Christmas with Marty Supreme

Afternoon matinees are almost as much of a Christmas tradition as sleigh-rides. Maybe more. On the day after Christmas, we decided to get out of the house before the bad weather arrived and see a film. There’d been a lot of hoopla surrounding the Christmas Day release of the latest Timothy Chalamet film, Marty Surpreme, but we didn’t know anything about that. We’d seen the previews. The movie looked good.

And it was good. It has lots of razzle-dazzle, a relentless pace, an array of memorable minor characters, and a seemingly endless stream of plot twists. Enormous effort has been given to recreating the look and feel of New York City circa 1950. And Chalamet “nails” the central figure, a young shoe salesman (and ping-pong hustler), who thinks he can become world champion, if only he can drum up the funds to fly to London for the tournament.

The soundtrack is also good—and loud—though I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs.  Hits like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and “I Have the Touch” were prominently featured; I’d never heard of them. Perry Como and Fats Domino are also on the playlist. (Those two I’m familiar with.)

There are patches of violence in the film, and Marty himself steps on a lot of toes in his pursuit of personal glory. Well, so does Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Come to think of it, what about Orson Welles in Citizen Kane? And how about the Jack Nicholson characters in a range of films from Five Easy Pieces to Chinatown and The Last Detail?

Marty has a good deal of youthful charm, and he seems to have a lot of friends at the local ping-pong parlor. In short, he isn’t a total jerk. Perhaps we can give him an added measure of sympathy second-hand by way of his sometime girlfriend, Rachel, played with anguished depth by Odessa Azion.

Ping-pong isn’t much of a spectator sport these days, but it was big in the early 1950s, and the tournament scenes are fun to watch. They’re given added political dimension due to the fact that the player Marty most wants to beat is Japanese. Marty also cracks a few Holocaust jokes along the way that are in very bad taste, but defends himself by arguing, “Hey. I’m Jewish. I’m Hitler’s worst enemy. And I’m going to be world champion.” 

But the political touches are minor, and the film has none of the “camp” flavor we find in works by the Coen Brothers. No, Marty Supreme is a vivid throwback to the days when a rollicking good romance/adventure story was all that an audience required.