Directed By Josh Safdie

Starring – Timothee Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion

The Plot – Follows Marty Mauser (Chalamet), a charismatic, arrogant, yet gifted table tennis hustler in 1950s New York City, as he schemes and hustles his way from the Lower East Side tenements to international glory, proving ping-pong is a serious sport, navigating dodgy deals, a pregnant girlfriend (A’zion), and his own over-the-top self-belief for a chance at greatness

Rated R for adult language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.

Marty Supreme | Official Trailer HD | A24

POSITIVES

The sudden separation of the Safdie brothers might’ve put an untimely ending to one of the most dynamic duo’s to ever grace cinematic directing, but it also afforded limitless opportunity for each of the them to cement their own unique appeal to storytelling, and in at least the first measurement of their solo projects, it’s Josh who ultimately comes away with the superior engagement, bringing along so many of the duo’s integral aspects still lingering in the conscious of this unconventional dreamer’s tale of toxic obsession. Similar to “Good Time” and especially “Uncut Gems”, “Marty Supreme” garners much of the tensely riveting and uncomfortable anxieties that made those films such edge-of-your-seat entertainment, with so much of Safdie’s direction and the production coherently fleshing out the elements of his environments that simultaneously blend together like a powder keg of combustible energy, the likes of which Marty continuously feels like the spark that ignites such a fuse. The sound mixing zeroing in on multiple ongoing conversations and increasing volume between their respective emotionality, paints a thunderously chaotic clashing that not only breeds authenticity to the claustrophobic confines of so many characters being in a close proximity with one another, but also captures the attention of the audience in ways that continuously forces them to hang onto every word of each of the characters, in order to remain at eye level with them, and when combined with the strangely surreal but subliminal incorporating of 80’s New Wave songs to its soundtrack and Daniel Lopatin’s stinging synth score, crafts operatic levels of intensity that ratchet the most captivating of interactions, with very few moments in the film’s two-and-a-half hour duration offering exhaling relief to alleviate such anxiousness. Safdie also brings along “Uncut Gems” cinematographer, Darius Khondji, who somehow pulls off the daunting task of making table tennis feel like the most exhilaratingly exciting sport in the world, with approaches to imagery that initially feel simplistic, but in execution are remarkable for the clarity and detectability attained from framing such an erratically uncontrollable game. Khondji receives a lot of help from the editing offering these prolonged in-game takes, in order to appreciate the magnitude of the physicality and quick-thinking intelligence needed for the sport, but Khondji’s intuition to craft these sequences with wide angles offers just the right amount of space to the expansive onslaughts of bodily responses, deviating only for periodic zeroing in on tightly framed facial registries, in order to maximize the compelling tension of a game’s spontaneous rhythms. Aside from the mesmerizing technical components, the film’s script also from Safdie and longtime collaborator, Ronald Bronstein, takes some refreshing deviations in the structure and stamina of conventionalized biopics, choosing instead to tell a story about balancing ones personal integrity with the pursuit of greatness, instead of a beat-for-beat recounting of the real-life athlete behind the movie’s inspiration. Being that Marty Mouser is loosely inspired by the life and career of table tennis player Marty Reisman, it allows the film the afforded freedom to sample some of the athlete’s documented conflicts without the demand to remain so closely tied to what’s factually accurate, and though the film’s single greatest exploration pertains to the slice of humble pie that all athletes, actors, and anyone coming into power must eventually face, in one way or another, I found the character study of Marty to be the movie’s single greatest strength, especially considering Mouser is anything but an admirable protagonist, as evidenced as early as the film’s opening scene. This will obviously make it difficult for certain audiences to indulge and invest in such an at-times detestably selfish character, but it forces Marty to come to terms many times in the film with the shallow aspects of his life that he finds irresponsibly important, all with the same kind of self-sabotaging and destructive tendencies that Safdie has centered the entirety of his films around, and while the script is far from perfectly ideal, I commend Safdie for the ambitiousness and audacity with faithfully fleshing out some scintillating set pieces, instead of making his story feel like a copy and paste of Reisman’s Wikipedia page, the likes of which so many celebrity biopics feel uninspiringly interchangeable with one another. I also want to show some love for the performances of Timothee Chalamet and Odessa A’zion, who each effortlessly bring their characters to life, but also this uncanny ability that Safdie has to redistribute unorthodox familiar faces into meaningful roles in his films. On the latter, Fran Drescher, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma (A.K.A Tyler the Creator), Penn Jillette, and Abel Ferrera, to name a few, appraise scene-stealing legitimacy to their respective turns, with Ferrera and O’Leary specifically enabling an element of moral ambiguity to characters who are imposing in their own kinds of ways. As for the decorated leads, A’zion offers a fiery electric energy and volatile resiliency that comes the closest to equaling Chalamet’s transformative tendencies, with her own brand of compromising integrities that takes her down some very dark and challenging roads, and Chalamet, while predictably giving another awards-worthy turn as the morally conflicted Marty, unpredictably elicits a hyperactive and disarming charm that he weaponizes against anyone standing in his path to prominence, exerting blissful naivety and unapologetic remorselessness as this devastatingly destructive force, while maintaining two entirely unique sets of chemistry with each of the leading ladies that he bounces from, like one of the ping pong balls in his table top games. Lastly, being that “Marty Supreme” takes place in the 50’s, it is a transformative period piece that naturally emulates the grit and grandeur of New York City, with the best of these elements paid to costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, who crafted thousands of outfits to account for various athletes, trends, and classes permeating within the film. Because everything feels so authentic and timely relevant for the depicted period, there’s really a naturalized appeal that breeds believability in the imagery, a fact made constant by the “Hustler suits” that she made for Marty, drawing heavily on zoot suits of the era, in order to give off the perception of his inevitable success in the public eye.

