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Two
of 2025’s best
films share the theme
of a man in the throes
of discovering who he
is. Guillermo del
Toro’s Frankenstein depicts
the Creature (Jacob
Elordi) trying to
achieve his sense of
self and find his place
in the world, with no
help at all from his
creator, Victor
Frankenstein (Oscar
Isaac).
Conversely, Josh
Safdie’s Marty Supreme shows
Marty Mauser (Timothee
Chalamet), a man beyond
confident that
he’s the
world’s greatest
table tennis player,
and how he is forced to
adjust his outlook
after a barrage of
unforeseen setbacks.
Frankenstein, Del
Toro’s longtime
dream project, combines
the romantic and the
grotesque in ways
typical of his work. Del
Toro hews somewhat
closer to Mary
Shelley’s
original than do the
movies made by James
Whale or Hammer
Films. He sets it
in 1857, nearly forty
years after the
novel’s
publication. Del
Toro begins with the
crew of a Danish polar
expedition rescuing a
gravely injured Victor
from the Arctic ice and
the vengeful
Creature. This is
the springboard for
first Victor, and then
the Creature, to tell
their stories.
The despised elder son
of a brilliant but
arrogant surgeon
(Charles Dance), Victor
grows up to be even
more brilliant and
arrogant than his
father. (In some
ways Isaac’s
performance as Victor
is a more exuberant
version of his
character in Ex
Machina.) His
theories on reanimating
corpses get him
expelled from the Royal
College of Surgeons of
Edinburgh but draw the
interest of wealthy
arms merchant Heinrich
Harlander (Christoph
Waltz). Harlander
offers Victor a blank
check to conduct his
experiments and his
pick of fallen Crimean
War soldiers as
subjects. Harlander’s
motives become clear in
time.
Victor’s brother
William (Felix
Kammerer) becomes
engaged to
Harlander’s niece
Elizabeth (Mia
Goth). Victor and
Elizabeth are intrigued
with each other, but
Elizabeth senses in
Victor a ruthlessness
that repels her.
Without going into
detail, Victor soon
demonstrates that
ruthlessness many times
over.
The Creature, meanwhile, comes to life in Victor’s tower
laboratory. Victor is at first entranced with his creation, but
becomes impatient with its slow progress and treats it harshly.
Elizabeth is infuriated by Victor’s cruelty and befriends the
Creature, who learns to say her name.
The rest of the plot is best left to viewers. Suffice it to say that the
Creature learns to speak and read; reveals himself to be kind and
courageous, but nevertheless draws the fear and hatred of the
peasantry; and discovers, through numerous painful encounters,
that he cannot die. This is the beginning of his rage.
In a foreword to a new edition of Mary Shelley’s novel,Del Toro
writes of the enduring significance the story has for him.
“He (Victor) becomes an uncaring god who can force dead flesh
to be reanimated but cannot calculate the consequences of his
creation,” he writes. “This leads to the infinite sorrow of his
creation, who will experience the hunger, the sorrow, and the
loneliness of existence, far removed from its creator. The
Creature…wanders through the world, encounters mostly evil
and hatred, and learns of rage and pain. He becomes hardened
and lonely. And I, at age 10, in a comfortable house in a suburb,
felt exactly the same way.”
Frankenstein is manifestly a personal film for Del Toro, at least
as much as Pan’s Labyrinth and much more so than Nightmare
Alley. Del Toro’s reference to his 10-year-old self is very much to
the point; in the performance of Jacob Elordi, we feel the anguish
of a lost soul, condemned before he even understands what is
happening to him—a lonely, abandoned child seeking revenge for
his undeserved pain. Isaac’s Victor, on the other hand, is a
heedless narcissist who learns humility and remorse the hard
way. Del Toro is kind to both characters in the end, giving them a
sort of reconciliation, and also a sort of absolution. When the
Creature looks to the sunrise at the end, we feel he has found a
measure of inner peace.
Impressive visuals are a hallmark of any Del Toro movie.
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen and production designer Tamara
Deverell deserve to take a bow, as does the boatload of makeup
artists who transformed Elordi into a singular Creature—part
matinee idol, part corpse. The film has a few anachronisms; for
example, dynamite figures in the plot, a decade before Alfred
Nobel invented it. But those are negligible in the hypnotic milieu
Del Toro creates.
Marty Mauser, the protagonist of Marty Supreme, could
reasonably be described as Victor and the Creature rolled into
one. In the screenplay by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, Marty
shares and even exceeds Victor’s self-intoxication. Yet Marty
lacks self-knowledge, and Marty Supreme is at its heart the story
of a man who, through a series of frenetic adventures,
achieves—if not humility—at least a true sense of his place in the
world.
