(RNS) — The plaudits have not been in short supply for Marty Supreme, the new biopic about a talented American ping-pong player who makes the international table-tennis big time in 1952. But there have been brickbats, too, directed at the moral shortcomings of the main character, played with panache by Timothée Chalamet, based on an actual ping-pong player of the era.
Chalamet’s Marty Mauser “acts like a textbook sociopath, and maybe he is one,” declared Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Judging Mauser (not unfairly) to be “a serial liar, a serial adulterer and a serial thief,” my fellow RNS columnist Jana Riess proclaims Marty Supreme “the definitive cinematic rendering of the Age of Donald Trump.”
Well, maybe. But the movie is also just the latest entry in a century-old tradition of dark tales about morally defective Jewish sons hustling to make it in America.
Longtime religion writer David Van Biema pointed to several of these tales, including Budd Schulberg’s 1941 bestseller “What Makes Sammy Run?” and Saul Bellow’s 1953 picaresque novel, “The Adventures of Augie March.” In last year’s terrific biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” Chalamet portrays Bob Dylan as another case in point.
The model for them all is Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel, “The Rise of David Levinsky,” about a Russian immigrant who forsakes his Talmudic education, makes a fortune in the garment trade and ends up deeply unhappy, longing for the intellectual life he failed to pursue.
These stories invert the Horatio Alger myth of the deserving youth who succeeds in America by dint of good character, hard work and a powerful, kindly patron. Here, instead, success requires a flawed character and an abandonment of the religious life of the old country. The storytellers are, in effect, following in the footsteps of the Hebrew prophets, who denounced their fellow Israelites for turning away from the Lord in pursuit of bad behavior and idols.
What made Schulberg’s Sammy Glick — an immigrant son who claws his way in record time from the Lower East Side to the top of the movie industry — run? As Schulberg put it in his introduction to the 1952 Modern Library edition of his book: “In throwing over the ways of his father without learning any sense of obligation to the Judeo-Christian-democratic pattern, he had nothing except naked self-interest to guide himself.”
Of course, these characters are not all the same. Their flaws vary, and their appealing features — brains, charm, talent, whatever — may serve to redeem them, at least in some eyes. We’re prepared to forgive Dylan a lot because of his music.
The best plea for the redemption of a flawed Jewish character comes from Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom, the nebbishy accountant in the original movie version of “The Producers.” Bloom, with Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), inveigles into his larcenous scheme to make a fortune with a failed Broadway play:
Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Max Bialystock is the most selfish man I ever met in my life…Not only is he a liar, and a cheat and a scoundrel, and a crook, who has taken money from little old ladies, he has also talked people into doing things, especially me, that they would never in a thousand years had dreamed of doing. But, your honor, as I understand it the law was created to protect people from being wronged. Your honor, whom has Max Bialystock wronged? I mean, whom has he really hurt? Not me. Not me. I was…. this man…. no one ever called me Leo before. I mean, I know it’s not a big legal point, but even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before. I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before. This man…. this man … this is a wonderful man. He made me what I am today … he did. And what of the dear ladies? What would their lives have been without Max Bialystock? Max Bialystock, who made them feel young, and attractive, and wanted again.
Marty Mauser receives no such testimonial, but at the end of the film he reunites with his estranged mother at the hospital, declares his love to the married woman he’d made pregnant and breaks down in tears on seeing his newborn son for the first time.
Should it get him off the hook? It couldn’t hurt.