Uncut Ping-Pong

A Review of Marty Supreme

The Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems is a brilliant film that creates a new form of cinema as it hurtles its way through a day in the life of its main character as he repeatedly self-destructs, while also damaging or destroying the lives of others. Josh and Benny Safdie get the most out of their anti-hero Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), whose manic intensity matches the film’s pacing. I walked out with my head spinning, still in its spell like the best films I’ve seen.

Since Uncut, the brothers have gone their separate ways, and Josh’s new film, Marty Supreme, has been nominated for nine Academy Awards, the most except for Sinners and One Battle after Another. Marty Supreme has a lot going for it, including Timothée Chalamet’s intense performance as Marty, the supporting performances by Odessa A’zion as his married, long-suffering, but accomplice girlfriend, and Gwyneth Paltrow as his actress fling. There are also the seamless, thrilling ping pong scenes and the propulsive direction, moving Marty from one tumultuous predicament to another, repeatedly making us wonder how he will get of out this one.

The film effectively weaves the real—his Brooklyn origins, his tour with the Harlem Globetrotters from 1949 to 1951 and his consummate hustling, with the fictional – his humiliating relationship with a businessman (Shark Tank’s ’s Kevin O’Leary), his affair with the actress, and his misadventures with a mobster’s dog.

But for those of us who saw Uncut Gems, the latter is Marty Supreme’s weakness because it’s pretty much the same film – following a charming, manic, self-destructive guy through a day or so’s misadventures. The diamonds/ping pong distinction is not enough to distinguish them, nor are the vastly different resolutions.

The two films also have in common a deep sense of the Jewishness of their main characters, though the latter is much more central in Marty. Uncut is set around the New York diamond business, a heavily Jewish industry, and Howard stops in on a family Seder in the middle of his frenetic journeys. But Uncut is removed by decades from W.W. II and the Holocaust, while Marty is just 5-7 years after those events. In a high cringe scene, Safdie has Marty tell a Holocaust joke in front of an arrogant gentile businessman but then pivots to a harrowing story of survival and incredible selflessness experienced by his playing partner. Marty says “I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” and part of his drive is to keep proving this in the post-war period. But this drive goes beyond this and is integral to his relentless but destructive personality.

Safdie knew he had a great subject in Marty based on the real ping pong champ, Marty Reisman, who won tournaments into his sixties. He was the Bobby Riggs of ping-pong – lulling unsuspecting marks into large bets, and betting on himself playing with outrageous objects like frying pans as a paddle. But betting on himself landed him in trouble with the ping pong authorities. When he was 19, a table tennis association official named Graham Steenhoven had him forcibly removed from a national tournament for betting $500 on himself. More than two decades later, Steenhoven led the U.S. table tennis team on its “ping-pong diplomacy” tour of China.

Marty was not invited.

Around the same time, in 1971, I had a relatively close encounter with Marty at his own ping pong club, located in a basement beneath a Red Apple Supermarket on West 96th St., just off Broadway. The place was a ping-pong and celebrity mecca in the ‘60s and ‘70s, attracting actors and writers like Dustin Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Zero Mostel. Even Bobby Fischer hung out there on occasion. Marty was there the night I visited and was playing a hotly contested game at a nearby table. A rules controversy arose that’s echoed by a scene in Marty Supreme. For the whole story of my encounter, see Me and Marty Supreme.

It’s not a critic’s job to tell film makers they should have made a different film that the one they made. But it is appropriate to point out that the film he made is another version of his previous film, substituting one charismatic, reckless character for another.