Whenever I feel the urge to put a couple of reviews together, I at least try to find some sort of thematic connection between them, and I may have found the most specifically connected double bill that could possibly exist. Both films are directed by a Safdie brother, both are character pieces about sports figures, and both have stars of billion dollar franchises but ended up with mediocre box office returns. Oh, and both were released by the same studio, if there weren’t enough similarities already. It’s like they had a bet to see which one could make the better movie with more or less the same premise and resources, which I suppose means that it falls upon me to call this match and raise the arm of the winner! Will it be the intense kid from Dune, or Dwayne “The Tooth Fairy” Johnson who takes home the gold!? Let’s find out!!
.
Marty Supreme
Marty Supreme is owned by A24
Directed by Josh Safdie
Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) may not look like much, but underneath the scrawny frame and terrible mustache is a world-class table tennis player with trophies and prestige under his belt, but still barely scraping by and has to pull scams so he can fund his trips to international tournaments. After a devastating defeat to an up-and-coming Japanese star (Koto Kawaguchi), Marty is more determined than ever to be at the next tournament and claim the top spot from his new rival. Of course, it doesn’t help his case that he scammed the International Table Tennis Association for a luxury hotel room, so on-top of his usual hustles to make it to the next tournament, he has a neigh unpayable bill to the organization that needs to be paid in full before he can compete. Tack onto all of this his strained relationship with his family and a girlfriend (Odessa A’zion) who’s about to give birth, and Marty is stuck with more problems than he can shake a ping-pong paddle at. His only hope might be from a local ink pen magnate (Kevin O’Leary) and his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow), but since Marty is sleeping with her on the side, it might prove an even more fought situation than even he’s capable of navigating. Can Marty fulfill his dream without destroying his life in the process, and will he even give up that for an opportunity to be the best in the world?
The Safdies have been two of my favorite filmmakers for some time, and their last collaboration, Uncut Gems, was an absolute treasure. This film, on the hand, is not nearly as shiny as Josh Safdie was not able to recreate that success despite how obvious it is that he’s trying to. Their distinct style has been carried over here, as once again we are following a driven individual as he fumbles his way through an endless and chaotic series of vignettes in pursuit of whatever they think will fix everything that’s gone wrong in their life. While I found this quality both horrifying and captivating in Uncut Gems and Good Time, it wore me down seeing it repeated here, and to my mind, he needn’t of bothered as he was already making an interesting movie well before he started to indulge in his usual tropes. The table tennis matches are stunning to watch, with trick shots and big swings to convey just how high a level these players are, and the pacing of the matches leave you at the edge of your seat anticipating the next volley with breathless anticipation. A movie that stayed focused on the tournaments would have been amazing in its own right, but I suppose Josh Safdie likes his characters to frantically run through the streets of New York City, and so a majority of the movie is about watching him make bad decisions instead of watching him play table tennis. I appreciate that the personal struggles are necessary for the payoff of the ending to be worth it, but where the previous Safdie films felt intense and ran at a breakneck pace, this one ends up being repetitive and overlong; failing to capture the bleak grittiness of Good Time or the comedic tragedy of Uncut Gems. A shorter runtime would have helped to at least keep the pacing from dragging, but it also fails to make Marty and his struggles meaningfully sympathetic. It’s hard to avoid the fact that the first problem he runs would have been the easiest to overcome, especially given just how far he’s willing to go later in the film, and as good as Chalamet is in the role, I just couldn’t connect with him when he wasn’t holding a paddle. The takeaway here is not that this is a bad movie as even a poorly done Safdie film is still better than most filmmakers on a good day, but the heart is missing where it’s needed most, and a strong ending that returns to the table tennis action does only so much to bring me back onboard. As much as I liked watching them hit balls back and forth, I’m not sure if it was worth the two hours of misery and anxiety to get there.
.
