By Bill Simons

A drama laced with sardonic wit, “Marty Supreme,” paced by fast cuts and rapid dialogue, relates the compelling story of a young Jewish con man, Marty Mauser, whose perverse charm, talent, exploitation of others and extraordinary confidence ultimately allow fulfillment of his quest to dominate the top of the table tennis world. His ping pong journey ricochets from seedy Manhattan dives to comic foil for Harlem Globetrotters’ intermission to world class competition superintended by pretentious elitists in Japan and England. Nominated for several Academy Awards, “Marty Supreme” is now available for home streaming. [Note: This article was written prior to the announcement of Academy Award recipients.]
“Marty Supreme” is a very Jewish movie, made so by theme, setting and people. Director Josh Safdie, himself a product of Jewish New York, creates his establishing shots from the drab, oppressive streets, shops, game rooms and lodgings that defined the Lower East Side vintage 1952, a place inhabited by working-class Jews. Absent from the exodus to the outer boroughs and Long Island, they remain in cramped tenements with common bathrooms. Shorn of privacy, apartment life accentuates loud gossip as its soundtrack. Safdie captures the juxtaposition between deprivation and ambition. 
The Jewish actress Gwyneth Paltrow plays a Gentile, more specifically a faded movie star diminished by the years who joins Marty for mutually manipulative sex. Many of the other core characters are Jewish, as are the performers, such as Odessa A’zion, who portray them. A’zion conveys longing and crafty toughness as the married girlfriend Marty impregnates in a shoe store stockroom. As Marty’s kvetching mother, the indomitable Fran Drescher, who formerly rendered “The Nanny” unmistakably Jewish and, in real life, led militant strikes of actors and scriptwriters, is outstanding. Another veteran Jewish comedic actress, Sandra Bernhard, cast as a neighbor, ratchets up the noisy, claustrophobic bedlam of tenement life. And Marty, embodied by Timothée Chalamet, the film’s star, is the son of a Jewish mother. 
Prior to “Marty Supreme,” Chalamet exhibited the uncanny ability to inhabit the wandering soul of another young Jew in “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic. Only 30, Chalamet elicits comparison to supernova James Dean and the young Marlon Brando by dint of preternatural talent and achievement. Chalamet’s performances in “Dune,” “Bones and All” and “Willy Wonka” also earned pride of place. A method actor, Chalamet follows a demanding regimen of total immersion in roles. Akin to Robert DeNiro’s ring training for “Raging Bull,” Chalamet insisted on singing Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” and taking up ping pong for “Marty Supreme.” Tireless and relentless, the peripatetic actor did innumerable interviews in countless cities to promote “Marty Supreme.”
“Marty Supreme” draws inspiration from the life and times of Jewish American table tennis champion Marty Reisman. Although the film is not and doesn’t claim to be biographical, the fictive Marty Mauser and the historical Marty Reisman – both lean, quick, bespectacled ping pong phenoms, hustlers and showmen – shared 1930 births and New York childhoods. The winner of more than 20 major tournaments, including U.S., British and world championships, Reisman had the edge on charm and Mauser on ruthlessness. Available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQVvG30fvf4), a 1949 Pathé film shows a 19-year-old Reisman winning the British Open with speed and flashy behind-the back returns. In 1997, Reisman, then 67, won his final major tournament, the eldest competitor to ever do so. 
A superstar in a niche sport, Reisman never acquired riches or celebrity. Ping pong, however, is ubiquitous in Jewish American experience, made so by green-netted tables, paddles and small, hollow white balls found in settlement houses, YM-YWHAs, JCCs, summer camps and, subsequently, suburban basements. It does not pose the injury peril, feared by many Jewish parents, posed by contact sports. In addition to cerebral qualities akin to chess, table tennis builds quick-firing muscles while providing a moderate workout. As sportswriter Rustin Dodd observes, “Even at the intermediate levels, the sport is blindingly fast, requiring high-level processing, complex technique and the kind of spin recognition associated with a major-league baseball player trying to distinguish between a 100 mph fastball and a 90 mph slider.” “Marty Supreme” may take table tennis to a new level. It would be a good ameliorative for a generation addicted to video games and social media. 
In the movie’s defining line, Marty calls himself “Hitler’s worst nightmare.” It has resonance in and beyond the film because it encapsulates Mauser’s self-image and the public rise of American Jews in the decades immediately following World War II. For a time, the horrors of the Holocaust and the emergence of the modern state of Israel significantly discredited the most blatant displays of antisemitism in America. So, too, did the wartime service of approximately 450,000 Jewish American soldiers and sailors. 
Brash, assured, talented and openly displaying their ethnic sensibility, a generation of American Jews, amongst them Philip Roth, Bella Abzug, Sid Caesar, Leonard Bernstein, Kirk Douglas and Barbra Streisand, seized center stage. Not only did the Jews survive, but as Marty’s denigration of Hitler implies, they could aggressively compete without hiding who they were. Marty and his bold cohorts were not the meek, passive victims that the deluded and defeated Hitler envisioned. 
A practitioner of bad taste and chutzpah, Marty delights in shocking uptight British journalists with the boast that he will do what Auschwitz could not, fully destroy a ping pong rival, then unapologetically retort that his Jewishness entitles him to hurl death camp barbs. Conversely, he displays pride that his frenemy Bela fed fellow concentration camp prisoners by smuggling honey back in on his chest when forced by Nazis to defuse bombs hidden in the forest. 
Clearly not the product of a yeshiva education, Marty never overtly draws upon Torah or Talmud, but his assault on the privileged and powerful who want to keep Jews “ghettoized” is unremitting. After a wealthy benefactor forces him to submit to a public bare buttock whipping, Marty brings down retribution by bedding the man’s wife. In several scenes, a mezuzah hangs above Marty’s t-shirt. Egyptian taskmasters get their payback when he loosens a stone from a pyramid built by Hebrew forbearers as a gift for his mother. 
Marty is neither hero, role model nor mensch. A heel, he is a self-absorbed user of people. In fact, it rings false when the movie ends with Marty making an implausible return to his abandoned girlfriend and their newborn son. Landsman to “What Makes Sammy Run?” and “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “Marty Supreme” brilliantly presents a riveting cautionary midrash concerning an inexorable and damaging diaspora journey of Jewish ascent.