The opening credits can be taken as a metaphor for the entire
movie. (Thanks to my sister, with whom I saw Marty Supreme,
for that observation.) Marty has just sneaked a quickie with his
unhappily married girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion). As the
credits roll, we see the sperm travel toward the egg and reach
their goal, creating a zygote in the form of a ping-pong ball. For
the next nine months, Marty will gestate in parallel with his
unborn child.
Marty, based loosely on the real-life table tennis champion Marty
Reisman, knows he will be the first ping-pong player in history to
have his picture on a Wheaties box. All he has to do is get to
London to play in the 1952 British Open championship
tournament. He will do anything to get there, including robbing
his uncle’s New York shoe store at gunpoint. (Marty is a
valued employee at that store; as he says, “I could sell shoes to
amputees.”) Once in London, he bulldozes tournament officials
into getting him out of the dreary players’ barracks and into a
suite at the
Ritz. Once at the Ritz, he bulldozes one of the guests, faded
movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), into bed, right under
the nose of her industrialist husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin
O’Leary).
Marty’s progress is brazenly triumphal—until he loses in the
finals to Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi).
Marty returns to New York, where Fate takes serial revenge on
him. All the people he stepped on during his rise to the
top—including Rockwell and the president of the International
Table Tennis Association (Pico Iyer)--are itching for a chance to
crush him on his way down. The $1,500 fine from the
association—for unsportsmanlike conduct and repayment of
hotel bills—is the least of it. This isn’t even counting the random
trouble Fate sends his way. This includes the bathtub that falls
through the floor in a fleabag hotel; the gangster (Abel Ferrara)
who pays Marty to look after his dog; the truckload of thugs
looking to give Marty and his pal Wally (Tyler, the Creator) a
beatdown after they hustle them at ping-pong; and various thefts,
scams, car wrecks, explosions, and shootings.
This doesn’t describe even a fraction of the events and
characters—most of them alarming—in Marty Supreme. Revealing too many of them would be to ruin the slam-bang
surprises Safdie has for us. Marty Supreme has much the same
impact as Uncut Gems, the 2019 film Safdie directed with his
brother Benny, and Marty shares many personality traits with
Howard Ratner, the lead character in Uncut Gems played by
Adam Sandler. The difference between the two is Marty’s sense
of mission. Marty has no Plan B for his life, so all he knows to do
is hustle as fast as he can to get a second chance at Plan A. “I
have a purpose,” he tells Rachel at one point. “You don’t. And if
you think it’s some kind of blessing, it’s not.” Only in the film’s
last 15 minutes does he understand that he doesn’t need the title
or the money to validate his self-worth; only in the last five does
he realize that others are counting on him to be something
besides a table tennis champion.
Marty Supreme gets our adrenaline pumping throughout its 150
-minute running time. The editing by Safdie and Bronstein, the
cinematography by Darius Khondji, and the eclectic music score
by Daniel Lopatin have much to do with that, as does the large
and impressive cast. Safdie hews to his usual practice of hiring
famous non-actors in key roles; O’Leary, the entrepreneur and Shark Tank star, and maverick film director Ferrara are
magnificently scary. Among the professional actors, Odessa
A’zion is deeply touching as Rachel, and Paltrow is imperious and
vulnerable by turns as Kay. But Chalamet, of course, is the film’s
reason for being. In films as varied as Call Me by Your Name, A
Complete Unknownand the two parts (so far) of Dune, Chalamet
has proved himself as charismatic as any actor in cinematic
history, and Marty Supreme represents his most electrifying
performance so far. Careening across the screen like the
Tasmanian Devil in a pinball machine, Chalamet leaves you
wondering how he could make such a schmuckso fascinating,
and—at the end—so lovable.
World War II and the Holocaust are only seven years distant at
the beginning of Marty Supreme, and Marty’s Jewish identity is
crucial to the film. “I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” he brags to
reporters. Although Safdie doesn’t tell us this explicitly, we get
the feeling at the end that Marty has come to recognize his
Jewishness as something more than a conduit for his
braggadocio. Simultaneously, he discovers his own humanity.
Just as the Creature has a revelation looking at the sun rising in
the Arctic at the end of Frankenstein, Marty has a revelation
holding his newborn child. Although it isn’t precisely germane to Marty Supreme, I can’t help thinking of the Holocaust survivor
who held his infant grandson and said, “Hitler, you bastard, I’ve
beaten you!”
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