{"id":199844,"date":"2025-12-23T13:41:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T13:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/199844\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T13:41:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T13:41:08","slug":"timothee-chalamet-is-going-for-it-in-marty-supreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/199844\/","title":{"rendered":"Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet Is Going for It in \u2018Marty Supreme\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question is: What are you willing to sacrifice to see Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet and Josh Safdie achieve it?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I\u2019ll never be as good as a wall. I played a wall once \u2026 they\u2019re fucking relentless.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the late Mitch Hedberg<\/a>, contemplating the essentially impenetrable nature of a game designed to break its players one point at a time. Swap out artificial turf and chalk lines for particleboard\u2014and depression for ecstacy\u2014and you\u2019re in the metaphysical sports-drama territory of Marty Supreme, a film whose eponymous protagonist dreams of being a wall: to have the serves and volleys of his opponents, as well as the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, bounce off him at top velocity. Josh Safdie\u2019s solo directorial debut is a tale of a patriot practicing a prodigious and self-aggrandizing form of ping-pong diplomacy\u2014a forerunner to Forrest Gump, minus the heart of gold. Rather, Marty Mauser (Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet) is every inch an Ugly American; smiling brightly with his stars-and-stripes paddle as part of a group photo with the world\u2019s best table tennis players, he\u2019s already a household name in his own mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I have a purpose,\u201d Marty tells one of the friends who serves as a rallying partner for his excessive rhetoric. \u201cAnd if you think that’s some sort of blessing, it’s not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through. And with that obligation comes sacrifice.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Marty\u2019s epic self-image contrasts sharply with his pint-size physique; to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is small, but he contains multitudes. It\u2019s not the size of the underdog in the fight that matters in this case, though, or even the size of the fight in the dog. What Marty has going for him is that he\u2019s rabid: barking, yapping, frothing at the mouth. He\u2019s willing not just to make sacrifices but also to offer them, whether the person on the proverbial altar wants to be there or not.\u00a0 He\u2019s not just driven\u2014he\u2019s fucking relentless. The first question is whether that will to power is enough to make him a winner in a world that runs on ambition. The second is whether a movie custom-made in such a solipsistic image is a virtuoso roller-coaster ride or a Herculean endurance test.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Solipsism, we might say, is Safdie\u2019s sweet spot: He\u2019s made several excellent movies about characters suffering delusions of grandeur and dragging people along for the ride. In this, he\u2019s well matched with Chalamet, who\u2019s unabashedly the most try-hard movie star of his generation, with a messianic public persona to match. The erstwhile Lisan al-Gaib has gone so far in recent interviews as to offer, unsolicited, that he thinks his performance in Marty Supreme is the best work of his career so far. \u201cThis is some top-level shit,\u201d he told Margaret Gardiner<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s been like seven, eight years that I\u2019ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances. It\u2019s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I\u2019m bringing to these things, I don\u2019t want people to take it for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on \u2018Marty Supreme\u2019 <\/p>\n

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More on \u2018Marty Supreme\u2019 <\/p>\n

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The original video of Chalamet\u2019s interview has since been deleted, although given the line-blurring nature of his current awards season campaign\u2014with its emphasis on \u201cculmination, integration, and fruitionizing”<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s possible that this apparent act of movie star muzzling is itself a stunt. Chalamet wants it all, and he\u2019s talented enough that his grasp may be equal to his reach. If there\u2019s an actor he evokes, it\u2019s Tom Cruise\u2014not just because of the Risky Business Ray-Bans of Call Me by Your Name, but because of the determination to show his work at all costs. The best Cruise performances are the ones in which he makes himself sweat and drenches the audience, and the same goes for Chalamet. Maybe that\u2019s why he wasn\u2019t quite right for the laconic genius of Bob Dylan, who tossed off classics like they were nothing. But cast Chalamet as a preening perpetual-motion machine like Marty Mauser, and he\u2019s in his element. He\u2019s on-screen for nearly all of Marty Supreme\u2019s 150-minute running time, holding the frame while keeping his costars, the camera, and the viewer at muscled forearms\u2019 length. The sheer physical exertion of his work in the ping-pong scenes is something to behold; what he does with a paddle is nearly as transformative\u2014and persuasive\u2014as Robert De Niro\u2019s ring work in Raging Bull, one of several feel-bad, toxic-alpha touchstones swimming around in Marty Supreme\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n

