Timothée Chalamet’s performance as ping pong wiz Marty Mauser in “Marty Supreme” is so electric it’s easy to forget this was only a few years after the Holocaust. And yet, the Holocaust was never far from my mind as I watched the film.
Maybe it was that early scene during a media interview when Mauser, in all his cocky splendor, described himself as “Hitler’s worst nightmare,” adding: “Look at me. I’m on top. I made it. I’m here”.
Indeed they looked at him. He was on top. He made it. He was there.
Since the Holocaust, Jews have been telling the world: “Look at us. They murdered 6 million of us just because we were Jews. We reached the very bottom. The world must never forget.”
Watching “Marty Supreme” made me forget.
It made me forget how weak and helpless the Jews must have been during the Holocaust.
Here is Marty Mauser, the antithesis of weak and helpless. Mauser has shown up to rescue the Jewish mojo. His moxie and swagger will come to define the Jewish story after the nightmare of all nightmares.
That Jewish story that Mauser represents was not about wallowing in the grief of losing 6 million and becoming permanent victims. No, it was about the very opposite of victimhood. It was about using every inch of our wits and our drive to make it in a tough world that still harbored discrimination against Jews.
We rarely see this in Holocaust memorials: what Jews did after the Holocaust. For me, though, that is the essential Jewish story– how we picked ourselves up after our darkest moment to create a Jewish golden age in America and a Zionist revival in Israel.
Chalamet plays an exaggerated version of that Jewish superhero who will never take no for an answer. He is so intense it’s as if he’s trying to match the Nazi drive to murder Jews with his own drive to succeed. He stumbles along the way, he cuts corners, he finagles, he goes overboard, but at no point does he lose his drive to make it.
Above all, he never loses his swagger.
It’s not enough to make it. He must also give Hitler the middle finger. He must become the fuhrer’s worst nightmare.
The most poignant scene in the film has nothing to do with Mauser or with table tennis. It’s about a friend and colleague of Mauser’s who survived Auschwitz.
As he recalls in a flashback, he was forced by the Nazis to defuse unexploded bombs in the forest so that if they exploded, no Nazi would be harmed. During one of these excursions, he stumbles on an abandoned beehive. But instead of eating the honey himself, he smears it all over his body. When he returns to the barracks, he lets his fellow prisoners lick the honey off him.
There are few scenes in recent years that have moved me like that one. Starving Jews licking honey from the hairy chest of a Jewish savior. Desperation meeting resourcefulness meeting gratitude.
That too was a middle finger to Hitler.
Jews are a people of stories. From our very beginning, stories have shaped our history and our identity. The Jewish challenge has always been to remember both the darkest stories as well as the brightest ones.
“Marty Supreme” brings those two extremes together. It reminds us in the beginning that the horror of the Holocaust is on the mind of our protagonist.
But that horror doesn’t own him.
What owns him, and what ought to own all Jews, is the drive to look at our people’s worst nightmare and make it Hitler’s.
