{"id":367522,"date":"2025-12-24T12:58:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T12:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/367522\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T12:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T12:58:11","slug":"marty-supreme-has-a-loathsome-protagonist-i-loved-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/367522\/","title":{"rendered":"Marty Supreme has a loathsome protagonist. I loved it."},"content":{"rendered":"

In Slate\u2019s annual Movie Club<\/a>, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics\u2014for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri\u2014about the year in cinema.<\/p>\n

Hello pals,<\/p>\n

Dana, I enjoyed the eloquent case you\u2019ve mounted against the formation of the Safdie school of anxiety-inducing art, even as I simply cannot relate to it at all. I love an interesting abrasive experience at the movies, I have a thing for a compellingly repellent protagonist, and I have cherished many a film that acts downright hostile toward its viewers, something I should probably talk to a therapist about (and not the kind played so excellently by Conan O\u2019Brien). I don\u2019t think you\u2019re wrong that the Safdie school has picked up a cinephile cult following because it resonates with our precarious present, when everything feels as if it\u2019s teetering on the verge of collapse and the only way to move through the world is to join all the hustlers, scammers, and bullies already out there grubbing for whatever they can get their hands on. But to Bilge\u2019s point about how \u201cthe so-called moment lasts a century\u201d or, in this particular case, a decade or two, I actually fell for a nascent version of this aesthetic back in 2007, when I wandered into the SXSW premiere of Frownland, Ronald Bronstein\u2019s first and only directorial effort to date.<\/p>\n

In terms of wallowing in discomfort, Frownland makes Marty Supreme look like Forrest Gump, following the travails of a wet-lipped homunculus of a door-to-door salesman named Keith, played by a brilliant Dore Mann (who never made another movie), who is abused by everyone around him, but who is also an inherently grating presence himself, something he seems anxiously aware of and helpless to change. To watch the movie is to be torn between feeling for Keith and feeling as if you yourself want to scream at him in disgust. It summons a sensation akin to being locked in with your own self-loathing, which is the opposite of pleasant but which offers its own inexplicable satisfaction. The best way I can sum it up is by way of the scene in which Keith\u2019s high school\u2013age girlfriend, played by Mary Bronstein, drops by because she\u2019s upset. She flings herself down onto his pillows, then comes up with hives already forming on her cheeks to ask if they\u2019re made of down, which she\u2019s allergic to. Then she deliberately rubs her face all over the offending items. Sometimes, you just need to revel in the repulsive.<\/p>\n

Frownland, like Mary Bronstein\u2019s own sandpaper-on-skin debut Yeast, which came out a year later, was grouped with mumblecore even though they didn\u2019t have much in common tonally with a subgenre praised for its stripped-down naturalism. It isn\u2019t surprising to me that the Bronsteins\u2019 and the Safdies\u2019 sensibilities have eclipsed the legacy of the scene they came up through, which has more in common with streaming comedies and YouTube and TikTok videos these days than anything you tend to find in theaters. One of the exceptions is The Baltimorons, a low-key rom-com about a comedian in recovery and the divorced dentist he seeks out due to an unfortunately timed tooth emergency, a film that comes from another mumble-alum, Jay Duplass, and which I was happy to see Bilge give a shoutout to on his list<\/a>. It\u2019s a lovely, warm movie that played incredibly well with festival audiences, and in another era, I could see it lingering in art houses and becoming an indie hit through word of mouth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Dana Stevens
\n Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s New Movie Is Part of a Trend I Can\u2019t Stand
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But the era we exist in rewards yelling, not mumbling, in part because that\u2019s the only way to get heard over the roar of all the other things competing for your attention. I\u2019ve thought a lot in recent years about the onus that\u2019s put on movies to feel expansive in order to compel people to seek them out in theaters rather than just waiting for them to hit streaming\u2014often budgetarily, but also in scope, themes, length, urgency. When I was writing about One Battle After Another, my first giddy thought was, There\u2019s just so much movie here. But My Undesirable Friends, for all that it mainly consists of groups of journalists talking, has its own epic sweep, in addition to that 324-minute runtime. So does Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s The Secret Agent, even as it was born out of his previous film, the personal doc Pictures of Ghosts, remixing similar elements into a grand thriller-adjacent \u201970s saga that, halfway through, also takes an unexpected stutter step into the present. The Mastermind is the biggest film Kelly Reichardt has ever done, albeit in her own inimitable Kelly Reichardt way. The Naked Gun pitched itself, in a tongue-in-cheek way, as holding the fate of the studio comedy<\/a> in its box-office returns. Even Sex\/Love\/Dreams, for all its close-up intimacy, has the benefit of sprawling over three installments.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet Is Great in Marty Supreme. But His Greatest Performance May Be What He\u2019s Doing Outside It.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t necessarily want to frame this as a complaint (sorry to Dorothy Parker), because who doesn\u2019t appreciate a big swing and a bold show of ambition? But I do worry about what becomes of smaller stories, ones that struggle to get a toehold in an increasingly tough theatrical market and that lack the right algorithm-friendly hook to get traction once they hit streaming or VOD. I\u2019m not sure what solution there is to this pressure, if one even exists, so I guess I\u2019ll just take this opportunity to sing the praises of Ira Sachs\u2019 Peter Hujar\u2019s Day, a portrait in miniature that\u2019s no less wondrous. What I enjoy so much about the film, which is a mere 76 minutes long and consists entirely of photographer Peter Hujar (played by Ben Whishaw) talking about his day to the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), isn\u2019t just the portal it opens into New York City on Dec.\u00a018, 1974. It\u2019s the way it understands that the minutiae of someone\u2019s life can be fascinating, even (or especially) if it involves wrangling a truculent Allen Ginsberg and taking calls from Susan Sontag. Hujar\u2019s actual ruminations on ordering Chinese food and wanting to quit smoking are as worthy of their time on-screen as a giant action set piece, even if they\u2019re a tougher sell.<\/p>\n

Justin, since you just wrote about it<\/a>, and since I was a fan too, I wonder whether you also found Bradley Cooper\u2019s Is This Thing On? to feel like a film from another time simply because of its earnest and grown-up focus on two people trying to figure out what happened to their marriage. And maybe this is finally the opportunity for you to delve into Who by Fire, which sounds as if it fits a rich, complicated history into a weekend in a cabin in the woods.<\/p>\n

No such thing as a wasted day,<\/p>\n

Alison<\/p>\n

Read all of the entries in Slate\u2019s 2025 Movie Club<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Slate\u2019s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics\u2014for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[1036,88,180514,206],"class_list":["post-367522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-comedy","tag-entertainment","tag-movie-club-2025","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}