MARTY SUPREME Review: Timothée Chalamet Leads Stellar Cast in One of the Year's Best Films

For the aptly named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), the 23-year-old table-tennis wunderkind at the chaotic center of writer-director Josh Safdie’s unmistakably brilliant new film, Marty Supreme, the American Dream isn’t just a promise of personal or professional success, but a reality he can literally will into existence.

 

A relentless, unapologetic striver obsessed with proving his self-worth and value to and within the world, Marty cannily perceives his prowess at table tennis, a minimally popular third- or fourth-tier sport in America, as a vehicle for self-actualization and the perfect, perhaps only, opportunity to leave behind the narrow, stifling confines of the Lower East Side tenement building where he was born and raised. 

 

When we first meet the fast-talking, uni-browed, bespectacled Marty, he’s putting his verbal dexterity into selling footwear at his uncle’s neighborhood shoe store. While his uncle, Murray (Larry 'Ratso' Sloman), sees Marty as the heir apparent and wants to promote Marty to a managerial role, Marty sees the shoe store as a means to an end: Making just enough money to cover his expenses for the upcoming table tennis championships in London. 

 

Except, of course, it’s not that easy. It’s never easy for the self-sabotaging Marty. (If it were, Marty Supreme would be a short and not the exhilaratingly exhausting two-and-a-half-hour film it is.) After Marty’s uncle reneges on paying Marty his wages, Marty does the next best — really, worst — thing possible: He holds the store’s senior clerk at gunpoint, takes his money, and disappears, leaving the potential consequences, including potential jail time, behind. 

 

Marty’s singularly egotistical focus on table tennis makes him unsympathetic, a key feature, not a bug, of Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein’s anxiety-attack-inducing screenplay. Time and time again, Marty’s selfish, self-entitled, narcissistic behavior makes him and his personal journey unworthy of their implicit or explicit support. If he’s crude, cruel, or unkind in his pursuit of table tennis glory, however, it’s less out of inherent malignancy or sociopathy than youthful exuberance or deliberate carelessness.  

 

Like a character out of Greek tragedy, Marty’s central flaw -- arrogance bordering on hubris -- leads him into one hair-raising scrape after another. He sidesteps his family’s demands to settle down into anonymous, lower-middle-class domesticity.

 

His onetime childhood friend, girlfriend, and neighbor, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), offers him the occasional, convention-breaking thrill (she’s married, they sneak off for mid-afternoon sex at the shoe store), but when she discovers she’s pregnant and Marty’s the likely father, he disappears once again, shirking responsibility and avoiding accountability. Both, unsurprisingly, find Marty.

 

In London, Marty leverages his verbal gifts and unerring self-confidence into the bed of Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), an ex-movie star planning a comeback on the Broadway stage, and the notice of Kay’s millionaire businessman husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary). With his cocky, self-assured, youthful demeanor, Marty offers Kay a temporary, energetic diversion from a loveless, passionless marriage and a fading career. She offers Marty not just an in with Milton and potential sponsorship, but a heady proximity to the wealth, power, and privilege that’s so far eluded Marty.

 

Like Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), the compulsive gambler at the center of Uncut Gems, Safdie’s previous film, co-written and co-directed with his brother Benny, Marty Supreme positively thrives on creating and participating in chaos, on courting and escaping danger, and finding himself triumphant, however temporarily, against the impersonal (and personal) forces aligned against him. An indifferent universe or not, Marty never ceases to see himself except as the master of his own destiny and, at least until the final moments, a legend in his own mind and no one else’s.

 

Safdie and Bronstein’s taut, tense, tightly wound screenplay takes an impulsive, driven Marty from New York to London, an expected victory against his onetime rival, Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig), and an unexpected defeat against a new foe, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), a whirlwind tour around the world as part of a novelty act, and a return to New York City, where Marty, down on his luck and near penniless, but certainly not out, schemes, cons, and even grifts his way back to the table tennis championships, this time in Japan, once again against Endo.

 

As much a perceptive, insightful character study of a specific personality type as it is an unconventional sports drama, Marty Supreme also serves as a fascinating sociological snapshot of a certain place, the Lower East Side, a certain time, the early 1950s, and a certain immigrant group, first- or second-generation Jewish Americans less than a decade after the close of World War II and the Holocaust that’s left mostly unspoken in Marty Supreme. 

 

When the Holocaust does get mentioned in Marty Supreme, it’s part of an offensive, cringe-inducing exchange between Marty and a group of journalists in London before he faces the past-his-prime Kletzki, a Holocaust survivor. Marty awkwardly gives himself a pass, using his status as a fellow Jew to shield himself from immediate criticism or pushback. Only later does the audience discover that Marty and Kletzki’s rivalry doesn’t extend beyond table tennis. Kletzki might even be described as a friend, albeit one with limited, temporary usefulness.

 

Safdie and Bronstein’s script only briefly breaks with Marty’s hyper-focused point of view, once when Kletzki, at Marty’s insistence, retells a darkly comic story involving bees, a beehive, and honey, and later when Rachel, eager to help Marty obtain funds for his trip to Japan and the table tennis championships, places herself directly in the dangerous path of a dog-obsessed gangster, Ezra Mishkin (Abel Ferrara). The first story reflects on Marty’s myopic, self-aggrandizing egotism and seeming lack of empathy, while the second reveals layers to Rachel’s personality that suggest she’s a better match for the ethically challenged Marty than he imagines for himself.

 

Elevated by career-best performances from Chalamet and A’zion, a surprisingly persuasive contribution from Tyler “The Creator” Okonma as Marty’s sometime friend and co-conspirator, Wally, and strong supporting turns from Paltrow and O’Leary (playing true to despicable type) as Kay Stone and Milton Rockwell, respectively, among an epically scaled cast numbering close to 150 speaking parts, Marty Supreme unquestionably belongs in any discussion involving the year’s best releases.

 

Add Safdie’s hyperkinetic direction, Daniel Lopatin’s dazzling, synth-pop-inspired score, and deliberately anachronistic 80s needle drops, and Marty Supreme becomes a must-watch for serious and casual moviegoers alike.