Marty Supreme

Desperate for money, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) enlists his friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who’s married but likely carrying his unborn child, for a hopelessly long shot in an endless series of long shots. She calls up the shady Ezra (Abel Ferrara), whose dog Marty lost, then tracked down. When she asks for a finder’s fee of $2,000, Ezra balks, saying he got the dog for free. What if I was a doctor operating on your mother, Rachel improvises, would you refuse the surgery because you got your mother for free? “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Ezra says. Rachel immediately retorts: “Well, then I guess you don’t know anything about love.”

The “Supreme” in Marty Supreme has dual connotations. The obvious one is that here’s an underdog hero who will stop at nothing to achieve sporting supremacy. Marty Mauser will be an anti-hero, a hustler, a fraud, a narcissist and whoever it takes to summon his destiny of being world champion. Usually, such protagonists have to overcome the system with talent and grit. Here, the talent and grit are almost incidental. It is assumed he has those, so he’d rather game the system in the language of those who run it. As a Jewish shoe salesman in 1950s New York in a post-Holocaust world, he is accustomed to selling his identity more than proving it. America and table tennis are merely his mediums to be seen; he is neither patriotic nor a purist. If he’s an allegory for the entitlement of US capitalism and the illusion of the American Dream — where he upends multiple lives and puts everyone at risk to get what he wants — so be it.