Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

Bounce

Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).

Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.

It's a vibe, I suppose. Helps that Darius Khondji is cinematographer, with shadowed aesthetic developed from his time with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection) through his time developing the dank grandeur of David Fincher's signature features (Se7en, Panic Room) to his time applying richly textured layers to James Gray's later features (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z, Armageddon Time) to his time illuminating the Safdie brothers' shaky-cam aesthetic (Uncut Gems, this film), lending them more gravitas and solemn beauty than some of them actually deserve. For this production Khondji adds a sumptuous glow about Chalamet's tousle-haired head, suggesting he's more 'Fast' Eddie Felson than Ratso Rizzo (we're not totally fooled, but Khondji for moments at a time manages to leave us confused). 

Also helps that legendary Jack Fisk is production designer-- he grew up in '50s Illinois, is adept in creating worlds set in the past (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, Killers of the Flower Moon), the relative present (The Straight Story, Carrie, Mulholland Drive), the nightmarish subconscious (Eraserhead). Fisk's work here is so immersive I can believe it helped settle and modulate Safdie's usually frenetic camerawork, the visual equivalent of slowing down from the near-incomprehensible near-hysterical gibberish Adam Sandler spouted in Uncut Gems to the comparatively sedate rat-tat-tat delivery of '30s screwball comedies. 

Does the film work? To a point. It wants to be The Hustler, to beat that film at its own game of taking up a relatively lightweight game (billiards), here employing an even more seemingly trivial sport (table tennis) to pronounce on momentous matters (At what point does selling one's honor dignity soul for the umpteenth time become too much? Who in this dog eat dog world does one truly care about, dig in one's heels for-- and why?), but lacks Robert Rossen's lean elegant visual design, lacks George C. Scott's Mephistophelean presence as counterweight. Marty stands alone in a world of fools and suckers and that I suspect is how Chalamet (who's never suffered from a shy and retiring ego) likes it, and likely why this film fails to touch its intended level. 

This Marty isn't even half as interesting as the real deal-- Marty Reisman, on whom Chalamet's character is loosely based, was a table tennis player from the age of nine, won his first city championship at the age of thirteen; he hustled for money and yes toured the world as opening comedy act for the Harlem Globetrotters, often visiting Hong Kong, and (a detail omitted from the film) smuggled gold and Rolex watches out of Asia into the United States. He won the 1997 US National Hardbat Championship at the age of 67, and in 2008 demonstrated on the Late Show with David Letterman that he could split a cigarette with a pingpong ball. On archival video footage Reisman looks improbable, with limbs longer and lankier than Chalamet's (you can believe he can cover a pingpong table with arms outstretched), his onscreen manner is far more charming and charismatic-- if he ever approached me for financing of thousands of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them, I'd seriously consider his proposal. 

This isn't Safdie's best work either-- that would be Uncut Gems, co-directed with brother Benny, in a milieu the brothers grew up in (the New York Diamond District), with real stakes (loansharks, a gambling addiction, a crumbling marriage, millions in rings and gems and unsecured loans), with Adam Sandler sweating the kind of desperation Chalamet can only fantasize about. Usually not a fan of the Safdies' trademark smash-n-grab frenetically-cut style but in this one case they may actually have a point, and so does the film-- an icepick of a point, driven into your skull between your eyes.

And this isn't even the ultimate table tennis saga-- that would be Masaaki Yuasa's Ping Pong: the Animation, with visuals that make the Safdies look like they are on quaaludes, and a narrative that goes into power dynamics, players' psychology, the significance of the sport to various countries' cultures (specifically Japan and China), the pitfalls and virtues of both victory and defeat. Would I call Marty supreme? Wouldn't call it bad, but would definitely rank it fourth at best.

First published in Businessworld 3.12.26