Wonderfully chaotic Timothée Chalamet epic Marty Supreme ping pongs its way into cinematic history

Marty Supreme

Directed by Josh Safdie

Written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O’Leary

Classification 14A; 150 minutes

Opens in theatres Dec. 25

Critic’s Pick

In the opening minutes of their excellent 2019 thriller Uncut Gems, directors (and brothers) Josh and Benny Safdie chart a course through the known universe that starts inside the core of a crystal as old as the world itself and ends inside the bowels of Adam Sandler, which feels as close as you can get to measuring the highs and lows of existence.

Now, working for the first time in his filmmaking career without his younger brother, Josh has somehow one-upped that moment of eon-spanning scatalogicalism in his magnificent new film Marty Supreme, which wastes little time before audiences are afforded a Fantastic Voyage-sized view of a school of spermatozoa swimming toward an egg, the miraculous moment of conception as squishy and enchanting as that original window into Sandler’s colonoscopy.

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Marty Supreme is a portrait of a hustler named Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet.The Associated Press

Whatever you might think of Marty Supreme’s ensuing 149 minutes – and however you might have processed Uncut Gems – you can’t say that the Safdies didn’t warn you. These are films – big, juicy, swaggering movie-movies – that go for it, dammit. Marty Supreme? That’s history, right there.

Set in 1952, with most of the action taking place over the course of a few madcap days criss-crossing Manhattan, Marty Supreme is a picaresque portrait of a hustler with nothing to lose and everything to prove named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet). A table-tennis wiz, Marty is desperate to escape the Lower East Side, where by day he’s a shoe salesman and by night he’s ducking his overbearing mother (Fran Drescher, barely recognizable from her Nanny days) and alternately begging for and avoiding the affections of his neighbour Rachel (Odessa A’zion).

Quick-witted but also frequently despicable, Marty finagles his way to London, where he finds himself competing for the world cup of ping-pong against reigning Japanese champ Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) and the bed of fading Hollywood actress Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow).

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The story eventually crosses oceans and jumps months forward in time, along the way roping in such wildly arresting characters as Kay’s carpet-bagging husband Milton (Kevin O’Leary; yes, the one from Dragons’ Den), a Manhattan mafioso with a missing dog (filmmaker and one-time Safdie Bros. mentor Abel Ferrara), and Marty’s foolishly loyal friend Wally (Tyler Okonma, better known as the rapper Tyler the Creator).

And then there are the dozens of other bit players − beautiful and scraggly, chiselled and grizzled men of a certain vintage − whom Safdie crams into the film’s many darkened but beautifully lit corners, the kind of only-in-New York mugs that instantly conjure a world you knew must have existed at some point in time but never had the bad fortune to encounter.

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There is sex and brawls and car chases and explosions and so much shouting − the kind of all-consuming cacophony that feels pulled from another dimension − that the more fragile moviegoers among us might very well suffer a heart attack halfway through the film, never to recover. (But what a way to go.) If Uncut Gems was a pressure cooker, then Marty Supreme is an industrial-strength stove that maintains a boiling point so perpetually intense it redefines the very concept of heat.

The themes Safdie and his writing and editing partner Ronald Bronstein (who has been working with the brothers since 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, their feature-length debut) are playing with here could fill an entire academic year’s worth of PhD theses. But the ripest one to pluck is Marty’s Jewishness, especially how and when he invokes it. A particular product of postwar American Judaism, Marty is a never-say-die fighter who will not, cannot, stop until he shows the entire world what he’s made of.

“Look at me, I did it, I’m on top. I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat!” he tells a group of London journalists, the proud-as-hell peacocking arriving only after he takes a jaw-dropping swipe at an opponent that invokes the horrors of Auschwitz, half-apologizing with the crack, “It’s okay, I can say that, I’m Jewish.”

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Gwyneth Paltrow’s portrayal of a fading Hollywood actress is brittle in the best kind of way.The Associated Press

The tagline to Marty Supreme is “Dream Big,” but it’s clear that Safdie and Bronstein are examining the world through the prism of a nightmare, the Holocaust barely in the rearview before their hero, who at his fiercest moments seems to flash his Star of David necklace like a weapon, puts everything on the line to face his near-mythical opponent – an enemy from Japan, no less. (This plot point also reveals that, despite whatever differences put them on separate directing paths – with Josh busy here and Benny directing Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine – both brothers cannot resist a sports movie in which the hero’s path leads to a tournament in Japan.) Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.

Just like Uncut Gems, though, Marty Supreme requires an inexhaustible commitment from its leading man that might strike most actors as unsustainable at best, psychotic at worst. But like Sandler before him, Chalamet pulls off the near-impossible, delivering a colossal performance of cockiness and vulnerability, a Wile E. Coyote meets Sammy Glick.

Whether by osmosis or otherwise, everyone else surrounding the star is just as good, too. Paltrow is brittle in the best kind of way, Drescher knows how to milk her few moments in the centre of the frame, Ferrara projects an odour so rank you can practically smell it off the screen, and relative newcomer A’zion is a sensation, the perfectly steel foil to Chalamet’s cocky son of a gun. It is also not a little distressing to report that O’Leary is just as wonderful, Canada’s most loathed reality-TV star delivering an altogether different kind of jerk than we’re used to seeing, or rather enduring.

All this, and Safdie’s movie assembles the best collection of ’80s bangers in a generation, anachronistically soundtracking Marty’s 1950s journey with choice cuts from Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, New Order and – during that opening insemination scene – a brilliant pull from Alphaville’s catalogue. And when it’s not synth’s greatest stars blasting on the speakers, it’s Daniel Lopatin’s twinkly, otherworldly score.

It is no spoiler to say that Marty Supreme opens with a conception, and closes with a birth. But in between, there is a whole world that opens up. Let there be light.