Marty Supreme

New York City. 1952. A young, lowly shoe salesman and small-time hustler, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is chasing his dream that no one respects: to become the world champion in the cutthroat world of Table Tennis. Marty’s pursuit of greatness takes him across the globe and even to hell and back.

Another Masterful Safdie Character Piece of a Charismatic Narcissist: The creative split of the Safdie Brothers after Uncut Gems was an unfortunate one. While Benny Safdie has taken on more diverse projects, both behind the camera as a director and in front of the camera as a character actor, Josh Safdie has stuck to his guns and crafted another hubristic tale in the classic Safdie mould with Marty Supreme. Even as far back as his debut feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Safdie has had a fascination with charismatic, yet morally precarious or just downright unlikable protagonists in crises of their own making. Where you’re sympathetic to their situation through nail-biting tension, whilst also creating an anxious, morbid spectacle of their downfall you cannot divert your eyes from; with the sum of their ever-escalating poor choices driven by their ego and selfishness, their determination slowly devolves into desperation as things go horribly wrong. In that sense, Marty Supreme is the third film in an unofficial Safdie trilogy of thrilling, propulsive character studies of grubby, egotistical, narcissistic New Yorkers, along with Good Time and Uncut Gems, and is arguably the most complete, intense, and furiously entertaining of the three.

Big Swings Pay off for Josh Safdie (Again): Marty Supreme is a powder keg of chaotic ideas that shouldn’t work on paper, but on the screen coalesce into something marvelous. Though set in the 1950s, Marty Supreme uses anachronisms to their fullest, especially through the music. Frequent Safdies collaborator Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneothrix Point Never) crafts a wondrous, dreamy synth-heavy score that is complemented by a soundtrack slathered with iconic hits from 80s new wave bands like Alphaville, New Order, and Tears For Fears that perfectly transposed from one era onto another, where it doesn’t feel out of place. The supporting cast that orbits Chalamet’s larger-than-life performance also seems bizarre and left-field, but all leave their mark on this film. Whether its Fran Drescher as Marty’s Mother, Gwyneth Paltrow as an aging silent film actress who gets romantically entangled with Marty, or even non-traditional actors like rapper Tyler (The Creator) Okonma as a cab driver and friend of Marty’s who grifts greasers at a Bowling alley, filmmaker Abel Ferrara as a small-time mafioso Marty runs a foul of or Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary as a stationary mogul who Marty convinces to help fund his Ping Pong dreams whilst also screwing his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Timothée Chalamet, Your Time Has Come: In his SAG Award acceptance speech for portraying music legend Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet stated with a disarming amount of blunt sincerity that he is ‘in pursuit of greatness’ and wants to be one of the greatest actors ever. Naturally, casting him as Marty Mauser, a man whose drive and ambition are as limitless as they were reckless, was a pure stroke of genius. Chalamet’s star persona embodies the mantra and ethos of Marty to a much less extreme level in real life (especially during the press cycle of the film), but he elevates it to such a captivating degree in Marty Supreme in an electric performance that will go down as the defining work of his career. Marty is, as he describes in the film, “Hitler’s worst nightmare”, a symbol of post-war Jewish resilience and determination, but also a textbook product of 50s American Exceptionalism at a breaking point. Hard-working but arrogant and self-absorbed, he feels like he is destined or owed a path in life simply because of who he is and has envisioned nothing to the contrary. He will let no one stand in his way of achieving his dream and will use and abuse everyone he knows to get to the top. Marty exudes this sort of brutish American bravado and is emblematic of the cultural imperialism of America post-WWII, especially in countries like Japan, where the sport of Table Tennis is exploding. Chalamet magnificently delivers on both the posturing, bombast, and swagger of Marty on the surface, but also the pitiful, childish, desperate young man he is at his core when that facade gets stripped away once the shit hits the fan.