Don’t hate the game, hate the player.
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, his solo directing debut, operates with the frantic, sweat-slicked energy of a man who has no choice but to keep barrelling forward lest what he’s left behind him catches up. It concerns itself with the trajectory of Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a 1950s ping-pong prodigy and inveterate hustler, loosely inspired by real-life icon Marty Reisman. But this is no underdog sports movie narrative. Safdie is far more interested in the friction of the hustle than the statistics of the scoreboard. Mauser’s path to his self-ordained destiny is paved with bad intentions, his ego the prize and everyone in his vicinity and in his path merely means to that end. It’s a jarring, discordant and utterly exhilarating sprint of a character study that is frequently as repellent as it is magnetic.
The success of Marty Supreme rests entirely on Chalamet’s ability to portray a man who is, by almost any metric, the absolute worst. Mauser is a petulant, obsessive, and deeply unlikable protagonist, possessed of a singular talent and almost zero social grace. Chalamet sheds his usual ethereal charm to inhabit a character defined by a jagged, abrasive arrogance, playing Marty as a man perpetually on the verge of ruin, yet he manages to hold the audience’s focus through sheer, relentless intensity. We don’t necessarily want Marty to win because he is a good person; we want him to win because Safdie makes the act of his losing feel like a physical collapse of the film’s internal logic. We believe Marty can win because Marty believes he must win.
Nowhere is Marty’s moral vacuum more evident than in his relationship with Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion). A standard sports biopic would use the childhood sweetheart as a tether to Marty’s humanity, Safdie uses Rachel to highlight Marty’s utter lack of ethical or moral restraint. He views Rachel not as a partner, but as a utility, a domestic safety net to be exploited whenever his professional gambles leave him bruised or in need. Marty is ruthlessly single-minded, and his treatment of Rachel – and indeed his long-suffering friends Dion Galanis (Luke Manley) and Wally (Tyler Okonma aka Tyler, The Creator) – is a masterclass in emotional parasitism. He expects them to absorb the fallout of his volatility while offering nothing in return, treating their loyalty as just another asset to be liquidated for his own hubris.
Safdie’s direction ensures the camera is a co-conspirator in Marty’s narcissism, rarely pulling back to allow the audience a moment of detached observation. The 1950s New York setting is stripped of its usual cinematic gloss, replaced with a grime-streaked reality of basement clubs, illicit gambling dens and slum tenements. Likewise, Chalamet himself is tarnished, his skin roughened and pockmarked and sporting an odiously thin pencil moustache. Marty Supreme inhabits a dirty world – in every sense – and he’s willing to play just as dirty as he can to get what he feels is his.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kay Stone provides a necessary, cool-tempered counterweight to Marty’s volatile heat. As a faded but still famous actress turned wealthy socialite thanks to a marriage to stationery millionaire Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), her presence adds a sordid aspect of class dynamics and, through her husband, the commodification and exploitation of skill. Stone doesn’t exist to give Marty a degree of redemption; she’s just another reflection of the transactional nature of Marty’s world.
In Marty Supreme, relationships are rarely about connection and almost always about leverage, but in O’Leary’s Milton Rockwell Marty encounters a much bigger fish – a shark even – who’s every bit as skilled at exploitation and manipulation as Marty is, but has money and power to back it up. The teeth are sharp but the dialogue is sharper, avoiding the stilted formality of a period piece in favour of a rhythmic, overlapping patter that mirrors the frantic bounce of a celluloid ball. In exploring what it takes to get to the tournament rather than the drama of the tournament itself, Marty Supreme highlights the desperation and moral compromise inherent in niche celebrity. The sport becomes another metaphor in a film stacked with them, a narrative house of cards on breeze away from collapse.
Every character, every action, every attitude of Marty Supreme, is an aspect of modern-day America. Entitlement, manifest destiny, callous arrogance, prejudice, bullying, inequality, inequity, talent, grift, grind and hustle – it’s all here, a nation’s psychological underbelly vivisected through the story of a wannabe world champion who’s only ever one wrong move away from losing everything.
Marty Supreme succeeds not just because Chalamet is so skilled in keeping the audience onside no matter how repellent Marty’s actions are, but because it also refuses to apologise for its protagonist, trusting the audience to find the fascination in the friction. The ending of Marty’s quest, suitably Pyrrhic, is overshadowed by the film’s ending in which consequences finally catch up with our anti-hero and in the end, the real marvel might just be Josh Safdie’s ability to find the cinematic gold in the most abrasive aspects of humanity.
