Marty Supreme’s ping pong grip is exciting but the stage plot really breaks it | stage

CMarty Supreme, the nerve-racking ping-pong player played by Osh Safdie, races through ambition, vanity, humiliation, deceit, soaring glory, crushing failure and the timeless allure of an eleventh-hour comeback. I realized all this after hours of playing table tennis in our local park. But I also realize it from nights spent at the theater – perhaps not the plays themselves, but the theater as the crucible for the careers of those involved. The film’s subplot, revolving around the charged opening of a Broadway play, becomes an inspiring parallel to Marty’s frenetic story and Safdie’s wiry style matches not only the adrenaline-fueled world of heroism, but also the feeling of being out on stage. I’m obsessed with theatrics in movies and Safdie’s is short but definitely adorable.

Halfway through the film, Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, sneaks into the Morosco Theater in New York. It’s a real theater – or was, until it was demolished in the 1980s. The film is set in 1952, the year Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea premiered at the Hotel Morosco, which would soon be a hit with the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. These plays about failed marriages find their counterpart in the film’s story about Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a 1930s silver screen star who now makes a risky return to acting in a frenzied play financed by her husband, Milton Rockwell.

Marty, intent on seducing Kai while raising money to reach the World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, watches practice from the wings. Kaye was cast as a mother bickering with her teenage son — shades here of Marty and his mother — but the scene didn’t take off and Kaye chastised her star Troy’s performance. “It’s like watching someone jerk off without using lubricant,” she fumed in one version of the script. “I wasn’t allowed to act,” Kay continues, grumbling—realizing that great theatre, unlike ping-pong, is about responding to your fellow player in the moment by thinking very quickly.

This rhythmic back and forth makes individual sports a special kind of conversation. As I watched the scene, I was reminded of what Christine Baranski said to me last year about delivering Tom Stoppard’s lines: “You can only deliver a line with a certain degree of spin, and it will please the audience.”

Kai, as a seasoned con artist, has a built-in bullshit detector and realizes that Marty himself is endlessly role-playing to get what he wants. As she tells her publicist, Marty wants to be an actor but he’s not good at it. The play within the film is essential to Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein’s interest in deception and authenticity—Marty can be as fake as the jewelry he thinks is real, but the film’s closing scene shows him, finally, at his most emotionally honest, after his various performances as a con man, a salesman, and an athlete. He proves to be a good enough actor to give Troy some sharp advice on how to handle a knife in a training scene: “If you’re going to lie, at least do it with some flair!”

Marty understands a broader sense of theatrics and spectacle, from how sensational material is presented to the press (such as Chalamet himself) and to which flamboyant shots can stir up a crowd. However, Marty initially reacts with horror to the suggestion of “organizing” a game for money in which he will lose, and he contemptuously considers becoming a sideshow act with a Harlem Globetrotters-style halftime routine.

The film moves from the glamorous excitement of the theater and the big tournaments to their sordid reality behind the scenes. Eventually, we move from rehearsals to opening night at Morosco, which captures all the highs and lows of the film. The curtain rises with a full house, including a stunned Marty in the booths, but hours later, as the champagne flows at the after-show party, news comes straight from the New York Times press that the review is corrupt.

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 hero is as much a hustler as Marty. This novel is narrated by a theater journalist, here the drama critic who brings Kay a defeat as humiliating as Marty’s at the hands of victorious player Koto Endo – or at the hands of Rockwell, when he hits Marty with a bat in retaliation.

If the film is primarily about the buoyancy of youth, embodied by the relentlessly impulsive Marty – who is no less passionate as all that sperm in the title sequence – then it would also be wise to limit it to the older ones, especially for the female actors. We never hear how Kay is criticized in the film – though it’s easy to imagine a misogynistic whiff of 1950s male criticism. Certainly the accompanying scene in which she and Marty are arrested In case of flagrante delicto In Central Park, it is presented as a performance to an audience of two (the police) who are happy to scale it down afterwards.

“Take your stinking chairs,” shouts Troy’s character as he throws away the furniture at the beginning of the play. There wouldn’t be much opportunity for audiences to do so—a scathing New York Times review would be the death knell for the show and for Kay’s theatrical career. She has more to lose than Marty and retreats after defeat. For him, there will always be another chance. For her, the game is over. Bitter truth from writers who know what’s at stake on stage as well as in sports.