"The dissatisfaction of humans, the constant desire for something more, something better, something different, is the origin of countless misfortunes." - Rosa Montero, La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (The Ridiculous Idea of Not Seeing You Again)
For Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), the 23-year-old table-tennis prodigy at the roiling, chaotic center of writer-director Josh Safdie’s extraordinary new film, Marty Supreme, the "American Dream" isn’t just a vague, undefined promise of personal or professional advancement: It’s a dream that Marty can literally will into reality.
A relentlessly brash, unapologetic, self-obsessed striver, Marty sees his table tennis prowess, a then minimally popular fourth-tier American sport, not just as a vehicle for self-realization, but as possibly the only opportunity to escape the Lower East Side tenements where he was born, raised, and lives. Nominally reared by a struggling single mother, Rebecca (Fran Drescher), Marty turned to table tennis, first as a distraction from poverty, later as a means for self-enrichment.
When we first meet the fast-talking, uni-browed, bespectacled Marty, though, he’s smoothly upselling expensive footwear to a middle-aged woman for his uncle at the latter's shoe store. While his uncle, Murray (Larry 'Ratso' Sloman), wants to promote Marty into a managerial role and presumably his heir apparent, Marty sees working at the shoe store as nothing more than a way to earn just enough to cover the cost of his flight and expenses for the upcoming table tennis world championship in London.
Except, of course, it’s not easy for Marty; far from it. Nothing comes easy for the impulsive, 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 Murray reneges on paying Marty his wages, Marty does the next best — really, worst — thing possible: He holds the store’s senior clerk up at gunpoint, casually subtracts his wages owed from the cash on hand, and promptly exits the establishment, consequences be damned and/or ignored.
Marty’s monomaniacal focus on table tennis makes him unsympathetic, a key feature, not a bug, of Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein’s anxiety-inducing screenplay. Time and time again, Marty’s selfish, self-entitled, narcissistic behavior makes him and his personal journey unworthy of their support, implicit or otherwise. If he’s crude, cruel, or unkind in his pursuit of table tennis glory, however, it’s less out of inherent malignancy or inborn sociopathy and more out of youthful arrogance or inadvertent carelessness.
Like a character out of a long-lost Greek tragedy, Marty’s central flaw — arrogance crossing into hubris — leads him into one nerve-shredding scrape after another, all in service of his dream of table tennis glory. He repeatedly sidesteps his family’s demands to settle down into anonymous, lower-middle-class domesticity.
Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), Marty's childhood friend, downstairs neighbor, and occasional hookup, offers him risky, convention-breaking thrills (she’s married to a man she clearly doesn't love, they sneak off for mid-afternoon sex at the shoe store). When, though, she discovers she’s pregnant, likely with Marty as the father, Marty promptly disappears again, shirking responsibility and avoiding accountability. Despite his best efforts, both unsurprisingly find Marty.
In London, Marty leverages his verbal profligacy and self-confidence into a consequential affair with 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 gives 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, self-destructive gambler at the center of Safdie's previous film, Uncut Gems, 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, (in)tense, precisely wrought 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 an astutely insightful study of a particular 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 Safdie foregrounds the Holocaust 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 a clout-chasing 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.
Unsurprisingly elevated by career-best performances from Chalamet and A’zion, a memorable, if all too brief, contribution from Tyler “The Creator” Okonma as Marty’s partner-in-hustling, Wally, and strong supporting turns from Paltrow and O’Leary (playing true to despicable type as a vampiric titan of industry) 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, the legendary Jack Fisk's (Killers of the Flower Moon, There Will Be Blood, The Tree of Life) lived-in production design, 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.
The film opens on Thursday, December 25, only in movie theaters, via A24. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.