Marty Supreme review – Powder keg of a ping-pong movie confirms Timothée Chalamet as one of our greatest talents
Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email
Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter
Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter
If Marty Supreme exists to prove that Timothée Chalamet could have easily kicked it with the New Hollywood icons of the Seventies, the Harvey Keitels and the Gena Rowlandses, then point proven. He’s truly one of our greatest talents.
The film’s a fictional portrait of a midcentury table tennis champion – loosely based on Marty Reisman, one of those real New York characters – fuelled by the same powder keg tension its director, Josh Safdie, put into the films he’d previously co-directed with his brother Benny. It spins out like a fairytale penned by someone midway through a stimulant-induced panic attack.
Safdie’s job, in part, is to keep up that pace, even if it’s a touch less relentless and certainly less claustrophobic than before. Chalamet’s Marty Mauser, like Uncut Gems’s Howard Ratner before him, is on the hunt for cash on a tight deadline. Glory lies an international flight away, at the competitions in London and Tokyo, and those cost money he simply doesn’t have.
open image in gallery
The star in Josh Safdie’s ‘Marty Supreme’ (A24)
He’s a true-blue underdog, but not one we’re particularly thrilled to root for. He’ll sleep with a girl (Odessa A’zion’s Rachel) and when she turns up pregnant, swear it couldn’t be his because he pulls out. His concept of fight talk is to promise the Japanese he’ll be “dropping a third nuclear bomb on their head”. He watches his own reflection while making out with a married movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kay Stone, played with the most pleasurable of smirks).
Chalamet jerks his limbs around and leans in hungry, and he has the same irresistible, volatile energy that drove those early Al Pacino performances. The way the camera closes in on pockmarked skin, an elegantly etched unibrow, and permanent wireframe glasses, only draws our attention to the actor’s eyes, where, like Pacino, all the vulnerability lies.
open image in gallery
Chalamet in the portrait of a midcentury table tennis champion (A24)
Safdie’s focus is the tension, yes, but it’s also to build for his star a suitably New Hollywood habitat for what feels like a career-best performance. Darius Khondji shoots in warm, lived-in 35mm, while the director populates his world with the kind of interesting, distinctive faces you rarely see anymore on screen, pulled from wherever he likes. Director Abel Ferrara, magician Penn Jillette, and high-wire artist Philippe Petit all have small roles.
While Marty Supreme is set in 1952, Daniel Lopatin’s electronic score is distinctly Eighties in flavour – Marty’s running so fast at life that he’s ended up three decades in the future. People like Wally (Tyler Okonma, AKA musician Tyler, the Creator), the closest thing he has to a friend, know they exist as nothing more than a tool in a tool belt, yet they can’t bring themselves to say “no” when he swings by for a favour.
Maybe it’s because, when Marty senses real hurt in them, Chalamet will slow down his sentences – usually delivered at a speed capable of summoning a miniature cyclone – and grab them, piercing them with unexpected sincerity. His ambitions are both admirable and a sickness; he infects everyone around him, and there’s few by the end who haven’t been caught chasing some desperate, fool-hearted scheme.
Off screen, the actor has wrestled in the public eye with the meaning of achievement (“I want to be one of the greats,” he said in an awards speech earlier this year). And maybe it’s because he sees a little of himself in Marty that he can understand that more fragile, sympathetic side to him.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
open image in gallery
Gwyneth Paltrow as married movie star Kay Stone (A24)
Here’s a Jewish, working-class kid in the postwar era – in his own words, “Hitler’s nightmare” – born with something to prove and wounds to heal. And yet, every play brings him wheeling right back into the brick wall face of capitalism, represented by Kay’s pen magnate husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary). “You’ll never be happy,” he sneers at him.
We root for Marty less for his skill, even if Safdie shoots his table tennis scenes with a striking intimacy, letting us see every fateful decision play out across his competitors’ faces. We root for him because we just want to see someone, for once, get one over on the fat cats. Whether he does or doesn’t, I’ll leave as a surprise, but Chalamet has a wonderful coda up his sleeve. He lets Marty, as a parting gift, become a human being again. He lets him cry.
Dir: Josh Safdie. Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher. 149 mins.
‘Marty Supreme’ is in cinemas from 26 December
