With a full-throttle turn from Timothée Chalamet, the NYC director’s first solo outing – about a young table tennis star hustling his way to the top – is a smash
In Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie takes the speed-freak rush of his work with brother Benny – Good Time, Uncut Gems – and knocks it out the park with a defiantly eccentric, go-for-broke crowd pleaser built upon Timothée Chalamet’s best performance since Call Me By Your Name. Chalamet absolutely slays as Marty Mauser, a charismatic young schemer from Manhattan living at home with his blue-collar Jewish parents in the early 1950s. Mauser has dreams of becoming the first major table tennis star to come out of America, and is known on the scene for his skills with the bat and his kamikaze sense of humour; in one early scene that drew literal gasps at the screening I attended, he tells reporters he’s going to do to an opponent “what Auschwitz couldn’t”.
Stealing cash from his dad to secure himself a spot at the world championships in New York, Mauser sails through to the finals but is beaten by a Japanese player of superior technique, causing uproar when he accuses his opponent of cheating. Meanwhile he has his head turned by Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a golden-age Hollywood star who is staying at the hotel he’s been put up in for the tournament. With a kid on the way by his young married girlfriend (Odessa A’Zion), Mauser stages an unlikely seduction while importuning her wealthy husband for cash to compete at the next world championships, to be held in Japan.
Safdie and regular screenwriter Ronald Bronstein barely take the foot off the gas in a relentlessly good first half, cranking out lines that Chalamet, as a rizzed-up nerd underfilling his 50s boxy suits, absolutely eats up. The table tennis scenes are ludicrously well staged, owing in part to Chalamet’s reported six years – six! – in training for the role. And there’s a cockamamie subplot about an ageing gangster (played by cult NYC filmmaker Abel Ferrara) and his dog set in motion when Mauser’s bath literally falls through the floor of a beaten-up hotel, breaking the mafioso’s arm.
If there’s a flaw in all of this madness, it’s a lingering question over the film’s treatment of its protagonist. Safdie has always been a little bit in love with the schemers and hustlers that litter his films, but there’s a borderline sociopathic quality to Mauser’s behaviour that Marty Supreme lets off the hook a little too easily, as if wary of slowing the film’s supercharged momentum. Still, with a showboating streak as wide as its protagonist’s, Safdie has cooked up his greatest heist to date here – it’s a hit with Christmas-sized bells on.
Marty Supreme is out in UK cinemas on December 26.
