“The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I’ll never be as good as a wall. I played a wall once … they’re fucking relentless.”
That was the late Mitch Hedberg, 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—and depression for ecstacy—and you’re 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’s solo directorial debut is a tale of a patriot practicing a prodigious and self-aggrandizing form of ping-pong diplomacy—a forerunner to Forrest Gump, minus the heart of gold. Rather, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is every inch an Ugly American; smiling brightly with his stars-and-stripes paddle as part of a group photo with the world’s best table tennis players, he’s already a household name in his own mind.
"I have a purpose,” Marty tells one of the friends who serves as a rallying partner for his excessive rhetoric. “And 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."
Marty’s epic self-image contrasts sharply with his pint-size physique; to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is small, but he contains multitudes. It’s 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’s rabid: barking, yapping, frothing at the mouth. He’s willing not just to make sacrifices but also to offer them, whether the person on the proverbial altar wants to be there or not. He’s not just driven—he’s 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.
Solipsism, we might say, is Safdie’s sweet spot: He’s made several excellent movies about characters suffering delusions of grandeur and dragging people along for the ride. In this, he’s well matched with Chalamet, who’s 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. “This is some top-level shit,” he told Margaret Gardiner. “It’s been like seven, eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances. It’s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things, I don’t want people to take it for granted.”
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The original video of Chalamet’s interview has since been deleted, although given the line-blurring nature of his current awards season campaign—with its emphasis on “culmination, integration, and fruitionizing"—it’s possible that this apparent act of movie star muzzling is itself a stunt. Chalamet wants it all, and he’s talented enough that his grasp may be equal to his reach. If there’s an actor he evokes, it’s Tom Cruise—not 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’s why he wasn’t 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’s in his element. He’s on-screen for nearly all of Marty Supreme’s 150-minute running time, holding the frame while keeping his costars, the camera, and the viewer at muscled forearms’ 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—and persuasive—as Robert De Niro’s ring work in Raging Bull, one of several feel-bad, toxic-alpha touchstones swimming around in Marty Supreme’s DNA.
Movie references are a given in Safdie’s cinema, but Marty Supreme differs most strongly from its predecessors in that it has a distinctly literary texture. There’s a whole lot of Philip Roth—and his equally horny Canadian counterpart Mordecai Richler—on 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. “I’m going to do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t,” Marty cracks before a match with his Hungarian rival Bela (Géza Röhrig), 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’s worth of honey across his torso and suckling his fellow prisoners transcends shtick. It’s closer to magic-realist mythmaking—a tableau powerful and unexpected enough that it stops the movie dead in its tracks.
Marty Supreme isn’t subtle about the sources of rage and anxiety driving its (anti)hero; when Marty says he’s “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” 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’s (Larry “Ratso” 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’t resent is Rachel (Odessa A’zion), the formerly platonic childhood pal who’s grown up into an eager and willing fuck buddy even though she’s married to an oblivious working stiff. The movie opens with Marty and Rachel hooking up in the back of the shoe store—a fateful copulation that ends up driving the film’s plot.
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’re 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’s 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’s 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 ’80s synth-pop needle drops—including Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” already memorably used by Jay-Z and Napoleon Dynamite—potently juxtapose anachronism and authenticity, a bit of stylistic flexing that adds up insofar as Marty’s yearning positions him as a man out of time, hurtling into the future.
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’s 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’s also a certain degree of verisimilitude here. Marty’s character is based loosely on the self-styled showman Marty Reisman, 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. “I only bet on a sure thing,” he was fond of saying. “Myself.”
Much has been made of the apparent creative split between the Safdie brothers, whose reluctance to say too much about the situation belies—or maybe highlights—the fact that they’ve 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 is that neither man believes he’s 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’s 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—including the money he stole from his uncle to get to England in the first place—Marty 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’s a bad bet.
The exception is Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a porcine American businessman who attends and delights in Marty’s flameout against Koto. He doesn’t like Marty one bit, but he recognizes him as a kindred corroded spirit and offers to be his benefactor. It’s an offer that Marty takes—not incorrectly—as an invitation to an intergenerational pissing contest rather than the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The casting of O’Leary, who’s spent more than a decade cultivating an image as Canadian television’s most hateful reality show high roller, is a masterstroke, even as it clouds the movie in bad vibes. Greedy, venal, and mean-spirited—and never quite as dumb as he looks—Milton is a terrific foil, and O’Leary does fine, shaded supporting work. He succeeds in making Chalamet’s flinty little pisser act sympathetic by comparison. The female figures are less successfully developed, however, with both Gwyneth Paltrow—playing Kay, a faded Hollywood star unhappily married to Milton—and A’zion tasked with little more than giving good thrall to Marty’s 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’re hostages to all that breakneck momentum.
That Marty Supreme puts the pedal to the metal is not surprising given its creators’ predilection for high-velocity (and high-viscosity) storytelling; Good Time and Uncut Gems were also fucking relentless, after all. What’s potentially (and maybe productively) irksome is the sense that Safdie is playing chicken with the audience’s sympathies. While it’d be nice to think that we’re past the point of demanding (or expecting) that movies need to offer up sympathetic characters—or depictions of social relations that sync with contemporary, politically correct perspectives—there’s 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.
In her pan of the film for Time, Stephanie Zacharek writes that “amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core.” The first part is true enough—amorality on-screen is fun, and virtue is for suckers—but it’s not right to say that the movie lacks emotion. If anything, it wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve. The core of Safdie’s artistry lies in the burning exposed-bulb urgency with which he illuminates the relationship between hubris and humility. The problem—which Zacharek also gestures toward—is 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—or Safdie’s sentimentality—but the ambiguity is exciting in and of itself. There’s poetry in the idea of a wall transforming into a mirror. What it reflects—about Marty and the movie made in tribute to his supremacy—is in the eye of the beholder.
