Timothée Chalamet portrays the legendary table tennis player Marty Mauser in A24’s Marty Supreme, which debuted in theaters on Christmas Day. Mauser, however, draws inspiration from Reisman, who rose to fame in the 1940s and 1950s for both his athletic prowess and his ostentatious fashion sense, including brightly colored polos and fedoras.
According to the Daily Beast, Reisman created table tennis history in 1949 when he defeated the great Hungarian Viktor Barna, a 37-time champion. One of the three people who attended the screening near their Washington State, USA, home, Roger Reisman, the real-life grandson of Marty, says it was “nothing less than surreal” to see his adored grandfather depicted in a ‘bad’ light.
Josh Safdie’s film narrates the tale of an aspirational young man in 1950s New York who works hard to achieve success in table tennis. He has a liaison with a married Hollywood actress (played by Paltrow) along the way, and her enraged husband “paddles” him on the bottom with a table tennis bat.
He is dating his childhood crush at the same time, and she becomes pregnant while she is married to someone else. Additionally, there is an abundance of overt criminal activities (such as theft and vandalism), and Marty, who is given the last name Mauser in the movie, is frequently portrayed as being quite disagreeable.
He has consented to give an interview to the Daily Mail about the movie with his mother, Debbie, and brother Josh because they felt compelled to defend their grandfather. Debbie added, “ ‘My father wasn’t like that. He made me feel so special when I was growing up. I want people to know that.’”
Josh, a 43-year-old grandson who coaches young sports, told the Daily Mail, “‘I think the reason we were never included was maybe there were some things they were going to portray we wouldn’t have approved. Maybe they didn’t want to share in the creative process, and maybe they didn’t want to share in any of the benefits of it.’
Rather, the family claims that the filmmakers purposefully “avoided the family” and “relied on disclaimers to evade responsibility.” Roger adds to the Daily Mail, “To the question of whether they got his story right – the answer is no. His relationship with my mother and grandmother was not depicted accurately. We knew of no affairs, no pregnancy while she was once married to another man. He was married to our grandmother before they had their only daughter. There was no liaison with a movie star in any family stories, or autobiographical renderings that could suggest this. It was hard for my mother to watch a film that was tied so closely to her father’s name, while straying so far from who he truly was.”
Roger chimed in, saying, “’Ask anyone who was close with him, he had a brilliant sense of humour, a beautiful mind. He was never mean-spirited and cared deeply about other people’s suffering and well-being. He also had a deep sense of justice, fairness, and of right and wrong.”
