“All right. I gotta tell you something, Rachel. It’s not intended to be mean. I have a purpose. You don’t. If you think that’s some sort of blessing, it’s not. It puts me at a huge life disadvantage. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through. And with that obligation comes sacrifice, okay? My life is the product of all the choices I’ve had to make. Your life is the product of…I don’t even know what your life is the product of! You’re just making it up as you go. That’s the kind of person you are. That’s not the kind of person I am, okay?” – Marty Mauser, Marty Supreme
Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) isn’t the most terrible guy, but he isn’t a particularly good one, either. He lies often, behaves petulantly (nigh-fatally, even) when he doesn’t get his way, and can treat his family with condescension bordering on contempt. Rachel (Odessa A’zion), his married lover and childhood friend, worships the ground he walks on, but Marty seems to view her as little more than an accessory as he pursues his actual passion in life: professional table tennis.
Yes, Marty Mauser has an overriding, obsessive, feral dedication to the sport of ping pong, and he not only aims to be its greatest player, but also to help make it a major force in the American market, as it has already gained massive popularity in Asia. His only issue is that he isn’t really a legit ping pong player, at least not yet: he actually works as a shoe salesman at a shop owned by his uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), who, like many of Marty’s family members, would rather the young man make a respectable living doing anything else but ping pong. But the thing is, Marty Mauser isn’t just an arrogant dreamer—he is also very, very good at table tennis, and has even secured a spot to compete in the British Open and potentially snag the title of World No. 1.
However, Marty needs to make it to the British Open, first, the likelihood of which diminishes when his uncle goes AWOL, though he has promised Marty money to make the flight from New York to Great Britain. Desperate, Marty decides to take the money he’s owed by force, which kickstarts a two-hours-and-fifty-minutes saga involving a ping pong match with a seal, police chases, a short clinic in theatrical acting, a country house shootout, and a textbook sports movie climax where our heroic protagonist finally gets to prove his mettle against a formidable foe in a foreign land. Oh, and someone gets their bare ass spanked by a paddle.
Marty Supreme is undoubtedly a film about greatness; about the pursuit of it, its allures and illusions, and what it costs. And when I say costs, I do also mean costs: to play, and to win, at a sport, even one as marginal as table tennis was in the 1950s, requires moolah more than mere chutzpah, and one of the many appeals of Marty Supreme is watching Marty finagle his way into the places he needs to be to get what he wants, whether that’s the successful acquisition of cash funds at any number of shady joints, or a fading movie star’s hotel room—though the results are oftentimes, and unsurprisingly, catastrophic.
No, Marty isn’t a pleasant guy; in fact, he can be downright nasty, and the film makes no effort to hide his flaws. It barrels at a breakneck pace with only a few lulls, and in multiple instances shoving the viewer into that trademark Safdie chaos where people are shouting and someone is bleeding and somewhere a phone keeps ringing or a dog won’t shut the hell up. Much like its protagonist, in fact, the film’s sheer propulsion compels, and while the Safdie Brothers are well known for their ability to ably drive a narrative through episodes of stress-inducing freneticism, it might very well be Josh Safdie, and not Benny, who has the better knack for it.
The aforementioned litany of zany occurrences are also part and parcel of the Safdie experience, though they aren’t just silliness for the sake of silliness. While Marty’s dedication is admirable, to an extent, it is also true that he is a very ridiculous man. I say this less to pooh-pooh ping pong (as decent a profession as any sport) than to highlight Marty’s lack of self-awareness. After all, the film shows other highly skilled players who work to the raise the profile of the game, like Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig), a former champion and Holocaust survivor, whose unassuming demeanor hides an extraordinary capacity for selflessness; or Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), the deaf Japanese wunderkind and current World No. 1, a man who prefers to think himself more as a craftsman than an athlete—and none of them seem to possess the same uncanny ability as Marty to wreck his own prospects.
One of the better elements of Marty Supreme (loosely based on a real-life table tennis champion, Marty Reisman, with emphasis on loosely) is this unpeeling of Marty’s self-mythology, where the blinders he has put around himself in order to single-mindedly obsess over his goal of world renown are gradually stripped from him. It is fitting that his foil, and rival in love, is pen magnate Milton Rockwell (played by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame—it should come as no surprise that a man who enthusiastically took on the moniker of Mr. Wonderful should serve as Marty Supreme‘s chief antagonist), the husband of the actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) and a rapacious capitalist who, unlike Marty, knows exactly what kind of person he is. It is this knowledge that gives him authority over Marty, who believes he is operating in a world where a man can get by through pure verve, drive and cunning, when in reality, the game was rigged from the start; and the sacrifices Marty believes he has to make in the beginning of his story will look very different from those he must make by story’s end.
