Review: "Marty" Remains the Gold Standard For Simple, Human Storytelling

Scorsese could take a note from one of his childhood's classics...

November 24, 2023

In 12th-century England, a woman stashed a milk pail in the caves at the edge of her Somerset village. Busy with the many goings-on of medieval English life, like avoiding the raging civil wars and endless deadly illnesses plaguing the known world, she forgot it. When she returned the next day, she found the milk had hardened: cheddar cheese was born.

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Slice and slap it on a ham sandwich; grate it over Shepherd’s pie; sprinkle it over crispy potato skins; cube it and serve it on a tray. Cheese is the great equalizer. Rich or poor; gay or straight; black or white; Red Sock or Yankee: it matters not. If people could reasonably sustain themselves on cheese alone, we’d never eat another cow again.

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In life, cheese is great. In movies? Not so much.

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Thank God for Marty.

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A Bronx butcher, the titular Marty, lives with his mother and spends his weekends with friends, all of whom badger him for his bachelorhood. Longing for love but with little hope of finding it, his prospects change when he meets a shy school teacher at a dance club. The two develop a romance that forces Marty’s hand when everyone questions his choice of partner.

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It's a knockout to the melodramas that have long polluted our perspective on love. Meet cutes happen between the most unlikely lovers, kick-starting journeys of questionable ethics and even more suspect legitimacy. Women get abused into submission; men get mocked into silence, or both. Perhaps both people are of high moral fiber and suffer nothing, left entirely to their own devices. In that case, an extramarital rendezvous atop the Empire State Building usually does the trick.

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Marty and Clara are none of these things, nor is their story. Marty is the reality most of us face: love doesn’t come easy. Not because we’re pessimistic for the sake of it or sitting around complaining we can’t meet anyone as though we don’t spend every free moment avoiding people. It’s hard to find because it’s hard to find.

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We get stuck in routines like Marty, working a job with the same faces every day and hanging out with the same friends every night, expecting something to change. We fear rejection but can’t help but take the risk.

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Clara isn’t some mouse quietly squeaking in the corner. She isn’t asking for a hero to sweep her off her feet. She only wants a chance but gets taken advantage of like we do. That exploitation stings, but in a way that more often renders us silent than rageful, hoping to mitigate our embarrassment by downplaying the depth of our feelings instead of admitting to another, or ourselves, that we have feelings at all.

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Marty is true in every way. No one ever wants love for us, only themselves. No one tells Marty to find love so he can be happy, only to satisfy their expectations. People discourage Marty from buying the butcher shop simply because he “shouldn’t.” How often are our dreams shot out of the sky before they even enter orbit, for no other reason than not being a "good idea?"

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We empathize with Marty’s eagerness to share every experience, thought, and feeling. We always plan a strategy before entering the arena. Don't be too interested or too detached. Don't be too upfront or too discreet. Don't share too much or too little. Nothing ever depends on who we are and what we want, only external expectations. But when we find that person who, in ways we can’t quantify, inspires us to strip that away and give everything we have, we can’t help it. We get excited, whether with Marty’s big-grinned idealism or Clara’s soft-spoken optimism.

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But we also resist. We find reasons not to give in, to run away. We stay at the side of the club and drum up excuses to keep off the dance floor. We let everyone else into our heads and turn our brains into scrambled eggs. We put some misplaced sense of social responsibility before what we feel. We turn the one in front of us into the one that got away.

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But maybe, just maybe, if we seize that one moment, like Marty does as he stands outside a diner while his friends bat around how to spend their days as bachelors, we can make sure they never get away.

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In many ways, love isn’t special. Millions of people find it every day, describe it the same way, and feel it the same way. But what Marty gets right is that love's inherent humanity makes it special. We all want it. We all feel it. We all long for it, need it, and cherish it. We break when it leaves and are whole again when it returns. If you find it, nothing should stop you: not your mother’s insecurities, your friends’ neediness, or how anyone feels but you.

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We like Marty. How can we not? He’s human. He puts himself out there even when his instincts tell him to stay hidden. He doesn’t understand “no” until it’s in big, bold letters because he’s desperate for it to be “yes.” He swings like a pendulum between refusing to settle and aching to compromise. He wants someone to believe in him, encourage him, and enjoy him. He’s everything we are, desire, and need, absent the dramatics that remind us that he began as words on a page.

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It’s what makes it that trailer-bait word that gets so often misapplied: timeless. Marty thrives on that oft-attemped but rarely accomplished goal: capturing the magic of human connection. It cuts through the melodrama and refuses to extend its reach beyond what parallels our experiences and thus becomes far more than many of its countless imitators.

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At a crisp, clean 90 minutes, Marty shows we only need a short time to latch onto a film and carry it long after the final fade to black. In an era where “artists” churn out overlong dreck, praise themselves for delivering "high art," and chastise the modern moviegoing audience for short attention spans and discontentment with more ambitious work, Marty reminds us that the most talented, sincere filmmakers accomplish more with less, not the other way around.

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People want movies to say nothing while pretending to say much, but sometimes they offer more in 90 minutes of genuine human connection than three hours of tedious mob drama or antebellum torture porn. Marty wasn’t the next leap in human psychology, but that’s why it's irresistible nearly 70 years after it won Best Picture. It’s just an authentic, human story without a hint of cheese.