The Smashing Machine
The Smashing Machine is owned by A24
Directed by Benny Safdie
In the late nineties, there was no one in the world of mixed martial arts as terrifying as Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson), aka The Smashing Machine. He dominated the sport with win after win, and was seen as an unstoppable force and the ultimate athlete, and yet, behind closed doors, there was much that had to struggle with. Between the damage the sport did to his body, the disrespect that his sport faces from the wider world, and his own demons that he has to keep in check at all times, well it’s only a matter of time before even the strongest man on Earth buckles under the pressure. With his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) by his side and his best friend Mark (Ryan Bader) in his corner, he may just have what it takes to come out the other side of his addictions, but perhaps love and recovery don’t always go hand in hand.
Perhaps it’s not true of every actor, but most of them want at least one chance at a serious dramatic role that could elevate them to one of the best of all time. Johnson is definitely one of those guys who may be the biggest star in the world but isn’t taken all that seriously as a performer as most people simply expect him to smile, arch his eyebrow, and punch a few things; maybe sing, too, if it’s an upbeat track that isn’t too complicated. To that end, he’s been working on getting this biopic off the ground for almost a decade, so it might be tempting to say this is more of his movie and that Benny Safdie was just a work-for-hire director to see it through. That would ignore, however, that Benny does have a producer’s credit and is the sole writer, director, and editor, which is a lot of responsibility and a lot of trust for Dwayne’s big Oscar role. The end result is an interesting mixed-bag; one that feels uncompromised in its artistic vision, but is also a bit lacking as far as telling a complete story. This is not about the UFC, Mixed Martial Arts as a sport, or the struggles and controversies surrounding those early years which, you’d think, would at least be a major subplot to buttress the themes of Mark’s story. Instead, we have a character piece in the purest sense as we look at a very specific moment in the life of Mark Kerr; a life that is already in progress when we start the movie and with much more that happened after the credits start to roll. It feels like the old adage of how a story should only be about the most exciting part of someone’s life taken to its logical extreme, and in doing so, I feel like we miss far too much context. How did Mark get involved with fighting, when did he get addicted to painkillers, even important life events that happen in the timeline of the movie, such as his stint in rehab, are glossed over. It’s true that a person’s life doesn’t fit neatly into a three act structure, hence why Marty Supreme is so loosely based on the real person, but there were ways to fill in the gaps that would have given this movie a more natural arc. What we’re left with is still very well executed as far as performances and filmmaking, but lacks a decisive punch to tie it all together. Dwayne Johnson truly comes into his own as an actor here as, for the first time, he manages to disappear into a role and isn’t just playing a heightened version of his Pop-Culture persona, though this is helped significantly by Emily Blunt who makes for a phenomenally chaotic foil to Johnson’s bottled up performance. Mark is forced to go through life being positive, upbeat, and gentle, but there’s always something simmering underneath that even he may not be fully conscious of, and it’s always stressful to see him alone with someone because of the possibility that he could become a different person behind closed doors; especially when Blunt herself has demons that only seem to get worse when Mark starts to get better. This is where that Safdie brand of claustrophobic tension really kicks in, and Benny manages to pull it off without heightening the danger through convoluted plot threads; just by having his actors bounce off of each other in an uncomfortable manner. The MMA scenes are well shot and engaging in a way that effectively breaks up the tension in the more personal scenes, they feel secondary to everything else when they should complement the emotional drama. Movies like Rock and Creed know how to effectively integrate its character drama with the training and fight sequences, but here they seem like an interruption or an aside; not building us to a decisive end or moment of true growth for our character. Where the movie decides to end feels rather arbitrary, even if Dwayne does continue to give a great performance in those final minutes, and it all feels like the real life MMA stuff is being forced to fill the space of a typical sports movie which then clashes with the pacing of the tighter emotional moments. If these two movies are a clear delineation of the brothers’ respective styles, then it seems obvious that working together brings out the best in both of them. Marty Supreme showed a great sense of technical panache and a recognizable structure, but didn’t reign itself in with rich characters and tight editing, whereas this movie gets the emotional drama with well-rounded characters, but feels a little inert and without much of a direction to go in. Still, I’d take characters I can relate with in a simple story rather than a tightly crafted series of intense set-pieces that doesn’t give me much to root for, and that means that this movie just barely ekes out ahead of Marty Supreme. I look forward to the rematch next year, when Benny does a kickboxing movie with Timothée Chalamet and Josh does a Frisbee-Golf film with Dwayne Johnson.
The Reviewers Unite 