A Fierce Debate Over the Merits of 'Marty Supreme'

"Marty Supreme" is the New York City movie of the season, and Hell Gate's staffers are ready to weigh in with competing takes. The first comes from Adlan Jackson, while Esther Wang adopts a different view.

I Saw the Magic of "Marty Supreme"

I hungered for discourse after walking out of Josh Safdie's table tennis epic "Marty Supreme," so I listened to a roundtable discussion on NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour." "You're rooting against him until the very end," the show's host, critic Linda Holmes, declared of Marty Mauser, the film's titular protagonist (Timothée Chalamet), loosely based on a real life player called Marty Reisman. The question of whether you're "rooting for" the protagonist is as good a question as any for a sports movie, but I knew I disagreed: In the end, I was unquestionably rooting for Marty. I knew I had every reason not to, including the ones the critics listed: white privilege, bad boyfriend, common criminal. 

To the film's credit, I think "Marty Supreme" is asking for responses like that quite directly. It's asking what we think of ambition these days, wrapped up in a white Jewish kid in his early 20s, less than a decade after the Holocaust, an American avatar, a "narcissist" as he's called, in one of several hazy anachronisms that the film leans way into. What do we think about a guy like Marty Mauser?