Marty Supreme P.S.

Given the critical accolades tossed at Josh Safdie and Timothee Chalamet’s film, it’s worth recalling, even a month later, the main reasons I labelled Marty Supreme “unwatchable.”
1. Marty’s character, which dominates the film, is so abhorrent any possibility of “enjoying” the movie evaporates. Yes, Chalamet does a remarkable acting job, presumably at Safdie’s direction, of making his character unlikeable. His selfishness is bad enough, but it his cruelty to others that is most repellent. (Should I overlook Marty’s ugliness and admire his creation as a work of art? Let me just note that I have the same test for paintings. I’ll take a Copley or Sargent or Velazquez portrait of a handsome man or beautiful women any day over someone plain or unattractive.)
2. The absurdity of Marty’s table tennis career. I suppose ping-pong doesn’t require the extreme conditioning of some other sports, but to be a world champion of anything one must be in good shape and practice hard and often. Marty’s irresponsible, not to say licentious and quasi-criminal, lifestyle, left no room for actually working on his game.
3. The table tennis itself. Having to film more than one match, the director seemed at a loss to differentiate the action, repeating over and over the same play of slam-and-race-across-the-room-to-retrieve. To my untrained eye, it also appeared that CGI was taking over the ball in flight.
4. To stick with the sport, Marty’s win over the Japanese champion was totally unsupported by the script. The film made a point of explaining that Marty’s loss to Endo at the British Open was due to a new kind of racket that Endo was using. And the loss was convincing. What had changed for the rematch? Marty hadn’t adopted the new racket, he was playing in Endo’s home country and he was either jet-lagged or hadn’t slept for 48 hours.
5. Then what about those orange ping-pong balls? The movie built this invention up to be a breakthrough, then it went nowhere.
6. Okay, let’s move on to Kay Stone. However tired of her marriage she is, are we to believe she would answer Marty’s cold call, then stay on the line with his rude manners, then come to his room for a quickie? And continue a relationship with nothing in it for her? Their relationship just made me squirm.
7.  Speaking of this relationship, the scene in Central Park was another head-scratcher. We learned that Safdie prides himself on using amateur non-actors; as good as Pico Iyer was in his role, the cops in the Park were embarrassingly bad. (I didn’t feel that way about Kevin O’Leary, but Siri thought him a terrible actor before knowing he wasn’t one.)
8. The dog subplot. This didn’t bother me as much as it did my friends with dogs, but it seemed to belong to another movie. What little sense it made dissipated when Marty and Rachel tried to pass off a dog that bore no resemblance to the canine in question.
9. The falling bathtub. Again, this belonged to a different movie, maybe one with the Three Stooges. It was also poorly set up by the landlord adjuring Marty not to take a shower, not a bath.
10. The ending. Were we supposed to believe that Marty has grown a heart because he coos over his newborn child? If so, it’s an undeserved ending. If not, why use it?
I’ve previously mentioned that I didn’t like any of the songs Safdie used (rare for a film), but I suppose that’s a matter of taste.