REEL | Timothée Chalamet Challenges 'Marty Supreme'

"I'm the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Marty Supreme, the eldest Safdie brother, Josh Safdie's second solo-directed film—after the younger Benny's own debut in The Smashing Machine, also an unconventional sports drama from A24, earlier this year—starring Timothée Chalamet (also a producer), is set in the world of championship table tennis in 1950s New York City. Chalamet portrays a fictional hotshot star player, Marty Mauser, on the rise that's based on real-life Jewish-American ping-pong hustler, Marty Reisman.

In her first film role in five years, an icy Gwyneth Paltrow is magnetic as a faded Hollywood starlet who comes into Marty's orbit and catches his eye as a trophy figure to attain and impress. In contrast, the forceful Odessa A'zion co-stars as Mauser's married childhood sweetheart, who complicates his big dreams in their rather small New York Jewish community, which they both feel limited by.

A perfectly cast Kevin O'Leary, the shamelessly loudmouth Canadian business mogul in his acting debut, as Mauser's maniacal pen magnate antagonist is a bit of an inspired choice, while Fran Drescher as his scheming mother is suitably neurotic and overbearing. It's one of the more interestingly assembled casts of the year, thanks to Safdie's focus on character archetypes and putting his actors (often non-professionals) in period roles echoing their real-life personalities, which makes the film's sense of hyper-realism all the more enthralling.



Co-written, edited, and produced with another regular Safdie collaborator, Ronald Bronstein, much of the Safdie's crew returns to supercharge Marty Supreme's manic pacing as a fever dream of criminal low-life behaviour escalating quickly into all sorts of violent trouble. Everything is edited and paced within an inch of the sprawling two-and-a-half-hour film's brisk runtime.

Much of it feels like an inspirational, '80s-style competitive sports drama, grafted onto a historical immigrant tale, cementing American exceptionalism. Marty Supreme definitely suggests its director was one of the minds also behind the making of the exhilarting but endlessly anxiety-inducing Uncut Gems.

Chalamet's sensationally electric performance, reminiscent of the same kind of charming scumbugs played by Adam Sandler and Robert Pattinson from previous Safdie films, builds the chaotic drama into a towering tale of unfettered mid-century American ambition fueled by the post-war survivalist instincts of Jewish New Yorker identity.


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