So does one play to win like Milton Rockwell, or play to win like Marty Mauser? And what does winning look like, to Marty, when the chips are down and he finds himself utterly alone, with only his skill and self-respect to vouch for him? In the film’s opening scene, the camera zooms in microscopically in order to observe a regiment of sperm cells vying to fertilize an egg, showing that, indeed, there is in nature an element of impersonal competition, where a single “winner” takes all—but after that? What then? Isn’t there more to life than the sheer pursuit of a thing, however grand, especially when it is blindly understood as the end-all-be-all?
To writer-director Josh Safdie’s credit, all these dynamics are at play whilst never sacrificing the film’s ability to entertain. There are definitely high-stakes moments, and scenes of more traditionally dramatic intensity, but on the whole, Marty Supreme leans more the comedic, and it is this buoyancy that helps keep it afloat; though it is perhaps too long, and so caught up in the hijinks necessitated by plot complications that by the time Marty makes his encouraging yet all-too-predictable realization(s), the viewer may find themselves incessantly checking the clock. (This formulaicness being the film’s primary weakness in comparison to something like, say, the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, another film that ironically undercuts its naively blustering protagonist, though it does so much more efficiently.)
As a revival of a certain era in history, Marty Supreme also deserves plaudits (courtesy of the great Jack Fisk’s production design, and the costumes of Miyako Bellizzi), and there is even a strange but interesting disconnect between the film’s 1950s setting and its soundtrack, which mainly features hits from the 80s, like Peter Gabriel and Tears for Fears. Safdie is on record drawing a connection between the optimism of the postwar era and that of thirty years after, where the sordidness of Vietnam and Ronald Reagan’s rampant de-regulation soured any notion of America’s supremacy, or that of its citizens’ ability to achieve prosperity through merit alone. This artistic choice seems to highlight the notion of Marty being “ahead of his time” as a sportsman-cum-entrepreneur in the conformist milieu of Eisenhower’s America, but with all the attendant baggage of such individualistic zeal.
(As a curious sidenote, in promotions for the film, A24 seems to be playing into this very dynamic, with Chalamet parodying the 21st century version of this personality-based branding in a marketing stunt, and with the actor himself appearing to fully don a brazen Marty-like mantle across various media appearances.)
Another mainstay of a Safdie film is good acting, and fortunately such can be reported for Marty Supreme. While I do not consider Chalamet to be among the upper echelon, he is quite good here, though I am simply unable to discuss his performance in the same breathless terms as some critics. This is the sort of role I can easily imagine him finding quite comfortable, so he more or less convinces, and even seems rather at home in Safdie’s naturalistically rapid-fire exchanges.
Everyone else does commendable work, especially Paltrow and A’zion in relatively weak roles that subordinate their own fullness as characters to Marty’s. And it’s a star-studded affair, when it comes to secondary and tertiary roles, with non-actor personalities like Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, The Creator), NBA Hall of Famer George Gervin, and maverick indie director Abel Ferrara putting in very serviceable work. But many of the speaking roles in Marty Supreme are non-actors, famous or otherwise, which adds to the film’s realism. Safdie’s script, co-written with Ronald Bronstein, is quite good, though the snappily improvisational style of the dialogue glosses over its more pedestrian fidelity to formula.
The film looks great, too, with previous Safdie collaborator Darius Khondji as DP (who did admirable work earlier this year in Ari Aster’s Eddington) shooting with anamorphic lenses to recreate the feel of the period. Safdie/Khondji deploy a very up-close-and-personal approach with the camera, coming in claustrophobically close to the human face in order to further immerse the viewer in this sweaty, catch-as-catch-can environment, and to also bring the viewer into the huddle, as if to make them a part of the banter and bullshitting.
Chances are, you know a guy like Marty Mauser, and have been both attracted to and repelled by that air of confidence, that smug belief in some impractical dream. The world is, in fact, full of Marty Mausers, all of them utterly convinced of their own rarity, and annoyingly unable to balance their passion with restraint; and while one may take some private glee in the inevitable crash-and-burn act (there can only be, by necessity, one World No. 1), there is also something close to genuine glory in the flair of their demise. Marty, in the end, makes his stand, though he wins nothing of what he’d hoped to win at the outset. But his tears before the credits roll are not, one can safely assume, tears of defeat.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Not A Rack Behind: On Ingmar Bergman’s “After the Rehearsal” (1984), Angel of Love: Reviewing Satoshi Kon’s “Perfect Blue” (1997), Collapse: on Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s “Warfare” (2025)