NEGATIVES

While I found “Marty Supreme” to be mostly engaging and full of top class filmmaking, I undeniably realize that this will be another example of mainstream audiences finding difficulty attaching themselves to the exploration, particularly with some choices in the screenplay that tested my patience every inch of the way in a two-and-a-half hour runtime. For starters, so many of these individualized arcs feel underdeveloped and unimportant to the extensive journey, between a lustful foray with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kay, which shamefully wastes away Paltrow’s six year comeback to cinema, and the surprising lack of table tennis in sporadic gaps to the movie’s consistency, the script indulges in a lot of compelling angles, without finding a comfortable rhythm and momentum between them, and this leads not only to a tediously exhausting second act that at times can feel aimlessly repetitive in a structure that doesn’t progress the narrative with enough urgency to replicate Marty’s bleak outlook, but also spends a majority of its time on too many scenes requiring a bit too much padding to what ultimately becomes of them. Being somebody who loves long engagements to thoroughly fleshed out worlds, I regretfully found myself struggling to remain patient in a film where characters make remarkably dumb decisions to fumble their own ambition, and it left this film and its pacing frequently defined by clunky sequencing and focus imbalance that at times made this feel more erratically sloppy than I’m used to in a Safdie brothers experience. Aside from this, my only other problem with the script pertained to an ending, which conveniently wants the audience to have its cake and eat it too, with regards to Marty’s journey to redemption. While I commend the movie for responsibly making him anything but perfect, I do think the exploration goes a bit overboard, with regards to fleshing him out to the point of detestability, an aspect that wouldn’t be bad, if not for an ending resolution that feels hollow with the kind of artificiality that shifts our protagonist’s mentality with the single laziest excuse for transformation that has ever been put to cinema. I’m not disagreeing that this event wouldn’t shift his priorities, I just find it difficult to believe that a man like Marty would or could ever live for someone else, and it left the ending falling a little flat in Marty’s grandest of triumphs.

OVERALL
“Marty Supreme” is a relentlessly energetic and sprawling opus that explores the cost of greatness through exhilarating chaos made intoxicating from Josh Safdie’s hyperkinetic brand of filmmaking. Anchored by a career-defining performance from Timothee Chalamet, as well as A24’s single biggest budget to date, transforming the canvas into 1950’s New York, the film’s highest of highs easily trump its lowest of low’s, in turn crafting the rare unpredictable biopic that blazes its own unapologetic trail to inspire the dreamers that keep the world spinning

My Grade: 8.7 or A-