and cares about it only as further self-obsession?<\/p>\n Curiously, Josh isn\u2019t the only Safdie brother who has portrayed the arrival of a child as inherent validation of a person who hasn\u2019t done any work to make themself better. Benny Safdie resolved his Showtime series, The Curse<\/a>, the same way. In The Curse, Emma Stone plays Whitney, an HGTV host who has made her name via allegedly eco-sustainable \u201cpassive\u201d houses that are actually ugly gentrified blights on lower-income neighborhoods. She\u2019s petty, pushy, and driven to be famous; she treats her dopey husband, Asher (played by series co-creator Nathan Fielder), like a sycophantic pet, not unlike how Marty treats Rachel. After nearly an entire season of them both being terrible, selfish people, Whitney gives birth to her and Asher\u2019s first child in the series finale.<\/a> The moment that she sees her son, she\u2019s beatific, proud, awed, overwhelmed \u2014 and, The Curse suggests, ready to abandon her old ways and devote her life to her child. The Curse lingers on her smile as if to recognize her as an improved person, and it\u2019s a mirror of the way Marty Supreme depicts Marty as he holds his own newborn. Both endings suggest that a baby will force these people to change their ways for the better. That kind of fantasy of redemption left my eyes, unlike Marty\u2019s or Whitney\u2019s, drier than dry.<\/p>\n