“I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” said Timothée Chalamet earlier this year at the Screen Actors Guild Awards after winning the best actor prize for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (2024). His chutzpah was startling but also weirdly charming given the faux-humility of the standard acceptance speech. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he continued, invoking the names of Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, and Michael Jordan. Whatever you make of Timmy’s ego, his remarks offer something of an amuse-bouche to the pleasures of watching him in Marty Supreme, in which he embodies the hubristic table-tennis prodigy Marty Mauser—a proof of concept if ever there was one.
Sporting geeky round glasses, a unibrow, and a moustache, his boyish mug branded with blemishes, 23-year-old Marty works a day job at a shoe store in the Lower East Side, a gig both suited to his powers of persuasion (“I could sell shoes to an amputee!”) and terribly beneath him. It’s New York City, circa 1952, and Marty has ping-pong on the brain. Having honed his skills in the city’s underground table-tennis clubs, where amateurs wager their winnings for quick cash, Marty is set to represent the United States in an upcoming tournament in the UK. No one is as impressed by this as Marty himself, whose quest throughout the film hinges on realizing his gifts to their fullest, dreamiest potential: become the world’s top player, the face of table-tennis in the US; reap lucrative sponsorships, dazzling wealth and fame. Laugh all you want, but the camera, at least, takes him seriously, slowly zooming in on Marty in action like a rapt spectator. His moves tell us that Marty’s got a shot, but is his mega-confidence a real force for manifestation? Or the delusions of a selfish man persuaded of his own divine rights?
This tragicomic calculus is signature Safdie. Streetwise spirals into chaos centered on charismatic hustlers with gambling addictions in films like Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) have made Josh and Benny Safdie as the leading practitioners of a strain of engrossingly anxious American cinema, finding the moral conflicts in dog-eat-dog schemes in their tales of New York. Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial project without his brother Benny, Marty Supreme follows suit to a curious degree—in part because the elder Safdie continues to work with some of the duo’s key collaborators, their editor and co-writer Ronald Bronstein, composer Daniel Lopatin, and cinematographer Darius Khondji. Marty Supreme’s opening credits mirror those of Uncut Gems, in which the camera plunges into the sparkling insides of a black opal, surfing through its cosmic void before cutting to diamond dealer Howard Ratner’s colonoscopy. When Marty scores a quickie with his married beau Rachel (Odessa A’zion) in the backroom of the shoeshop, another microscopic joyride ensues: Marty’s sperm swarm into Rachel’s uterus, and one exceptional tadpole manages to penetrate an egg.
For all its similarities to the Safdies’ previous works, Marty Supreme stands apart for its epic sweep and blockbuster aspirations. The film’s period setting and jacked-up budget (reportedly upwards of $60,000,000, compared to Uncut Gems’s roughly $19 mil) allow for globetrotting set pieces and buoyant recreations of midcentury New York, from its creaky tenements and dusty streetscapes to its vintage five-star hotels. Marty Mauser is loosely based on the Jewish-American ping-pong player Marty Reisman, a raconteur whose skill was matched by his vaudevillian playing style; an awareness that he was also putting on a show. Marty’s Jewish identity subtly informs the drama’s twists and turns, positioning Marty’s American Dream as a rejection of his roots and a striving toward, if not gentile acceptance of, a kind of upper-class cosmopolitanism denuded of ethnicity. It’s a loaded desire in any time period, but especially here, in the aftermath of World War II, with its fraught idealism and psychic scars.
After holding his coworker at gunpoint to supposedly collect his next week’s earnings, Marty heads to London where his chief opponent reveals himself to be Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) of Japan. Endo’s participation marks the recovering nation’s first appearance in an international competition since before the war, while Endo’s impaired hearing—perhaps a battle wound—endows him with preternatural concentration. For his part, Marty plays the stereotype of the entitled American, his imperious ways comically in tension with his juvenile looks and string-bean physique. Confident that he’ll triumph, Marty checks into the Ritz on the host federation’s tab and sets his sights on a former Hollywood starlet named Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, herself lured out of a semi-retirement) upon hearing of her past bona fides. Against the odds, Marty succeeds in seducing the middle-aged beauty, though his attraction to her is largely symbolic. A star athlete like him needs a diva on his arm. When the two consummate their affair, Marty looks not at Kay’s luxury lingerie, but at himself in the mirror enacting his illusions.
Endo ultimately obliterates Marty in the tournament’s final match, deflating his ego, swollen after several days of playing the chest-thumping provocateur. In an earlier match against Béla (Géza Röhrif), a veteran player and concentration camp survivor, a twinkle-eyed Marty invites him to have “some fun with it” when it becomes evident that Marty will win the match. The two infuse acrobatics into their game, inadvertently previewing their antics (ping-pong with pots and pans; ping-pong against a seal!) as openers for the Harlem Globetrotters, a gig the debt-wracked Marty begrudgingly takes following his loss to Endo. In one of his many efforts to grab Kay’s attention, Marty pays for her table’s dinner after seeing her across the room seated, crucially, next to her husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a tycoon in the business of pens. The magnate immediately detests Marty for his peacocking (unaware, of course, that he is also being cucked by the pesky youngster), a hatred compounded by Marty’s dubious smack-talk: he threatens to do to Béla what “Auschwitz couldn’t” and describes his upcoming match with Endo as “dropping a third atom bomb.”
