Marty Supreme – Review

Cert – 15, Run-time – 2 hours 30 minutes, Director – Josh Safdie

Aspiring table tennis star Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is determined to achieve greatness, however in-between tournaments a series of poor decisions create growing problems for him and those he’s worked his way into the lives of.

A week or two before its release the marketing campaign for Marty Supreme seemed to switch from the new dramatic thriller from Josh Safdie to star Timothée Chalamet saying he deserves an Oscar for what he sees as the best performance of a consistently top-form career. Perhaps some of the lead character’s behaviour remains in him – and was slightly present when he said he wants to be one of the greats when accepting his SAG award for A Complete Unknown earlier this year, a phrase which was wrongfully criticised as egotistical. Aspiring table tennis star Marty Mauser (Chalamet) – the Supreme of the title comes from the brand name of balls used in the sport – is a cocky and truly egotistical figure, determined of his own greatness and just needing the opportunity to show it to the world.

In some ways he’s blinded by both his own talent and where he believes he can get himself. Doing anything he can to get the money needed to get him from one tournament to the other, aiming to go from runner up to champion. However, in his bid to do so Marty crashes into people’s lives, often leaving them behind without a second thought, and creating a downward spiral for more than just himself.

Chalamet certainly gives a strong performance as the chaotic fireball charging through the various events that Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein have stitched together. Marty is a successfully unlikable character barrelling through relationships and desperate attempts to raise money and live the life he dreams of before he can afford it.

Key relationships are seen with former movie actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who starts an affair with Marty as she prepares to return to acting with a hopefully careet boosting stage production. Meanwhile Marty tries to get her businessman husband (Kevin O’Leary – effectively playing himself) into table tennis events in the hope of raising funds for his trip to Tokyo.

Yet, the most emotional engagement is found in Odessa A’zion’s performance as Rachel, the downstairs neighbour of Marty who is also having an affair with him and becomes pregnant with his child, in an unexpected opening credits sequence, even from one of the minds behind the colonoscopy opening of Uncut Gems. A’zion feels very sidelined during much of the film’s first half and while glimpsed a bit more in the second still doesn’t quite as present as she perhaps should be, or deserves to be with a grounded performance which almost steals the show from Chalamet who is firmly in almost every scene of the film.

It’s in a strand relating to a hotel disaster and a missing dog (owned by Abel Ferrara’s increasingly mob-like figure) that Rachel gradually starts to appear more. The sequences are fittingly chaotic in the ways in which they develop and come in and out of the overall set of events that make up the film in its not-entirely-narrative-driven state. At times the winding nature can feel a bit much, especially when what initially seems like a brief instance or one-or-two-moment idea sprawls out into a longer set of sequences. There’s still an engaging nature to them, and the film as a whole fills its two-and-a-half hour run-time rather well. Not quite building up a sense of frequent tension – although there’s something thrilling about the fierceness of the table tennis matches and how quickly things move around during them.

Safdie and Bronstein have formed a film that’s as chaotic as its lead character, but not as unlikable. There’s an engaging nature to his lack of thought, and near tunnel vision as to where he wants to be with his life and career, and just how immediately he wants that to be the case. And more so when the film properly links him to other characters, even if it is leading them in to his spiralling life in the desperate, often poorly thought and egotistical, pursuit of greatness. But, it’s easy to be caught up in that poor thought which has been clearly laid out, if getting slightly tangled, at each stage of production, as everything starts to crash down around Chalamet who crashes through it as long as he can.

While the lead character is successfully unlikable, how Chalamet leads him crashing through the occasionally tangled events, balanced by the supporting cast with an underused yet scene-stealing Odessa A’zion, pushes the frantic chaos on display in Marty Supreme as the pursuit of greatness becomes panicked determination.