If you had only looked at the plot outline for Marty Supreme, you might be wondering just how exciting the life of a ping pong star could possibly be. Well, in the hands of Josh Safdie, the answer is: ‘exceptionally’. His follow-up to Uncut Gems is easily the most riotously entertaining film of the year, following the formula of its masterpiece predecessor of high stress, financial chaos, a cast of ludicrous and short-fused characters, and the inimitable thrill of live sports. It’s equal parts riveting and hilarious and, in its phenomenal title role, must finally be the film to win Timothee Chalamet his Oscar.
Loosely based on the life of real table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme has Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a genuinely brilliant young ping-pong-er in 1950s New York with a hustler’s spirit and an ego the size of a planet. Just like Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner before him, Marty is not great with money and it’s not long before, on a trip to London for a tournament, he has overspent and behaved badly enough to land in professional trouble and a mountainous debt. It’s a mistake he pays for a thousand times over for the rest of the film, his various cash-grab schemes ending with him in trouble with the mob, having to do humiliating half-time shows in Bosnia, and even getting spanked with a ping pong paddle (not in a fun way).
Marty might end up going in circles, but Safdie keeps those circles spinning at lightning speed, always escalating the stakes and chaos – Marty has a jaw-dropping capacity to piss people off and there’s more than a few scrapes that he’s lucky to escape from with his life. The result is a film that, though less relentlessly stressful than Uncut Gems, is completely gripping and wildly exciting, dragging Marty across the globe with a perfect balance of bleak darkness and laugh-out-loud fun.
Safdie’s script, co-written as usual by Ronald Bronstein, is just hilarious, packed with exceptional one-liners and their trademark shouting matches in which dense and intricate dialogue is allowed to crash into itself in a magnificently immersive way. It’s a mode into which Chalamet slots effortlessly, another exceptional performance in the career of the most exciting actor of his generation. Confidence and fear, drive and frustration, a guilty soul and despicable charm – Chalamet can rattle through all these in the space of a single scene here and if he doesn’t utterly dominate this year’s awards season, it’ll be daylight robbery.
He’s ably supported by another Good Time and Uncut Gems-esque eclectic supporting cast, Jennifer Venditti yet again proving herself as one of the absolute best casting directors in the business. You’ve got everything from Gwyneth Paltrow in her first non-Marvel film in a decade as Marty’s older love interest Kate Stone, a glamorous former Hollywood star, to Tyler Okonma (aka the Creator) as his best friend and fellow ping pong hustler Wally to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr Wonderful) as antagonistic rich sponsor Mr Rockwell.
They’re all fantastic, making every corner of this world feel richly lived-in, helped immensely by hyper-detailed set design and costuming and some more knockout cinematography from Darius Khondji. Of particular note on this last front; Safdie and Khondji never use the fact they’re making a sports movie as a lazy excuse to resort to slow motion. Every serve and rally is as lightning fast as it should be, Safdie one of the few directors to actually understand what makes sport thrilling to watch and thus able to translate that excitement into some of the best non-boxing sporting scenes ever filmed.
The sound design is just as good and bolstered by the year’s best soundtrack from Daniel Lopatin. It’s as bombastic as the film around it, always folding seemingly opposed eras and styles of music into one another until a blissfully thundering harmony is formed. There’s an out-of-time sense to a lot of Marty Supreme’s characters, whether that be quite literally in the case of Paltrow’s faded starlet or more intangibly for Marty himself and the likes of Mr Rockwell who can feel like they’ve been pulled in from a later time, and Lopatin’s score couldn’t fit them better.
After nearly 150 minutes of spiralling intensity, Marty Supreme looks like it’s about to land on the most precisely satisfying ending possible before just keeping on trucking into something much more unexpected and yet also much more indelible. It’s a true buzzer-beater of a finale, ending on a note that balances complete earnestness, an insanely dark laugh, and complete and utter faith in its audience, the kind of ending that has you leaving the cinema convinced you’ve just seen a masterpiece. At the very start of the year, Marty Supreme was the 2025 film I was most looking forward to watching, 2020s Hollywood’s most exciting leading man matched up with its most exciting filmmaker. It lives up to literally all of my unreasonably high expectations, and that’s just plain magic.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 