‘Marty Supreme’ Review
Timothée Chalamet shines in Josh Safdie’s weirdo outsider sports movie.
THIS YEAR PRESENTED fans of the movies with a bizarre natural experiment.
The Safdie brothers—Josh and Benny, the directors of newer indie classics like Good Time and Uncut Gems—decided that they needed to take a break from each other. Each planned on separately directing a feature film this year.
Not the biggest shock in the world; this happens from time to time. (See the Coen brothers’ recent solo efforts.) But here’s where things get interesting. Both of the Safdies’ movies were to be produced and distributed by indie powerhouse A24. Both movies had outsized budgets, among the most expensive ever released by A24. And both movies are, bizarrely, period piece outsider-sports movies whose stories center on oddball figures who make professional pilgrimages to Japan.
Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine came out earlier this year. Despite good buzz from the Venice premiere (a 15-minute standing ovation!), the Dwayne Johnson-starring mixed martial arts movie set in the 1990s has to be considered a miss. It had a few interesting sequences (including one of my favorite scenes of the year, scored to Bruce Springsteen’s epic tale of urban desperation, “Jungleland”), but it died with audiences and was met with mixed reviews from critics.
As noted above, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme shares a lot of similarities with Benny’s The Smashing Machine. Even the choice of sports is disarmingly similar: While table tennis and MMA don’t seem to share much, they are both one-on-one competitions that were bigger overseas than domestically when the films are set, and both feature dramatic tournaments with our hero facing off against surprisingly difficult opposition.
Timothée Chalamet plays the titular Marty, last name Mauser, living in New York City in the 1950s; he’s working in his uncle’s shoe store to make money to pay for a flight to England to take part in the world championship of table tennis. Marty is an absolute dynamo on the table, rocketing balls back and forth, doing trick shots to wow the crowd.
Half showman, half conman, this is the role Chalamet was born to play. You buy his work here equally whether he’s thrashing opponents, seducing both his married childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’Zion) and the past-her-prime actress, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), or scrounging for cash in an effort to pay for airfare, hotel fare, and various fines leveled by the table tennis association. Marty is, objectively, just a bad person in this film, and yet you can’t quite look away from him. He’s a very American type, the relentless striver, a more talented and likable version of Budd Schulberg’s Sammy Glick, perhaps, but one with the same central amorality, the same overarching belief that he is Someone, with a capital-s, and he doesn’t care how many people he has to hurt to make sure the world will recognize it.1
Marty Supreme is both disarmingly straightforward and beguilingly elliptical in its structure. The straightforward: There’s an early loss, a call to greatness, a period in the wilderness where Marty attempts to accumulate the resources necessary to rebound, and then a final triumph—of sorts. The elliptical: At some point in that middle section during the accumulation of resources, I realized we’d spent nearly an hour of the film in a circular loop following the efforts of Marty and Rachel to return a dog to a gangster. And here’s the important part: I didn’t care. The pace on this movie is whitewater rapid; it never slows down even when it’s running in loops. You could argue that this leaves the movie somewhat empty, that the whole thing doesn’t amount to much. But I object to this framing. I strenuously object. It is, in fact, the point of the film, the reason on some level that it exists. It is an ode to the hustlers and the strivers, an argument that drive and moxie can overcome material deficits. If you will it, it is no dream.
It helps that Safdie has stacked the cast both with longtime talents—Paltrow and Chalamet, but also Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard, and Emory Cohen in smaller parts—and less traditional performers. Kevin O’Leary, of Shark Tank fame, is thrillingly twisted in the role of Kay’s millionaire husband and pen magnate, Milton Rockwell. Abel Ferrara, normally behind the camera as a director, is alarmingly evil here as the gangster who owns the aforementioned dog. David Mamet has a small part, as do Isaac Mizrahi and Penn Jillette. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give special attention to Odessa A’Zion, who is almost always the best part of anything she shows up in. When I talked to Fresh Kills director Jennifer Esposito last year, I mentioned the almost-feral nature of A’Zion’s performance for her, and she brings a similar sort of desperation to this movie as Marty’s pregnant lover. She is absolutely magnetic here, you can’t take your eyes off of her.
To bring it back to the natural experiment: If I taught cinema, I’d spend a couple of classes on Uncut Gems, The Smashing Machine, and Marty Supreme. It’d be a perfect way to demonstrate the importance of pace, the energy that a camera move can bring to a motion picture. Josh Safdie is constantly on the move with Marty: running through city streets, darting back and forth across a ping-pong table, even witnessing the very act of creation in an animated sequence that calls to mind Uncut Gems’s journey from an opal to orifice. The Smashing Machine may simply have been too deferential to the documentary on which it is based, adopting a naturalistic storytelling vibe that robbed the film of any real energy. Whatever happened, every storytelling beat is hit harder by Josh than Benny, every stylistic choice is more electric.
Watching The Smashing Machine earlier this year—with its staid aesthetic, with its locked-down vibe—I kept thinking ‘Where’s the energy from Good Time, where’s the agitation from Uncut Gems?’ Mostly, I kept thinking: ‘Why is this so dull?’ And judging by Marty Supreme, we seem to have the answer.
That Chalamet himself has come to embody this type on his various press tours is one of those wonderful bits of kismet that helped define generations of Hollywood stars and there is a very real case to be made that he is the last in a long line of such people.