Movie references are a given in Safdie\u2019s cinema, but Marty Supreme differs most strongly from its predecessors in that it has a distinctly literary texture. There\u2019s a whole lot of Philip Roth\u2014and his equally horny Canadian counterpart Mordecai Richler\u2014on offer, and like those canonical novelists, Safdie and his cowriter Ronald Bronstein are working with themes of postwar assimilation and lingering currents of Jewish guilt and vengeance in the shadow of the Holocaust. \u201cI\u2019m going to do to him what Auschwitz couldn\u2019t,\u201d Marty cracks before a match with his Hungarian rival Bela (G\u00e9za R\u00f6hrig), who no-sells the joke. His stoicism is an act not of defiance but of solidarity; Marty, and Safdie and Bronstein, can get away with such spectacularly tactless one-liners on the basis of their heritage and self-consciously in-your-face edginess. The ensuing flashback-slash-fantasy of Bela smearing an entire beehive\u2019s worth of honey across his torso and suckling his fellow prisoners transcends shtick. It\u2019s closer to magic-realist mythmaking\u2014a tableau powerful and unexpected enough that it stops the movie dead in its tracks.<\/p>\n

Marty Supreme isn\u2019t subtle about the sources of rage and anxiety driving its (anti)hero; when Marty says he\u2019s \u201cthe ultimate product of Hitler\u2019s defeat,\u201d he sounds suspiciously like an Inglourious Basterd. But the film is also smart about how trauma can breed ambivalence. Marty resents the cramped apartment he shares with his mother (Fran Drescher) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he resents working at his uncle\u2019s (Larry \u201cRatso\u201d Sloman) bustling but flea-bitten shoe store, and he resents said uncle for offering him a raise and a promotion as collateral against him pursuing dreams of ping-pong stardom. The only person he doesn\u2019t resent is Rachel (Odessa A\u2019zion), the formerly platonic childhood pal who\u2019s grown up into an eager and willing fuck buddy even though she\u2019s married to an oblivious working stiff. The movie opens with Marty and Rachel hooking up in the back of the shoe store\u2014a fateful copulation that ends up driving the film\u2019s plot\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 1950s New York on display in Marty Supreme is a marvel of production design by the legendary world-builder Jack Fisk, who has spent the better part of 50 years re-creating the past from the ground up. Here, we\u2019re treated to a series of winding alleyways and street-level storefronts that are somehow considerably bigger on the inside. Every back room is a hideaway; every basement is a rabbit hole. The speed and nimbleness with which Marty navigates this habitat of rickety fire escapes, paper-thin walls, and dangerously water-damaged floors can be exhilarating, with Darius Khondji\u2019s camera hurtling in sync with its subject. Meanwhile, the backgrounds are teeming with the kinds of distinctive, asymmetrically fascinating faces that typically get bypassed in casting calls. If one measure of a successful period piece is that it\u2019s hard to imagine the people on-screen scrolling through TikTok, Marty Supreme feels genuinely transporting. At the same time, the throbbing electronic score by Daniel Lopatin and the vintage \u201980s synth-pop needle drops\u2014including Alphaville\u2019s \u201cForever Young,\u201d already memorably used by Jay-Z<\/a> and Napoleon Dynamite<\/a>\u2014potently juxtapose anachronism and authenticity, a bit of stylistic flexing that adds up insofar as Marty\u2019s yearning positions him as a man out of time, hurtling into the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

History gets a workout in Marty Supreme, which posits that the city that never sleeps used to keep itself awake playing ping-pong, that a typical Saturday night in Manhattan was filled with greasers, hustlers, and wannabe toughs roving around in search of a dark spot to practice their backhands. It\u2019s clear that the filmmakers are using ping-pong symbolically, as a metonym for the myriad leisure-time fads that proliferated in the shadow of Pax Americana, as well as a shorthand for competitiveness itself. Shades of The Hudsucker Proxy and its cosmic vision of the Hula-Hoop, but there\u2019s also a certain degree of verisimilitude here. Marty\u2019s character is based loosely on the self-styled showman Marty Reisman<\/a>, who once tried to shake down the head of the United States Table Tennis Association and toured the world as a halftime act with the Harlem Globetrotters (a sojourn that gets faithfully replicated in Marty Supreme, with Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker making cameos in the layup line). Reisman was an outlier, but the tradition he represents is as real as it gets. \u201cI only bet on a sure thing,\u201d he was fond of saying. \u201cMyself.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

