Isn’t it strange when a film is misrepresented by its own advertising? For example, I’m not sure what movie I was expecting when I finally settled down to watch Oscars hopeful, Marty Supreme, but it certainly wasn’t what the trailers had sold me on – especially in regards to the copious mentions to ping pong. I mean, yes, table tennis does play a sizable role in Josh Safdie’s gleefully chaotic, 50s set drama, but Marty Supreme is no more about ping pong than Barton Fink was about writing a wresting picture and as a result, the film crams more surprises within its run time then any other movie this year. Of course, there’s a danger that this frenetic experience may be compared to the amusing ad campaign for David O’Russell’s Joy that conveniently thought to omit that the uplifting film was about Jennifer Lawrence’s character inventing a mop, but when a cagey trailer results in a surprise as awesome as this, I find it incredibly hard to complain. Josh Safdie to serve.
Marty Mauser reluctantly works in his uncle’s shoe store, hocking footwear to patrons like a pro, but despite the fact that his family want him to settle down and run the store someday, Marty – who seemingly has untold reserves of energy – has way too many irons in the fire to do that. Despite having an affair with his childhood friend, Rachel, and pitching selling ping pong balls painted a novelty orange, Marty is also a highly ranked, professional table tennis player who is due to play at the British Open. His dream is to win it and rake in the cash that will surely come if his victory manages to break the sport in America, but he hit the first of a ridiculous amounts of snags when his uncle leaves work for the day without giving him the $700 loan Marty needs to buy a plane ticket.
From here, we get something of a seismic ripple effect as we not only see what a shameless grifter Marty can be, but we also find out how maniacally determined he is when it comes to trying to accomplish his dreams. Essentially robbing his own store to get the money he feels he’s owed (even though it’s technically a loan), Marty makes it to the British Open where his obnoxious levels of confidence earn him admiration and scorn aplenty. However, when he not bitching about his accommodation or making outlandish comments to the press, Marty catches the eye of former starlet Kay Stone who us stuck in a loveless relationship with wealthy pen magnate Milton Rockwell as soon falls into another hurried affair.
But when his plans for the Open don’t pan out as he hoped, Marty and his endless confidence gets stuck on an out of control ferris wheel as he flips and flops into numerous different adventures that involve ping pong hustles, inadvertently dog-napping a mobsters pooch, trying to deal with the fact that Rachel is pregnant and yet more run-ins with Stone and Rockwell. Can Marty’s unstoppable enthusiasm and shameless scamming manage him to wrangle the funds to make it to the next Open all the way in Japan?
If you’d told me before the lights went down that Marty Supreme was basically 150 minutes of Timothée Chalamet acting like an entitled, insufferable prick as he zips across the globe lying, cheating and scamming his way into achieving his dreams, I would have girded my loins for an experience that would undoubtedly have gotten on my tits from beginning to end credits. However, Josh Safdie (one half of the brotherly duo behind Uncut Gems) has somehow taken the concept of a super confident, unstoppable man-brat and turned it into one of the most insane, enjoyable rollercoaster rides of the year. I don’t want to say it’s a sleazier Forrest Gump with ADHD, but watching it’s monobrowed main character steamroll his way through life on a wing and a prayer only to end up in yet more deep shit proves to be the counter intuitive ode to chaos I didn’t even know I needed.
Essentially more of a comedy built entirely on balls and stress than anything else, Marty Supreme, much like Chalamet’s unflappable lead, it a film with incredible drive that has an end goal in sight, but ultimately takes such a messy, crazy and genuinely funny route to get there, even if you find our “protagonist” a selfish, indefensible little shit (which I actually think you’re supposed to), you can’t help get caught up in his overwhelming belief that his needs supersede literally everything else. It helps that Safdie lays his audacious cards on the table right from the word go as he begins his gritty, screwball comedy (think Coppola filming a Coen Brothers script) with the sight of Marty’s sperm impregnating the egg of his needy lover, Rachel (an impressive Odessa A’zion) to the sounds of Forever Young by Alphaville. From here, we watch Chalamet ricochet from event to event as we continue to get banging, 80s needle drops even though the film is set in 1952 and the result is effortlessly spellbinding.
The sheer amount of lived-in detail this the film has somehow grounds the heinous and desperate shit that our single-minded lead attempts to pull off that sees him angering approximately 95% of every human being he unleashes his abrasive personality upon, and it’s scale is nothing short of hilarious, but all credit has to be bestowed on the film’s lead who – like his character – regularly achieves to impossible by annoyingly being every bit as talented as he constantly says he is. If mismanaged, Marty Mauser would quite simply be unwatchable without the uncontrollable urge to rip the cinema screen apart with your bare hands, but somehow Chalamet turns this arrogant, bespectacled fucker into a fascinating underdog, scrabbling and clawing at any chance he can get to achieve his goals no matter who he uses and pisses on along the way. However, thankfully cause and effect manages to go hand in hand with Mauser far more than it does with, say Ferris Bueller, and while Marty does screw up a fair few lives in his wake, his own life isn’t exactly a bed of roses itself as he’s constantly having to come up with counter schemes to deal with the previous schemes that collapsed in the first place.
The cast is wondrous and contains a hefty amount of eccentric choices such as Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler The Creator and Abel Ferrara that seem weird when placed alongside the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow’s bored former actress; but everyone involved give the film an authenticity that’s incredibly hard to maintain as the film moves at the velocity of a ping pong ball served by the ranked number one.
Considering how much of a thoughtless engine of destruction he tends to be, the fact that Marty Mauser’s deranged odyssey ends up being utterly involving just proves how much all involved are firing on all cylinders. Unfathomably gripping, genuinely funny and featuring a pace that’s impressively unrelenting, all involved should be proud of their supremely fine tuned work. I just feel bad for anyone going in actually expecting a table tennis movie…
Marty superb.
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