Marty Mauser is a motor mouth. He’s the fastest talker on the Lower East Side. In the old days they’d call him a Sammy Glick.
Marty has dreams of making it big, and luckily he has a skill: table tennis, aka ping pong. He plays a guerilla game and knows it can get him out of Brooklyn and onto an international stage. Ping pong championships made news when there were only three TV channels.
In Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” Timothee Chalamet is like his own ping pong ball, flying turbo charged back and forth around the world and even in his parents’ little house as he plots his triumphs by hook or crook. Nothing will stop him.
Marty was a real person. My friend, radio host Mark Simone, actually had dinner with Marty Reisman ononce at Patsy’s in New York. Reisman also appeared on David Letterman’s original show. He was still winning prizes in his later years. Marty was a larger than life guy who’s only now going to get his due in this wild tale that’s going to send Chalamet into the stratosphere and maybe even reignite Gwyneth Paltrow’s moribund career.
The movie is based on Reisman’s 1974 autobiography, “The Money Player,” so congrats to the producers for reviving a 50 year old book few knew about or remembered. Reisman was the 1958 and 1960 U.S. Men’s singles champion. In the end, he won 22 major table tennis titles from 1946 to 2002, including two United States Opens and a British Open.
But just watching ping pong wouldn’t be so interesting on screen. Safdie and Chalamet have created a frenetic, OCD, ADHD character who cannot stop talking or hustling potential wealthy patrons. He finds one in Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary who plays a rich boor married to a has been movie star whom Marty beds (Paltrow). And so the fun begins.
The big challenge is how Marty — who’s broke with no possibilities of earning anything in the normal world — will scrape together the money to get back and forth to international competitions. But we never fear it won’t happen since Marty can talk himself in and out of any situation no matter how much he has to debase himself.
“Marty Supreme” isn’t just about Marty. Safdie’s given him plenty of colorful supporting players including a real find in Odessa A’zion as his married best girlfriend and co-conspirator, Fran Drescher as his mother, Abel Ferrara as his stepfather, and plenty of colorful New Yorkers like John Catsimitidis, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sandra Bernhard.
The marketing on “Marty Supreme” is already out of control. In the movie, Marty keeps pitching the idea of orange ping pong balls instead of white ones so viewers can follow him easily. He eventually gets them made with his name on them. In real life, A24 has turned this into an opportunity gone crazy, stamped into the potential moviegoing audience’s psyche weeks in advance. The real Marty would definitely approve (it’s unclear if his estate gets a taste of the proceeds).
The bottom line is that Josh Safdie’s made an incredibly entertaining movie, full of fun, that ends on an uplifting note. Audiences won’t be able to get enough of 30 year old Chalamet, who will have to take measure to make sure he doesn’t blow his Oscar chances by being Marty in real life. A little Mauser goes a long way.
