Timothée Chalamet plays Marty, a 1950s Jewish table-tennis champ hustling for fame and fortune in New York, in new film Marty Supreme.Elevation/Supplied
This Sunday, Jewish families around the world will begin celebrating Hanukkah, eight days and nights commemorating the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem following the Maccabean revolt against the occupying Seleucid Empire about 2,100 years ago. Traditionally, the holiday is marked by families lighting the menorah, spinning dreidels and consuming astronomical amounts of latkes. But going forward, I’ll suggest adding one more Hanukkah activity to the mix: a screening of Marty Supreme.
While the new movie is not set around Hanukkah nor does it explicitly reference the holiday – and it arrives in theatres on Christmas, just a few days after Hanukkah concludes this year – director Josh Safdie’s tale of Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a 1950s Jewish table-tennis champ hustling for fame and fortune in New York, burns with the relentless, fight-for-your-life spirit of the Maccabees.
Sporting a Star of David necklace and an arsenal of provocative quips on the tip of his tongue (“I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare. Look at me, I did it, I’m on top. I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat!”), Marty – loosely based on 1950s ping-pong star Marty Reisman – feels pulled from ancient history at the same time that he embodies the never-say-die defiance of the post-Second World War Jewish psyche. With apologies to Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, Marty Supreme is, thematically and spiritually, the greatest Hanukkah movie ever made.
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Not that Safdie and his writing and editing partner Ronald Bronstein were moved by the Jewish spirit while conceiving the project, exactly.
“The inspiration really stems from my 10-year journey making Uncut Gems and having this dream that no one believed in. If my enthusiasm and passion for the dream died, then the whole thing died,” Safdie says of his acclaimed 2019 gambling thriller, which he made alongside Bronstein and his younger brother, Benny Safdie.
“It was in tandem with that journey that my wife bought me this book about a young Jewish player from the Lower East Side who played at this place uptown run by the first Black business owner in the Times Square district. I really responded to these guys whose dreams no one respected.”
And yet, the big dreams of Marty Supreme are laced with the particular nightmares of Jewish history. One memorable scene finds Marty, while touring Giza with his vaudeville-like ping-pong act, clandestinely chipping away at one of the Egyptian pyramids, the chunk of ancient stone later gifted by Marty to his mother with the words, “We built this.”
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The wild yet tender moment – which I suppose also makes Marty Supreme the greatest Passover movie ever made (sorry, Charlton Heston, and, I guess, Uncut Gems, too) – was in fact inspired by the time that Josh and Benny visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
“We were at Dachau many years ago, and we wanted a piece of the barbed wire from the fence. So, we were like chipping it away and it was raining, and this family sees us in the rain and we’re like, ‘What are you looking at?’” Safdie says of the stunt, a kind of metaphorical middle finger to the Nazis. “I brought back pieces of barbed wire for all of my friends.”
Marty Supreme doubles down on this theme of Jewish resistance during a beautiful and haunting interlude, in which Marty listens to a fellow table-tennis athlete (played by Geza Rohrig, best known for his lead performance in the Auschwitz-set drama Son of Saul) describe his particular method for not only enduring the concentration camps, but also ensuring the survival of his fellow Jewish prisoners.
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“There was a player named Alojzy Ehrlich, who had that story that you see in the film. We changed it a little bit, but his life was spared at a concentration camp because they recognized him from a championship game in ’39,” says Safdie. “I do believe that, just like World War II was gasoline on the flame of the American dream, it was the survival of the Jews through the Holocaust that was the gasoline on the flame of Jewish pride. There was a sense of pride that they survived. And I think there is that element in the film.”
It is a point further underlined by an intense speech that Marty delivers toward the end of the film, in which he attempts to justify his more despicable tendencies by saying that no one outside of his tightly knit Jewish community could possibly understand his unrelenting, perhaps untenable, drive: “I grew up having to fight for everything.”
“It’s funny, that’s the scene where I blew out both of my knees because the way I direct, I have to be within like eight feet of the actors. So, I’m jamming myself into these little crevices while filming,” recalls Safdie, at the same time admitting that the scene crystallized a recurring problem he has with directing dialogue that he wrote.
“I see a script as like a hammer, and a hammer is just a tool to use. When I can just see the script, it bothers me. But as Ronnie [Bronstein] reminds me, we spent a lot of time writing that dialogue, so I’m happy that you’re pointing the scene out, because it is kind of a key moment. It’s about his purpose.”
If Marty Supreme is infused with a particular kind of Maccabee energy, then it also contains its own cracked-mirror version of the Seleucid Empire that so stymied the legendary Jewish warriors centuries ago. In this case, that side is personified by Marty’s nemesis, a carpetbagger tycoon named Milton that is played by none other than one of Canada’s greatest reality-TV villains, Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary.
“When you cast someone, you’re bringing every life experience that person has had to the soul of the movie. So if you cast Brad Pitt, he’s an amazing actor, but you’re bringing every Brad Pitt film with it, and you have to think about how to use that or not, how to destroy it or rebuild it,” Safdie says.
“And for Milton, I wanted someone who could bring a big, powerful kind of deep-state vibe. What about an entertaining businessman? We obviously have one in the White House. And then you think of Shark Tank. Even before we started talking about it, Ronnie goes, ‘Mr. Wonderful. That’s our guy.’”
As Marty – but definitely not O’Leary – might say: Chag Sameach, baby.
Marty Supreme opens in theatres Dec. 25.