Josh Safdie’s ping-pong nerve-jangler Marty Supreme races through ambition, vanity, humiliation, deception, soaring glory, crushing failure and the deathless allure of an 11th-hour comeback. All of this I recognise from hours of playing table tennis in our local park. But I recognise it, too, from nights at the theatre – not so much the plays themselves, perhaps, rather the stage as a crucible for the careers of those involved. The film’s subplot, about a Broadway play’s fraught opening, becomes an inspired parallel to Marty’s frantic story and Safdie’s wired style matches not just the adrenalised world of a tournament but also the sensation of stepping out on the stage. I’m a sucker for theatre scenes in films and Safdie’s are brief but certainly supreme.
Halfway into the movie, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser sneaks into New York’s Morosco theatre. That’s a real playhouse – or was, until it got demolished in the 80s. The film is set in 1952, the year that Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea was put on at the Morosco, which would soon have a hit with the premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Those plays about failing marriages find a counterpart in the film’s story of Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a silver-screen star of the 30s who is now making a risky return to acting in an overheated play bankrolled by her husband, Milton Rockwell.
Marty, as intent on seducing Kay as he is on raising funds to reach the table tennis world championships in Japan, watches rehearsals from the wings. Kay has been cast as a mother who is quarrelling with her teenage son – shades here of Marty and his own mum – but the scene doesn’t take off and Kay chastises the performance of her co-star, Troy. “It’s like watching someone jerk off with no lubricant,” she fumes in one version of the screenplay. Kay continues, complaining: “I wasn’t allowed to act” – recognising that great theatre, not unlike ping-pong, is about responding to your fellow player in the moment with lightning-quick thinking.
That rhythmic back and forth makes one-to-one sports their own kind of conversation. Watching the scene, I remembered what Christine Baranski told me last year about delivering Tom Stoppard’s lines: “You could just send a sentence over with a certain degree of top spin and it would delight an audience.”
Kay, as a veteran performer, has a built-in bullshit detector and recognises that Marty is himself endlessly playing roles to get what he wants. As she tells her publicist, Marty wants to be an actor but he’s just not very good at it. The play within the film is essential to Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein’s interest in artifice and authenticity – Marty can be as fake as the costume jewellery he thinks is real but the closing scene in the movie shows him, finally, at his most emotionally honest, after his various performances as trickster, salesman and sportsman. And he proves a good enough actor to give some sharp advice to Troy about how to handle a knife in the rehearsal scene: “If you’re going for phoney, at least do it with some flair!”
Marty understands a broader sense of theatrics and spectacle, from how to serve juicy material to the press (like Chalamet himself) to which flamboyant shots can whip up a crowd. Yet it is with horror that Marty initially reacts to the suggestion to “stage” a game for money in which he would lose and it is with disdain that he reflects on becoming a vaudeville sideshow with a Harlem Globetrotters-style half-time routine.
The film moves from the glamorous pizzazz of the theatre and big arena tournaments to their crummy backstage realities. Eventually we proceed from rehearsals to opening night at the Morosco, which captures all the highs and lows of the film. The curtain goes up with a full house, including a transfixed Marty in the stalls, but hours later, as champagne flows at the aftershow party, news comes straight from a printer at the New York Times that the review is rotten.
One of Safdie’s inspirations for the film was Budd Schulberg’s 1941 New York novel What Makes Sammy Run? which has a similarly caffeinated pace and whose eponymous antihero is as much of a hustler as Marty. That novel is narrated by a theatre journalist and it is a drama critic here who brings Kay a defeat as humiliating as Marty’s at the hands of the triumphant player Koto Endo – or at the hands of Rockwell, when he vindictively spanks Marty with a bat.
If the film is primarily about the surge of youth, embodied by the relentlessly driven Marty – as eager as all those title-sequence sperm – it is also wise to the confines of older age, particularly for female actors. We never hear exactly how Kay has been critiqued in the film – though a misogynistic whiff of 1950s male criticism is easy to imagine. Certainly the accompanying scene, in which she and Marty are caught in flagrante in Central Park, is presented as a performance with an audience of two (the police) who delight in cutting her down to size afterwards.
“Take your stinkin’ seats,” yells Troy’s character as he throws furniture about at the start of the play. There won’t be many more chances for audiences to do that – a scathing New York Times review will be the death knell for the show and for Kay’s stage career. She has more to lose than Marty and retreats in defeat. For him, there’ll always be another shot. For her, it’s game over. A bitter truth from writers who know what’s at stake on stage as well as in sport.
Chris Wiegand is the Guardian’s Stage editor
The Guardian
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