Here's how I understand the "meta" casting of Gwyneth Paltrow in "Marty Supreme." Paltrow is a tough cookie. She endured Harvey Weinstein's harassment, and, when the ugliness of Hollywood became intolerable, she invented her own high-profile career away from the movie cameras. Yes, Paltrow is a child of privilege, and she sometimes makes dumb remarks. But she is also a fighter. That's the subtextual story in "Marty Supreme."
Paltrow's Kay Stone sort of likes Marty Mauser--sort of but not really. Marty's true value is as a pawn in a psychosexual war between Kay and her husband. Kay can use Marty--his phone calls, his aggressive "restaurant behavior"--to make her husband uncomfortable. Marty misreads Kay's behavior; he thinks his best option with Kay is to feign "emotional authenticity." But Kay sees through this. She likes Marty as his actual self, a scrappy egomaniacal schemer. "Marty," she says, "I know that you stole my necklace, and I know that you don't feel remorse. When I was in my twenties, *I* would have stolen my necklace, too."
Kay desperately wants to resuscitate her own career; she won't admit this, but we see the depths of her desire on her face in one great scene, when she is standing onstage with her back to the audience. Kay's efforts fail--maybe because she is not a skilled performer or maybe because of American misogyny. It's not clear. Kay's failure is framed as a kind of stillbirth; when we see her for the last time, she is screaming in pain, and she is surrounded by women. One friend--acting as a kind of nurse--forces Marty to retreat from the scene. This foreshadows Marty's own stillbirth--the death of his athletic dream--the climax that will occur overseas in the last ten or twelve minutes of the movie.
To me, the main thematic obsession of this movie is the idea of life's relentlessness. Life just keeps happening. You fall through the rotting fifth floor of a crappy motel--you damage your back--and you must keep moving along. Kay will need to improvise after the Broadway fiasco. Marty will need to improvise after he blows up his own business deal. I see Marty's final tears as a sign of exhaustion--it's not that he is moved by fatherhood but just that he is having a kind of nervous collapse after nine insane months. And yet he will need to function--or put on a convincing act, a performance that looks like "functioning." That's life.
I don't read Vulture very often, but I was startled by Roxana Hadadi's simplistic misreading of this movie--and also startled that someone would choose to publish the piece. The movie is worth seeing, and Gwyneth Paltrow is terrific.
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