If you want to understand America, and understand why much of the rest of the world wants to be us but also can’t stand us sometimes, you need to see the new movie “Marty Supreme.”
Loosely based on the life of Marty Reisman, whose skill at table tennis gained him a certain amount of fame in the 1950s, the movie gives us Marty Mauser, who is convinced he’ll be the next great American athlete-superstar. That the scrawny, wiry kid’s sport is table tennis, about which most Americans don’t care, is just one more obstacle for Marty to overcome. And “Marty Supreme,” if it is about anything, it is about just how many obstacles Marty must overcome — most of them self-imposed.
The thing about Marty, portrayed brilliantly by Timothée Chalamet, is that even though he’s a fantastic table tennis player and an undeniably charming self-promoter, he’s also a relentless pain in the neck. That applies to anyone who might make the mistake of caring for him, and anyone who doesn’t, for that matter.
Marty has four goals: to be rich, to be the best, to be famous … and to be famous for being rich and the best. He careens through the world with heedless abandon in pursuit of these goals, treating everyone he comes across as supporting characters in his hero’s journey, to be discarded as needed. These include his married childhood best friend (Odessa A’zion), with whom he has been having an affair; the grande dame actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) both fascinated and repulsed by him; the ultra-wealthy patron who dislikes Marty but sees a business use for him (memorably played by Kevin O’Leary, known as Mr. Wonderful on “Shark Tank”); and, basically, anyone else unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Marty is driven partly by his talent but mostly by his steadfast belief that everything’s going to work out for him, no matter how little he plans ahead, no matter how many mistakes he makes, no matter how many people he steps on. Marty refuses to acknowledge the possibility that he could fail — “that doesn’t even enter my consciousness,” he says at one point. His refusal to consider defeat is a kind of armor, or maybe a get-out-of-jail-free card. No matter what he does in the short term, it will simply be the backstory to the tale of his ultimate victory and dominance.
What’s fascinating — and this is largely due to a magnificent performance from Chalamet — is that despite Marty’s incorrigible narcissism, you can’t help but root for him: He hungers so badly for it all that you just want to give it to him so you can both move on: He wears you down, just like he wears down everyone else in his life. And he is powered by that deeply American idea that he is special, that no one else has the manifest destiny he does, that this is what he was born to do: To deny him is to deny fate itself.
And yet the movie is also deft enough to quietly make the argument that this personality trait, as destructive as it is, also has its own merit. In this main-character narcissism, there is, in fact, some mad-genius truth — that the true winners in the world are those who, for better or worse, simply will not relent. Eventually, they push hard enough to do something new, or innovative, or special, or, dare one say, great.
The movie subtly makes the case that the indomitable refusal to accept bad news, the ability to toss adversity aside even in the face of rational common sense, is its own sort of superpower. If you can convince yourself of your indestructibility, maybe you can convince others of the same thing. The way to be rich, to be famous, to be the best, to win, is simply never to stop. Never stopping means never having a moment to apologize.
“Marty Supreme” doesn’t so much endorse this worldview as accept it, in a certain way, as self-evident in America. If you want to make it as badly as Marty wants to (a Jewish Lower East Side kid, he even has the chutzpah to claim he is the “ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat”), this is what it takes: no self-examination, no harboring of doubts, no admission of weakness, no regrets.
Marty, like the country he adores, believes he can do anything and will not be stopped, because he is exceptional. Is he right? Marty believes that if he doesn’t stop, if he pushes and pushes and pushes, it doesn’t matter if he’s right. Because he’ll win. Which will make him right. It is as succinct a summation of America — now and, really, forever — as I’ve seen in movies in a long, long time.
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