Image Credit: Copilot
By Dr Rahim Said
There are films that want to tell a story, and there are films that want to teach you something.
The latter often arrive with good intentions, rolled-up sleeves, and an unmistakable wagging finger. Marty Supreme wisely chooses the former.
On the surface, the film carries the kind of thematic baggage that usually triggers sermon mode: Jewish identity, family obligation, class mobility, assimilation, ambition, and the quiet violence of success.
In less confident hands, this could have become a cinematic TED Talk with background music. Instead, director and writers trust the audience to connect the dots without being force-fed the moral.
Timothée Chalamet’s Marty is restless, sharp, and emotionally evasive — a young man sprinting toward success without pausing long enough to ask who he’s leaving behind.
What makes the performance compelling is not what Marty says about identity or belonging, but what he avoids saying. His silences do more work than most screenplays’ monologues.
This restraint matters. As Manohla Dargis notes in her New York Times review, the film “touches on big, weighty subjects… but it isn’t didactic and doesn’t serve up any life lessons, in the pious finger-wagging manner of many American independent movies.” That line should be printed and taped above the desks of every aspiring writer.
Which brings us to the word itself.
Didactic: a Warning Label for Writers
According to the New York Times Word of the Day, didactic
(/daɪˈdæktɪk/) means “instructive, especially excessively.”
The word is not a compliment.
To be didactic is not merely to teach, but to announce that you are teaching, usually with the subtlety of a PowerPoint slide titled Lesson Objectives.
In film, it shows up as speeches that explain the theme. In columns, it appears as paragraphs that begin with “We must understand that…” or “The lesson here is clear.”
Marty Supreme avoids this trap. It doesn’t tell you that assimilation costs something; it shows you a family dinner where nobody quite listens. It doesn’t lecture about class; it lets success quietly rearrange loyalties.
The audience leaves the cinema thinking — not because they were told to, but because they were allowed to.
A Lesson for Young Column Writers
Here is where young opinion writers should pay attention.
A column is not a classroom. Your reader did not sit down expecting a moral science lesson. The moment your writing starts explaining itself, you’ve lost them.
Good columns, like good films, imply more than they declare. They trust readers to be intelligent, even if they disagree. They resist the urge to underline their own conclusions in red ink.
If Marty Supreme had ended with a speech about identity, it would have shrunk itself. Instead, it ends with ambiguity — and that ambiguity lingers longer than certainty ever does.
The paradox for writers is this:
The harder you try to teach, the less your audience learns.
So, watch Marty Supreme not just as a film, but as a writing lesson. Say what matters. Show why it matters. Then stop. Let the reader — or viewer — do the final piece of work.
That is the difference between being insightful and being didactic.
The writer is also Special Adviser to Yayasan SALAM Malaysia, an NGO dedicated to volunteerism in Malaysia for the past 30 years