Review of the Week: Marty Supreme

(150 mins, 15, in UK and Irish cinemas 26 December)

Here’s what all the real con artists and hucksters know: confidence isn’t a trick, it’s a superpower. Self-belief, when a man has it, can push open any closed door or persuade anyone of anything. And Timothée Chalamet, in Marty Supreme, absolutely has it. 

He’s got ping-pong-playing skills as well, but, despite the sports movie marketing, it’s confidence, not athleticism, which is the true subject of this new film from Josh Safdie, one half of the film-making brothers known for the Adam Sandler-starring Uncut Gems (2019) and the Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time (2017). The events, which unfold as Marty hustles his way to championship tournaments, first in London and then in Tokyo, are mostly the fictional invention of the elder Safdie, and only loosely inspired by the biography of Marty Reisman, a real-life New Yorker whose many midcentury adventures included becoming two-time US table tennis champion in 1958 and 1960.

Safdie has said he was struck by Chalamet’s physical similarities to Reisman – similarities which have been emphasised through the application of a monobrow, a bum-fluff ’tache and a pair of wiry glasses, to match his wiry frame. But there’s also a deeper, spiritual affinity between character and actor. That will be evident to anyone who saw Chalamet accept the best actor award for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown at February’s SAG Awards. “The truth is, I’m in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet told an audience which included the more reserved British multiple Oscar-winners Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman. “I know people don’t usually talk like that … But I want to be one of the greats.” At the time, Chalamet was gently mocked for his earnestly stated ambition, but in retrospect it was a very Marty sort of move. A powerful one, too.

And Chalamet is only one example of this film’s often unexpected, but always inspired, casting. Odessa A'zion has a desperate, dirty-fingernailed beauty as Marty’s married, passionately adoring girlfriend, Rachel. Tyler Okonma (aka the controversy-courting rapper Tyler, The Creator) is so at ease as Marty’s partner-in-hustle, Wally, that it’s hard to credit this as his first proper acting role. Abel Ferrara, the granite-faced, cult New York director of The Driller Killer (1979) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), is every bit the mobbed-up dog-lover you don’t want to let down. These performances and more (Sandra Bernhard! David Mamet! Isaac Mizrahi!) are judiciously placed among non-actors to create a 1950s milieu that feels so real you could reach out and touch it. 

Nor is this postwar period setting merely an incidental excuse to show off some nice two-tone wingtips and a slicked-back side parting – it allows for a deeper interrogation of that long-running Safdie interest in New York Jewishness and masculine pride. Marty’s irreverent rejection of the usual Holocaust-related pieties is shocking – his Auschwitz-themed trash talk about a fellow Jewish man and rival has the London sports reporters gasping – but it’s also a kind of self-liberation. Similarly, Marty has his own reasons for pursuing a connection with a decades-older faded movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow), but the opportunity to cuckold her latently antisemitic WASP husband certainly comes as a welcome bonus.

Essentially, this is another Safdie Brothers movie, one which feels more of a piece with their oeuvre to date than The Smashing Machine, the actual sports movie which the younger Safdie, Benny, put out earlier this year. Josh Safdie has chosen to re-team not only with Uncut Gems’ co-writer and co-editor (Ronald Bronstein), but also with the same cinematographer (Darius Khondji) and the same composer (Daniel Lopatin). This film even includes an early-on, microscopic-journey-though-the-human-body sequence – a fateful insemination – which closely mirrors that bit in Uncut Gems when the camera seems to take us in through the iridescent facet of a black opal and out again through Adam Sandler’s lower intestine.

Crucially, Marty Supreme shares the same propulsive energy of earlier Safdie films, but this time much of it is seemingly emanating from Chalamet personally. As Marty, he’s the narrative ping-pong ball, ricocheting from one chaotic encounter to another, driven by a radiating self-belief which ultimately manages to give a meaningful shape to both the man’s life and the film’s absurdly action-packed, picaresque storyline.

This kid! Every time you count Chalamet out, he comes back fighting: harder, better, stronger than ever before. They might as well hand over the Academy Award now – and next year’s too, for good measure. Chalamet reigns supreme and only a fool would bet against him.