Movie Review – “Marty Supreme”
“Marty Supreme” is undeniably an interesting watch, especially if you’re going into it relatively blind. It kept me glued to the screen for its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. It’s also a movie that hurt to watch.
If you are aware of the Safdie brothers’ previous works, “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems,” then the intense, feverish pacing of this film may not shock you, but it will undeniably grab hold of you.
While this movie is only directed by one of the brothers, Josh, the increasing high pressure that this film presents is very familiar to their other works. Amidst the chaos that entails, this movie also has a lot to say about youthful aspiration and unchecked bravado, amidst a turning point in American history.
The film follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a young, Jewish-American living in 1950s New York City, who dreams of becoming a world-class table tennis champion and will do anything to achieve this goal. Early on, you realize that anything truly means anything as Marty goes to extreme lengths to get a taste of success.
What follows is a series of bad decisions that spiral into one after another, resulting in the film equivalent of a car crash, where it’s hard to watch, but almost impossible to look away from. Marty’s unchecked ego is the catalyst for most of the problems presented, and on some level, seeing his drive to achieve success is inspiring, yet I also wanted to throttle him.
While I am not a crazy Timothée Chalamet fan, I can’t deny that his performance here was one of my favorites of last year. He excels at portraying a character who won’t take no for an answer and becomes increasingly more frantic as he attempts to cement that sort of reality. The character’s self-confidence and paper-thin bravado on display are continuously fascinating, especially when it continuously lands him in hot water.
The rest of the cast does a fantastic job of bouncing around the ego of the main character, with a standout to me being the love interest, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), whose performance becomes more and more engrossing as the movie continues.
Since the film acts as a character deconstruction, most of the characters aren’t given the same in-depth look as Marty receives, mainly because it’s about seeing how the world and people in it are influenced and used to Marty’s selfish ends.
A notable fact about this movie is that it is loosely based on the real-world table tennis player Marty Resiman, who was known for his hustler attitude. While interesting, the film dramatizes the exploits of Resiman to a fantastical degree, instead using loose aspects of his life to tell a story about the pervasiveness of capitalism and what worldly relations looked like after WW2.
Like with a lot of movies, a lot is going on under the surface here, but it ultimately can still be appreciated as a story about a character quickly spiraling out of control via his stupid actions.
While I said that this movie hurt to watch, I still enjoyed it immensely for how off-the-wall its presentation and pacing were. Some will not enjoy how cruel and anxiety-inducing it can be, but it does serve as another example of how engrossing stories like this can be.
Instead of rooting for Marty, I was consistently wondering how he might get out of the hole he dug for himself, a question that leads to many fun surprises. “Marty Supreme” was a riot on my emotions, but like other Safdie films, its writing and storytelling stand out immensely against its contemporaries.