Among these outrageously unsavory comments, Marty takes aim at Rockwell’s son, an American soldier who died liberating a camp. Wildly offended, Rockwell keeps score, emerging as the film’s Faustian figure when Marty pleads for his patronage following his return to New York. He had originally denied Rockwell’s offer to fund his trip to Japan, where another ping-pong championship will take place, offering Marty a chance at redemption in the form of a rematch with the formidable Endo. Rockwell’s offer, however, comes with a catch: a free trip in exchange for Marty’s participation in a staged face-off against Endo—now a profitable symbol of Japan’s postwar revival—hosted by Rockwell’s company, which has begun to make inroads into Asian markets.
Safdie’s stunt-casting of Kevin O’Leary—aka Mr. Wonderful, a Canadian businessman with Trumpian swagger and a fixture on the reality TV show Shark Tank—sharpens the film’s ethical crises. Ping-pong is a joke; at best a bankable circus act, in Rockwell’s mind, making Marty an irritating but still commercially viable tool; undeserving of respect but worthy of exploitation. Marty himself proves to be an able swindler, and his efforts to amass the couple thousand he needs to make the trip to Japan comprise the (bloated if meanderingly diverting) bulk of the film. Amid perpetual pandemonium, Marty encounters an aging gangster (Abel Ferrera, the cult director of some of the muckiest New York–set crime films) and loses his beloved dog—a mishap that he spins into an opportunity to collect a finder’s fee. In Waspy downtown youth clubs, Marty and his bestie Wally (the rapper Tyler Okonma) scam low-level ping-pong hobbyists into betting cash on their games. “I’m here to make money, not friends,” one of O’Leary’s Shark Tank one-liners, comes to mind as Marty short-shrifts his loved ones in pursuit of his goals—wrecking Wally’s cab, his source of income; and disavowing his paternity when Rachel announces she’s pregnant.
Still, Marty’s deceptive tactics, exaggerated as they may be, aren’t unusual in his working-class quarters. His own mother (Fran Drescher) has made a habit of feigning sickness, or enlisting the help of her relatives in the police department, to wrangle Marty back home; and Rachel, who emerges as the Bonnie to Marty’s Clyde, proves slippery herself when her black eye—supposedly a blow from her jealous husband—is revealed to be painted on. Desperation, as Safdie’s previous films have shown us, begets deranged, dangerous, and ruthless forms of invention, and the risks are vast—like getting caught in the crosshairs of a gunfight over a gangster’s missing dog. The looming presence of Rockwell and Kay, whose wealth is held over Marty’s head like a dog bone, underscores the casual cruelty of this class discrepancy. Is Kay really all that generous when she decides to give Marty one of her dozens of diamond necklaces? When the cops catch them canoodling in Central Park after hours, they take Marty’s prize—in other words, his Tokyo plane ticket—as punishment. Kay could easily get him another, but as he waits outside her building for this life-changing gift, she’s sidetracked by devastating pans of her Broadway debut; her goodwill towards Marty gone in a puff of smoke.
If survival in Marty Supreme involves tearing down others, it also means signing off on your own abuse and humiliation; in other words, being the clown they took you for in the first place. Table-tennis’s frequent comparisons to vaudeville and other forms of mass spectacle throughout the movie also tethers the game to early forms of American entertainment, most conspicuously the Hollywood studio system, which was heavily shaped by Jewish creatives and entrepreneurs and which was, at its inception, derided as cheap and sensational.
In this sense, Marty Supreme is of a piece with other narratives about Jewish identity during and after the war, stories that bristle at the shit Jewish survivors must eat not just stay alive but to live the way they want to, however small or, in Marty’s case, outrageously big, that may be. In last year’s The Brutalist, for instance, a gifted Hungarian architect is figuratively and literally raped by his gentile benefactor. Marty, though spared such extreme levels of sadism, still suffers a great indignity in exchange for his ticket to Japan, agreeing to pull down his pants and receive multiple spankings from Rockwell in front of an amused audience of his fat-cat friends.
The rest of the film reels back from this low
point in surprisingly reassuring fashion for a director whose last two
anti-heroes were either arrested or shot in the head. Perhaps in accordance
with its bigger and more commercially-oriented scale, Marty Supreme softens
its touch in the final act. Our underdog reasserts his dignity, and finds a
kind of clarity that allows him to come down to Earth—embracing a more
conventionally-fulfilling future with a glimpse of his newborn child, and
settling down, in a sense, like the film itself.
