Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Marty Supreme’ Performance Is So Meta and So Brilliant

According To The variety In the new film “Marty Supreme,” a fondly remembered legend of the screen is attempting a comeback. This actress, still resplendent, emerges onstage and receives a round of applause, a bit of homage from an audience that knew her years before, and is waiting to see what she can do now — how time has changed her. To this point, we’ve seen her deny her ambitions, as well as her lust for the film’s title character: She’s too composed to give herself away. Now, though, the audience cannot see her face as she turns her back on them, but the camera follows her and so we can. She has burst into the gladdest grin, remembering, all at once, what the attention of the crowd felt like. The performer is Kay Stone, a fictional mid-century star who’s receded into private life. And the performer playing her is Gwyneth Paltrow, whose very public life has, for years now, not made room for acting. To see Paltrow at work is to be reminded of what a vital and urgent screen presence she is, how alive she manages to be in every moment and how adept she is at showing the way her characters hide that vividity behind shades of cool. It’s also to be aware that perhaps Paltrow needed the time away to conjure a performance quite this majestic. Paltrow made no secret of her ambivalence about acting after becoming a mother; her business interests, in the form of her Goop suite of media entities and products (kicked off with a newsletter in 2008), have allowed her to more proactively define her brand, and what roles she’s held on to have plainly not been that exciting anyhow. (She practically seems to delight in going viral when, in various on-camera interviews, she can’t remember appearing in various Marvel films.) Many actresses, past 40, find opportunities drying up. As if to pre-empt the question, Paltrow stepped away from the set and found opportunities elsewhere. That choice compels us in other ways. Many people who are not inherently interested in wellness culture, or in self-help jargon, or in a woo-woo redefinition of the concept of “divorce” as “conscious uncoupling,” got on board the Goop train, at least as gawkers. I reserve judgment on whether the ideas Goop puts forward are valid. They’re interesting to the onlooker because the figure speaking about them has that Paltrovian assurance and composure. But while Paltrow has been making her way in the world of business, something’s been missing on-screen. The passionate anger thrumming under Margot Tenenbaum’s seen-it-all glare in “The Royal Tenenbaums”; the lust for life Viola de Lesseps must tamp down under boy drag in “Shakespeare in Love”; the slowly dawning repulsion Marge Sher- wood struggles to hide in “The Talented Mr. Ripley”: Those weren’t flukes. They were proof of Paltrow’s particular interest in playing with the concept of concealment, of showing us just how hot her blood can run under the hauteur. The defining pre-Goop image of Paltrow in the public imagination is of her facade breaking while accepting an Oscar. Done up in princessy Ralph Lauren, she openly, loudly wept: The passion underlying the pink couture is what she’s shown us in movies too. That’s also at work in “Marty Supreme,” and perhaps it’s no wonder the script appealed to Paltrow. By contrast to the frosty but secretly yearning Kay Stone, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is all bravado, pushing his career as a table-tennis player forward through his insistence that he is destined for the pantheon. (Marty, too, makes for a metatextual meal for the actor playing him — Chalamet is as un-shy about his ambition for himself as any star currently working.) Their pairing is one of opposites: Marty seems, for much of the film, resistant to the idea of an inner life. Life, for him, is meant to be lived aloud. Kay, though, has been seasoned enough by the Hollywood system and life’s disappointments to know just how much of herself to keep in reserve. And so when Paltrow lets loose and shows us the flare of uncontrollable emotion undergirding Kay’s careful control, we who have missed this talent of hers are powerless to do anything but mirror the audience on-screen, and let out a cheer.