A very arty, elegiac and cryptic, but not unpleasant, look at women’s lot in a poor East German farmhouse in three or four discreet early 20th-century years, intercut and largely unresolved. It helped that the director warned, this was not a film about plot or characters; it was an experience that we should float along. Death, sex and subjugation seemed to be common themes, with trivial amusements lightening the load.
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.
It’s tricky to make a modern historical drama where the viewer has his own context to compare. It doesn’t help when the American characters played by Michael Shannon and Remi Malek come across as clueless and incompetent, while Russell Crowe’s Hermann Goering is masterful and compelling. But the film seems populated by symbolic figures, not real people. Still, I wish the famous trial could have made some sense, historic or dramatic.
A feminist fun-house frolic and frightfest, glued together by the acting chops of Sydney Sweeney. The story makes an inexplicable 180-degree pivot midstream, but I was enjoying myself so much I didn’t mind. It was a good time at the movies, not something to analyze.
So Italian, as with every film by Paolo Sorrentino. The story compresses the last six months of a presidency into three actions, but it is the loneliness of old age that is the subject with the existential question, “who owns our days?” Beautifully acted and shot in a wide-screen format that surrounds every figure with the air of Rome.
A gorgeous Gothic bromance, better viewed on a larger screen than our home TV. We know the story but have to admire its presentation, along with the appearance of Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz and the rest of the finely costumed cast. Telling the story twice dilutes the drama in favor of sheer spectacle.
A family’s repressed feelings, anger issues and bad legal choices following the death of their son are resolved by therapy and play-acting. The plot, as presented, is manipulative and schmaltzy, more community theater than Sentimental Value.
Four days, four events, shows how rich the cultural life can be in our small city.
Friday we attended a preview of Marty Supreme, sponsored by the Film Society at the Riviera Theater, with co-star Gwyneth Paltrow interviewed afterward. (The movie was awful.)
Saturday the Museum of Art hosted an interview with the premier Monet scholar Paul Tucker, pegged to its show of Impressionist art from Dallas and its own collection. (This was entertaining and enthralling.)
Sunday was a country music concert at the Arlington, sponsored by UCSB’s Arts & Lectures series, headlined by Molly Tuttle with opening acts by Meels and Kaitlin Butts. (Disappointing.)
Monday we attended the digital presentation of the National Theatre’s camp production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the New Vic Theater. (Really terrible.)
We happen to be major supporters of all four presenting organizations, for which we are proud. It’s only too bad that for three of these events I would rather have been watching football.
Kelly Reichardt’s latest addition to the slow cinema genre starts off well in a small Massachusetts city, circa 1970, with the totally pleasant Josh O’Connor’s museum heist, but then he and the film have nowhere to go and Reichardt goes there.
Aided by a comb-over, Ethan Hawke transforms to a lost-soul, lost-cause Lorenz Hart lounging in Sardi’s bar on the night that Oklahoma! opens (without him). Bobby Cannavale, Patrick Kennedy, Margaret Qualley and the uniquitous Andrew Scott are excellent foils for essentially a monologue by Hawke/Hart that never goes away. At first it is a bit annoying; eventually you are in awe of director Richard Linklater’s audacity and accomplishment.
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