Josh Safdie's latest cinematic whirlwind, Marty Supreme, delivers a 149-minute spectacle with the relentless, fanatical energy of a one-man ping-pong rally. This marathon sprint of gonzo calamity and uproar is a sociopath-screwball nightmare, trading traditional gags for detonations of bad taste, frantic deal-making, and a heady mix of cinephile references and alpha cameos. It's a farcical race against time in a world where its characters seemingly never need to eat or sleep.
A Live-Wire Performance from Chalamet
At the centre of the maelstrom is Timothée Chalamet, delivering a smash-hit performance as Marty Mauser. He plays a spindly motormouth with intellectual glasses, a movie-star moustache, and the physique of a tiny cartoon character. The role is loosely inspired by the real-life 1950s US table tennis champ and hustler, Marty "The Needle" Reisman. Chalamet hilariously embodies an unstoppable live-wire twitch, powered by indignation and self-pity, as his character dreams of world-conquering success in the sport and patents his own brand of ball, the 'Marty Supreme'.
The film is worth the price of admission for a single, gasp-inducing set piece alone, featuring a whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, and cult director Abel Ferrara in a grimy New York hotel room. The film's disorienting climax includes a revealing shot of Chalamet's naked buttocks preceding one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment seen on screen in years.
Paltrow's Poignant Counterweight
Set in 1952, Marty is a young Jewish shoe-shop worker having an affair with his married childhood sweetheart, Rachel (Odessa A'zion). He saves his earnings to travel to Britain for the table tennis championships at Wembley, leading to a series of bizarre uproars. Once in London, his brash behaviour shocks British journalists, particularly with crass jokes about his friend and fellow player, Béla, a Hungarian-Jewish camp survivor played by Géza Röhrig.
Hustling his way into a free room at the Ritz, Marty develops an erotic obsession with a retired movie star, Kay Stone. For this role, Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement, providing a clever and witty counterweight to Marty's thrumming narcissism. Paltrow is both amusing and sensual, her character seeing through Marty's antics and understanding him better than he does himself. Her later Broadway debut is a wonderfully realised scene, with a stunned Marty in the audience.
More Than a Sports Movie
The film's comic and absurdist power lies in the slow realisation that Marty Supreme is not really about table tennis. It behaves unlike a traditional sports film, with no training montages or humble mentor moments. Unlike Forrest Gump's patriotic table tennis celebrity, Marty remains a largely reprehensible character. Yet, the film is ping-pong: its rhythm and spirit—a spectacular, clattering, dizzying back-and-forth—infects every scene.
As catastrophes, stunts, and jabbering desperation mount, and Marty's supercharged neediness threatens to throw away everything important in his life, the pure craziness is a marvel. By the film's end, after a disastrous face-off with Japan's ping-pong superstar Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) and bigotry from Kay's husband Milton (Kevin O'Leary), a poignant kind of maturity is somehow achieved.
Marty Supreme is a unique cinematic experience, a film that leaves your head oscillating as if hit with cymbals. It is out on 26 December in the UK, following a 25 December US release and ahead of its 22 January Australian debut.