Much has been made of the apparent creative split between the Safdie brothers, whose reluctance to say too much about the situation belies\u2014or maybe highlights\u2014the fact that they\u2019ve emerged on the other end with movies about competitors reluctant to share the spotlight (or the credit) for their success. The common denominator between Marty and Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine<\/a> is that neither man believes he\u2019s capable of being beaten, and the films share a basic structure whereby the hero loses unexpectedly and struggles first to save face and then to get back in the ring. (One wonders how many times the Safdies watched Rocky III together as kids.) Marty\u2019s humiliation occurs in the U.K. at the hands of a taciturn, hearing-impaired Japanese prodigy, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), who gets elevated to godlike status after taking down the all-American braggart; again, the postwar subtext is laid on thick. Unceremoniously flung back to New York with his tail between his legs and debts to pay\u2014including the money he stole from his uncle to get to England in the first place\u2014Marty scrambles to secure financing for a rematch in Tokyo (fittingly, the same foreign crucible as in The Smashing Machine), only to find that pretty much everybody around him thinks he\u2019s a bad bet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The exception is Milton Rockwell (Kevin O\u2019Leary), a porcine American businessman who attends and delights in Marty\u2019s flameout against Koto. He doesn\u2019t like Marty one bit, but he recognizes him as a kindred corroded spirit and offers to be his benefactor. It\u2019s an offer that Marty takes\u2014not incorrectly\u2014as an invitation to an intergenerational pissing contest rather than the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The casting of O\u2019Leary, who\u2019s spent more than a decade cultivating an image as Canadian television\u2019s most hateful reality show high roller<\/a>, is a masterstroke, even as it clouds the movie in bad vibes. Greedy, venal, and mean-spirited\u2014and never quite as dumb as he looks\u2014Milton is a terrific foil, and O\u2019Leary does fine, shaded supporting work. He succeeds in making Chalamet\u2019s flinty little pisser act sympathetic by comparison. The female figures are less successfully developed, however, with both Gwyneth Paltrow\u2014playing Kay, a faded Hollywood star unhappily married to Milton\u2014and A\u2019zion tasked with little more than giving good thrall to Marty\u2019s hypothetically hypnotic charisma. Both actresses have fine moments in which they get to thread the needle between infatuation and exasperation but the movie is so rollicking that their characters seem even more like damsels in distress than they are. They\u2019re hostages to all that breakneck momentum.<\/p>\n

That Marty Supreme puts the pedal to the metal is not surprising given its creators\u2019 predilection for high-velocity (and high-viscosity) storytelling; Good Time and Uncut Gems were also fucking relentless, after all. What\u2019s potentially (and maybe productively) irksome is the sense that Safdie is playing chicken with the audience\u2019s sympathies. While it\u2019d be nice to think that we\u2019re past the point of demanding (or expecting) that movies need to offer up sympathetic characters\u2014or depictions of social relations that sync with contemporary, politically correct perspectives\u2014there\u2019s still a risk in making a big-budget, high-profile movie about a fanatically self-absorbed asshole. That even goes for one that takes pains to remind us of the cost of that self-absorption at regular intervals; what the script takes from Richler and especially The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the notion that success is its own worst alienation effect.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In her pan of the film for Time<\/a>, Stephanie Zacharek writes that \u201camorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core.\u201d The first part is true enough\u2014amorality on-screen is fun, and virtue is for suckers\u2014but it\u2019s not right to say that the movie lacks emotion. If anything, it wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve. The core of Safdie\u2019s artistry lies in the burning exposed-bulb urgency with which he illuminates the relationship between hubris and humility. The problem\u2014which Zacharek also gestures toward\u2014is that the film is determined to redeem its antihero, much more thoroughly than in either Good Time or Uncut Gems, which settled for Pyrrhic victories. Here, pretty much everything gets burned up except for Marty. The way that Chalamet plays the final moments may not redeem the character\u2014or Safdie\u2019s sentimentality\u2014but the ambiguity is exciting in and of itself. There\u2019s poetry in the idea of a wall transforming into a mirror. What it reflects\u2014about Marty and the movie made in tribute to his supremacy\u2014is in the eye of the beholder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Nayman<\/p>\n

<\/a>Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book \u2018The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together\u2019 is available now from Abrams.
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