‘Marty Supreme’ review: Everybody wants to rule the world in Josh Safdie’s film

Desperate for money, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) enlists his friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who’s married but likely carrying his unborn child, for a hopelessly long shot in an endless series of long shots. She calls up the shady Ezra (Abel Ferrara), whose dog Marty lost, then tracked down. When she asks for a finder’s fee of $2,000, Ezra balks, saying he got the dog for free. What if I was a doctor operating on your mother, Rachel improvises, would you refuse the surgery because you got your mother for free? “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Ezra says. Rachel immediately retorts: “Well, then I guess you don’t know anything about love.”

The hustle never ends in Josh Safdie’s films, four with his brother Benny, and now his solo feature, Marty Supreme. It’s a constant dance of deception, but there’s also a strange purity to it, the instigators of chaos so far out on a limb that you know they’re fully bought into their own bullshit. Rachel can say in all seriousness to the man being resold his own dog that it’s really about love because she believes it—just as Marty believes he has a purpose, “an obligation to see a very specific thing through”.

Though it’s hard to keep track of everything table tennis player Marty—loosely based on Marty Reisman, a flamboyant US men’s singles champion—needs money for at any given point, the overarching goal is to compete in the world championship in Japan. Defeat to Japan’s Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) in the finals of the 1952 British Open upends his grand plans of become the first US celebrity in the sport. Suddenly, the bills he’s been running up at The Ritz need to be cleared before the federation clears his participation. He can’t afford a ticket to Japan either, after spurning an offer from pen manufacturer Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) to throw an exhibition match against Endo before the championship.

Safdie protagonists don’t so much solve problems as parlay them into new problems until the original sin is obscured. No sooner is Marty back in New York than he’s a blur of mad plans and broken promises (at one point, cinematographer Darius Khondji captures him as a literal blur running through the streets). Every failed endeavour begets—Marty would say, necessitates—another, riskier scheme. He orchestrates a table tennis hustle with his friend, Wally (Tyler Okonma), but it inevitably unravels. He attempts to pawn a necklace from Rockwell’s wife, semi-retired actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), with whom he’s having an affair, only to find out it’s costume jewellery. Even a simple task like taking Ezra’s dog to the vet (for a fee) mutates until Marty is peeking into a house out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Safdie elicits something from audiences I’ve only seen horror films do: he gets viewers talking to the screen. During my screening, the audience groaned, cheered, offered advice and admonition as characters made terrible decisions or said something outrageous. One Auschwitz joke was thrown in so casually that everyone reacted in unison a second later.

Marty is a memorable slimeball, played by Chalamet as a whirlwind of smug confidence and entrepreneurial invention. There is a lot in common between him and Adam Sandler’s jeweler-gambler in Uncut Gems, but a crucial difference is that Marty is actually good at something besides hustling. He is the hustle, a talented, dogged player who has the misfortune of coming up against an innovator in Endo (who uses sponge rackets and a pencil grip, both new to the game). Deaf, undemonstrative and patriotic, Endo is a natural foil to Marty. Their final showdown is exhilarating but confusing—you don’t want the casually cruel motormouth American to beat the modest champion, but then all this effort would’ve been for nothing.

It’s tempting to surmise from the Safdie brothers’ first solo ventures last year that Josh was the primary shaper of their four films together. Yet, if Marty Supreme seems cut from the same cloth as the equally frantic Good Time and Uncut Gems, it’s because The Smashing Machine is designed as a very different sort of film, albeit also about a troubled athlete in a growing sport who seeks glory in Japan. Benny sought out new collaborators for that film, whereas Josh works on Marty Supreme with Ronald Bronstein, who’d co-written and co-edited all their films, and composer Daniel Lapotin, who scored their last two films together. Both Safdie solo films use the services of casting director Jennifer Venditti, whose work on Marty Supreme is particularly striking, surrounding Chalamet and Paltrow with left-of-field choices like Ferrara, Pico Iyer and Penn Jillette.

Marty Mauser may be all over the place, but Marty Supreme is extremely precise. The first needle drop, in the opening credits, is Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, one of several new wave tracks that complement Lopatin’s chunky synths. Do you really want to live forever, the film asks, over the abstractly beautiful sight of a shoal of sperm swimming to an egg cell, which turns into a table tennis ball. Then, at the film's end, Rockwell warns Marty, “I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever… You go out and win that game, you’re gonna be here forever too. And you’ll never be happy.” It’s quite probable, though Safdie does close on a rare moment of stillness and happiness. Even here, though, the music is pulling Marty towards another scheme: Everybody wants to rule the world…

‘Marty Supreme’ is in theatres.