I finally went to see this yesterday, since Ivy

was spending the day at the dog sitter’s, so I had a little break.

There are two major things wrong with this movie, and they’re related:

1. It is not about anything. Marty just pursues his goal, no matter whom he hurts, and furthermore, we’re not even interested, let alone sympathetic.

2. The director, Josh Safdie, is a technician who’s exclusively concerned with flash and effect. The movie is loud, jarring, and ultimately off-putting (I walked out at the two-hour mark, after wanting to for almost the whole movie).

Realize here that I’m in the distinct minority on this movie. The critics loved it. Even the musical score, which is heavily 80’s-influenced and full of synthesizers, has drawn almost unanimous praise, but I hated it.

Moral Center

I happened to read this Substack post just after the movie, and it explained a lot.

Oversimplifying: In the 19th century, the moral framework of a novel was not even explained; it was just assumed. In Hemingway, and in Westerns, the code was still there but came entirely from within the individual rather than from the culture. Some more recent movies and novels feature an anti-hero, like Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone, but the anti-hero is still wrestling with a moral dilemma (how to save Jodie Foster or whether to take over the family crime business and kill people, respectively).

Marty is not wrestling with anything. Morality, if it even exists for him, died at Auschwitz. His motivation is not to prove himself to his father, get revenge for a murder (that standard plot device of kung-fu movies!), protect his family, or uphold standards. Those things might make him an interesting protagonist. Marty just wants to be the world’s best at ping-pong. I immediately didn’t care and that didn’t change over the course of the movie.

To banish a stereotype: I’m not merely saying I didn’t like Marty (although I didn’t). I’m saying I wasn’t interested in his quest. We don’t know why he wants to be the best, and we never see him actually working on his game, so how he got so good is a mystery.

Here’s an excerpt from that article on the moral imagination:

In the Western, the town is often weak, divided, or corrupt. The law may be compromised. The church may be absent. The community cannot be trusted to do what is right. Moral responsibility therefore collapses inward, onto a single figure willing to stand when others will not.

• The sheriff who stays.

• The gunman who won’t draw first.

• The man who bears the cost alone.

This figure still follows the Hero’s Journey. There is a call. There is an ordeal. There is sacrifice. But the return is altered. The hero does not reenter a morally coherent community that shares his values. Often, he must leave, the traditional “rides off into the sunset” trope. Sometimes, he dies. The journey completes, but it does not restore the world that made it possible.

This is the Hero’s Journey under strain.

Marty isn’t a Hero or an Anti-Hero. He’s just a hustler.

Critics’ Reviews

The critics all obsess about the message that the film sends:

• The Jewish Experience in America (that capitalization is as portentous as the phrase itself)

• The Jewish hustler, who commands the world rather than being abused by it. In particular, they cite an earlier movie by the same director: Uncut Gems.

None of them talk about its quality as a movie.

Movie producer Samuel Goldwyn said something about message pictures. The “Quote Investigator” website says the actual quote occurred this way:

Finally in Goldwyn’s office, the second writer outlined his idea. “Mr. Goldwyn,” he said, “this is a wonderful opportunity to point out labor’s battle against capitalism. You have a chance here to bring a great message to the people.”

Goldwyn looked at him. “Messages, messages,” he said. “From Western Union you get messages. From me you get pictures.”

The New York Times review rattles on about Marty and what he means:

In fact, Marty’s very existence is a bit of magical thinking. The real-life versions of Marty — Jewish table-tennis stars like his namesake Marty Reisman — are footnotes in sports history. Marty Mauser may not achieve the greatness he longs for, but he is a representative of a generation of Jews whose dreams didn’t quite come true but who deserve recognition all the same.

That’s the big-picture version of what Safdie and his cohorts are doing with “Marty Supreme.” In the narrative, they dig deeper into the knotty reality of what it would have been like for a 23-year-old Jewish American man in 1952.

Technical Mastery

If you watch the director, Josh Safdie, talking about Marty, he focuses exclusively on style: on capturing the real-life feel of a ping-pong match, and his “direct cinema” goals.

Here he is with Sean Baker, the director of Anora (on the right)). In the first five minutes, they slobber all over each other, but then they geek out over the real business of movie making, much of which is legitimately fascinating: lenses, light, the order of filming (wide vs. closeup scenes), how you choose extras, picking clothes, how you set up an indoor shot, where onscreen period-authenticity is critical, etc. He went to extraordinary lengths to find some very rare anamorphic lenses which were created in the early 1950’s, to get that period look.

Nowhere in this interview is there anything about Safdie’s artistic goals, or any sense of humility. He just wanted to make something cool. The entire movie projects an air of “Look at me! I’m a hot director!” There is no room to breathe, and the action scenes just seem thrown in and over-the-top.

The Pace

The editing pace of the film is hyper-kinetic, as the jargon goes. Maybe you like that sort of thing. I don’t. It might work in a music video but it doesn’t fit with a movie about the 50’s.

The Score

And now we come to what really ruined the movie for me: the musical score. It is way too loud, too intrusive, and completely wrong for the period.

“But this is what Josh Safdie intended!” you say, superciliously.

I know it was. It was a deliberate choice, but unfortunately it was a dumb one. His reasons were apparently to show that Marty was way ahead of his time. His ambition was futuristic, supposedly. Safdie even had an alternate movie in mind where Marty comes back in the 80’s as a grandfather.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. This is viewing the past in terms of the present, which is the cardinal sin of historical drama. It’s like the “Regency picture” where the women are all feminists chafing against the male-dominated society, and talking like a bunch of woke college students. The past is the past. It wasn’t like now.

Conclusion

You might well be impressed by all the Oscar nominations and decide this is one you need to see. I’d say wait until you can watch it at home and turn the volume down.