Larger than Life

At the screening of Marty Supreme that I went to before Christmas, Timothée Chalamet said that his performance was in part inspired by The Last Dance, the 2020 documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Championship Bulls teams of the Nineties. No one ever talks about Jordan as a good person; in fact he is known to be as petty and vindictive as they come, on and off the court. Yet rather than being off-putting, this is one of the reasons that people like him so much; his stylistic successor Kobe Bryant went on to mimic this antisocial way of being in his own career to great effect. Right or wrong, we make excuses for “bad” people when it comes to sports, the arts and many other fields, if they chase and achieve the highest levels of greatness. Some would even argue that being an asshole is a requirement.

We drop in on Marty’s Mauser’s life in the middle of his quest to become the best table-tennis player in the world, and what we see for almost three hours is Marty’s relentless pursuit of that ambition. He wants to go to Tokyo to play in the ping pong championships after losing to the Japanese player Koto Endo in London. He wants to win. He wants to beat Endo. He wants to popularize the sport. But most of all, he wants to become somebody of worth. He wants to have a place in the future, to be remembered, and in order to do that, he has to become someone who matters in the story of the world. That means rejecting the temptations of an ordinary, respectable life.

At the beginning of the film his uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) offers him a cushy job managing his shoe store. He gives Marty a chance to assimilate into the American dream as a middle-class working man, within a continuous line of family legacy. But this is not what Marty wants. This vision of life is limited and small, and Marty does not see himself as a small person. As he says over and over, he has a calling that goes beyond what others want from him or for him. He tells Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), who may be pregnant with his child, that her life is small. To live as husband and wife, raising a family, is something he looks down on. When he finds out that she faked abuse by her husband in order to stay with him, he makes his revulsion of the life she wants for them very clear. He is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to escape the fate of mediocrity. He pursues the married, aging starlet Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), steals her jewelry while having sex with her in the shower, then confesses, but only to garner sympathy so he could try to get money from her again.

For most of the movie, Chalamet plays Marty as a fantastically unlikable protagonist in the Jordan mold: someone who is willing to sacrifice everything, including the lives of those around him, in order to achieve greatness. He drives the high-anxiety plot with such charisma that it feels less like a well-worn Safdie trope than an organic expression of inner desperation. He is a man in motion—physically, mentally and spiritually—because time is running out for him. The less time he has, the more brazen his attempts to escape the trap of the small life become.

Marty, for most of the movie, is not a sympathetic character. This ironically makes him easy to root for, because his motivations are easily understood: the desire to rise out of one’s station, to make something of yourself bigger than the condition that you’re born into, to be more than a cog in the machine. We Americans have accepted that sometimes you need to be ruthless to escape the life that is prescribed to you.

But is Marty’s behavior supposed to be justified by his victory over Endo in an exhibition match? Unlike in the final segments of The Last Dance, when Jordan’s achievement speaks for itself, something feels strangely hollow about Marty’s “triumph.” The ending, when Marty bursts into tears at the sight of his child, feels similarly hollow, despite what appears to be the director’s bid to earn sympathy for his protagonist at the last moment. In an interview with Frazier Tharpe of GQ, Josh Safdie indicated his intentions for the ending by way of autobiography:

After I finished [Uncut] Gems and I had that hollow feeling, I turned around and I looked at the people who believed … I had my [now] wife, my ride-or-die, she believed. And my dream was inspiring for her. My passion would be infectious to her passions. The pandemic hit. Next thing you know, I went to City Hall, we got married, have a kid and have another kid. And that feeling when I met my first daughter, it was a cosmic feeling. … Having a kid is like—[Marty’s] one dream had to end so the other one could begin. It’s seeing [Marty] actually go from boy to man.

Becoming a parent can certainly be transformative, and from its first moments Marty Supreme is framed by the prospect of Rachel’s pregnancy. But the idea that becoming a father will turn Marty from a boy to a man is in tension both with Marty’s character as we know it and with the rest of the film’s structure. Sports movies tend to be very simplistic in their structure, and Marty Supreme, for all of its high-octane action and anxiety, is no different. It’s about the hero’s journey from nobody to somebody by virtue of their ability, discipline and persistence. Even in the case of sports movies where the hero has reached the top, like The Smashing Machine, directed by the other Safdie brother, Benny, we have to see the fall of the athlete so they can rise again. Through his own talent and relentlessness, Marty made a way where there was none.

In real life, we are aware that there are conditions out of our control that prevent many of us from achieving great things—the socioeconomic situation that we’re born in, a lack of opportunity, injuries, talent and often pure luck and chance. Len Bias, the number-two pick in the 1986 draft, was projected to be one of the great NBA talents coming out of college, then died two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. We know that the world isn’t fair and doesn’t really operate on merit. Yet in life and in art, sport remains one of the spaces where meritocracy still seems possible. Where we can still seemingly, by our own volition, go from nobody to somebody. Jordan gets turned down from the varsity team in high school, then goes on to become the greatest basketball player in the world. LeBron James is just a kid from Akron, as he likes to say, whose basketball talents took him from poverty to an American icon.

Marty Supreme builds up to that moment where the protagonist is to be transformed from a nobody to a somebody after moving like a tornado through the world and the lives of those around him. And yet, something is missing from his moment of triumph. He beats Endo in the exhibition match, but he has not redeemed himself by becoming a champion which was one of his main desires (and the victory over Endo, while meaningful in showing that he’s just as good as his opponent, is also indicated to be meaningless in a sense since he alienates everyone he might need later in order to play the match). Instead, through the suggestion of the last scene and the director’s own words, he chooses the small life instead. The movie turns, in its final moments, from the sports narrative to a family one.

The Last Dance ends with Jordan beating the Jazz and becoming the legend and myth that we know and love. This great achievement acts as a retroactive justification for all his bad behavior, because the fact he reached the top suggests that everything that he did to get there was worth it. Whether he’s likable or not doesn’t matter. When Marty looks at his child and the camera lingers on his face as he cries, by contrast, the bid for the audience’s sympathy feels disconnected from what has come before. Rather than owning that idea that sometimes you have to be an asshole to be great, the movie uses tears to forge a connection between the character and the viewer. Perhaps the director, in identifying with Marty, couldn’t allow him to be completely bad.

But by giving into sentimentality at the end, the movie puts everything that came before in question. Rather than justifying Marty’s behavior, it inspires us to question his previous destructiveness. We can excuse someone being an asshole if they go on to do great things, if they do the things we can’t. There’s much less to sympathize with in the asshole who ends up choosing the small life like the rest of us.