When the Coen Brothers split up in 2019 and made separate movies, it was illuminating what projects each of them chose. Joel Coen, the elder brother, made a black and white adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Ethan Coen, the younger brother, made two screwball dark comedies featuring lesbians and starring Margaret Qualley, Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don’t. One could discern if one chose what part of their shared canon came from the more serious dramatic brother and what part came from the more quirky comedic brother. Not surprisingly, you need them both to have that signature Coen Brothers dramatic quirkiness. Hopefully their split is temporary.
The split up of the Safdie Brothers, writer/directors of Good Time and Uncut Gems, is equally as revealing. In the fall of last year, Benny Safdie, the younger, made his directorial debut with The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A few months later, Josh Safdie, the elder, made his directorial debut with Marty Supreme starring Timothee Chalamet. Both are ostensibly sports movies in that they are about athletes. Beyond that they couldn’t be more different and reveal that in the brother’s previous partnership, it was most likely Josh Safdie who was the dominant creative force. Mary Supreme is far more like Good Time and Uncut Gems in writing, direction, and style than The Smashing Machine is. The most interesting thing though is that The Smashing Machine is a better movie and contains what Good Time and Uncut Gems had but Marty Supreme does not: an emotional core and a general point. Or to put it another way, what Good Time, Uncut Gems, and The Smashing Machine have in common is that they ultimately have something to say. Good Time, Uncut Gems, and Marty Supreme are alike in that the stories have the same subject matter and style, they all energetically swirl around morally dubious hustlers in New York City.
What is Marty Supreme about? It stars Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser, as an aspiring athlete in 1950s New York City (I think I recognize these streets from where Marlon Brando was shot in the first Godfather movie). Since Marty Mauser looks like Timothee Chalamet, his choices of sports are limited. Here, he plays table tennis, an otherwise obscure sport that is just being organized into international competitions.
Marty needs money for the airfare to get to certain competitions. Unfortunately, for reasons unexplained, his mother wants him to be a shoe salesman (or something) and keeps stealing his money. Also, when he does get to the first competition in London, he does not win and thus does not win the prize money and fame he was counting on. That competition involves a surprise entry by a Japanese player who is his opposite in personality. He is stoic where Marty is epicurean, calm where Marty is frenetic, humble where Marty is egotistical. The movie is at its most interesting when they spar off for the first time. This occurs in the movie’s first hour and Marty loses. True to form, Marty is a sore loser and accuses the other player of cheating.
We think there will soon be some sort of rematch. But this does not happen for a long time. Instead, Marty’s mom steals his airfare money again and Marty spends the next hour and a half on various side hustles trying to get to the next tournament in Tokyo. These schemes all work until they don’t and by the two-hour mark he is no closer than he was at the hour mark. Marty is also a giant asshole (not unlike Robert Pattinson in Good Time and Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems) that pisses off everyone he meets, thereby burning every bridge and effectively ending his dreams by the time his rematch with the Japanese player starts. He wins that rematch, but by then it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses.
The best thing that can be said about this movie is the characterizations. Any given scene is well-written and well-acted. In particular, Timothee Chalament’s verbal spats with the financier Milton Rockwell (played by Kevin O’Leary), Owner of Rockwell Ink, who may or may not want to be his corporate sponsor, are especially memorable. Marty Mauser also has an affair with Kay Stone (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), wife of Milton Rockwell, and they too have verbal spats. You think at some point Milton Rockwell will find out about the affair but the movie is too busy for that. I hear the Oscars have created a new category for Best Casting. I’m not sure what that really amounts to, but I would think this movie has some sort of edge given all the especially non-movie-star-looking Jewish actors in supporting roles.
The movie is too long to end up where it ends up. If I had to choose the removal of one of the sideplots, I would omit the one about the guy with a lot of cash who gets injured when a bathtub falls on his arm and he sends Marty on a mission to bring his dog to a veterinarian but the dog gets lost when Marty hustles a bowling alley with a black cabbie and there is a conflagration at a gas station, but then they find the dog at a farmhouse across the street the next day but the owner is violently opposed to giving the dog back and so various people die of gunshot wounds in a shocking and gratuitous fashion. This movie would have been better without all that if only because it would have been shorter.
I haven’t even gotten to the subplot about Marty knocking up another man’s wife, Rachel Mizler (played by Odessa A’Zion) and her being like eight months pregnant during some of the more violent scenes about the dog. But what does it matter? What was the point of this movie?
It is not that I am discouraging the subject matter. Good Time was about a petty criminal, but then he met someone even stupider than he was and by the end of the movie, it felt like he had turned a corner. Uncut Gems, though the main character was reckless and adulterous, had an ingenious scheme to turn himself and his gambling debts around. It was exciting to see him try to pull off. What is the redeeming value of Marty’s story? Josh Safdie misses his brother. Benny may have been able to come up with something.
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