I was a bit hesitant to see Marty Supreme because I was not a fan of Good Time and I could barely stand Uncut Gems.

I don’t mind the attempt to be authentic, but I just could not get into the constant shouting and talking on top of each other in endless discussions that never go anywhere. A little constraint goes far. We get the idea. Take Anora, for example, it has a similar approach, but Sean Baker knows when to pull back. Apparently at least one of the Safdie brothers has learned to do that as well. Actually, often in a very sharp way. When these situations happen, and they happen constantly, the dialogue is often cut short and we see the result. I like this approach.

But okay, what is this about? Marty Mauser plays table tennis and is very good at it. However, there isn’t much money in it, nor does he have any form his family. So, he hustles constantly to keep his career going. The movie basically covers one of these situations, where he needs to cross the Pond to play in a tournament in the UK, and after he returns home, he starts working to get to the World Championships. However, just before he needs to leave, he learns that he has been banned from play after leaving the association that runs these tournaments with a huge bill from his hotel stay, so he needs to get together the money to pay this as well, so he tries quite a few schemes in a relatively short time.

So, in many ways this is exactly the same movie as Good Time or Uncut Gems. You could argue that Safdie has mastered this on his third attempt. At the same time, there is a difference in these characters. Connie (in Good Time) seems to be a decent guy who is just trying to protect his brother, while Howard (in Uncut Gems) is a dirtbag (although he is clearly addicted to gambling). Marty is a piece of shit, but he is also very ambitious. It’s just that he has learned a certain mindset many people who have born into poverty have: they have a tendency to use what they have earned (or stolen) as soon as possible. This seems to apply to everything Marty ever gets and thus he keeps sabotaging himself.

I wonder how savvy Josh Safdie is regarding the world around him. He cast Gwyneth Paltrow as a retired actress and Kevin O’Leary as her husband, a rich pen manufacturer. The thing is that these two people are complete and utter pieces of shit who have no regard for anyone. Paltrow can sell her garbage products with impunity despite causing plenty of harm, and O’Leary seems to think he is somehow special just because he is rich, despite the fact that the most important quality one needs to be rich is to have less ethics than most people. Kevin O’Leary just plays a character that is basically himself in situations where we see him without the mask of civility he needs to use in public. Is there a message in this decision?

At the same time, Abel Ferrara, a cult director going as far back as the 70s, is cast here as a mobster, and Tyler the Creator cast as Marty’s old friend. Did they just take famous people and put them in their movie? Not that either of them is bad, but they just feel like they are from a very different worlds.

The thing I was most impressed with was the postwar attitudes shown in the movie. Especially O’Leary’s character seems to have strong feelings about this. He is not afraid to show his disdain towards a Jewish person who had been in a concentration camp, because in his words, his son died saving this man, even though his son died in the Pacific theater. He seems to have some disdain for the Japanese as well, but being your typical rich asshole, he is very much willing to overlook all of this, as long as he is making money. The Japanese, on the other hand, are looking to regain their national pride.

The soundtrack is pretty weird. Since the movie takes place in the 50s, the diegetic music is radio music from the period, but when it’s not diegetic, it’s always from the 80s. We get New Order, PIL, Tears for Fears and Alphaville among others. I don’t mind this, but I do wonder that if you are going anachronistic in this way, what is the point of staying in one specific period?

All in all, Marty is not exactly sympathetic. He doesn’t seem to have much regard for his sort-of-girlfriend (who is married). He does have affection to some of the people with whom he has a mutually beneficial working relationship. Otherwise he just uses people without a second thought and there is probably a good reason some of those people have a hard time trusting him. This is a feature, not a bug. The movie works much better this way than if it had tried to make Marty seem like a hero of some kind. He is a good protagonist in the sense that he can keep the plot going, but he is no good guy.

He does have a tendency to pull others into his schemes. I wonder how many lives he has ruined this way.

It is pretty long, but didn’t really feel like that, except that my poor bladder doesn’t enjoy 150 minute movies (I almost made it but little after the two hour point I just had to take a leak). Otherwise, there are no points where the movie starts to feel slow or repetitive.

It’s a pretty good movie. I can see why it got 9 Oscar nominations, including the big one. On the other hand, of the 7 of the Best Film nominees I’ve seen, I would rank this 6th. Not necessarily by a wide margin (I feel those movies are pretty close to each other).