Marty Supreme Review – Timothée Chalamet Smash in a Spectacular Ping-Pong Nightmare | film

THis new film, directed by Josh Safdie, has the frantic energy of a 149-minute ping-pong race with one player running around the table. It’s a marathon of disaster and hype, a sociopathic nightmare like something by Mel Brooks – only instead of gags, there are explosions of bad taste, cinematic innuendo, alpha cameos, frenzied deal-making, racism and anti-Semitism, passionate longing and thrilling adventures. It’s a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a long-mouthed nerd with glasses, a movie star mustache, and the build of a small cartoon character. He’s loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life American table tennis champion from the 1950s who was given to Bobby Riggs-type shenanigans: betting, competition, and showmanship. The film probably gets its price of admission simply with one gasp-inducing scene involving a suave Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult impresario Abel Ferrara in a direct role, and a disturbing New York hotel room. Talk about not standing on solid ground. Equally disconcerting is the climactic reveal of Chalamet’s bare buttocks before one of the most disturbing displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson’s If….

Marty is a young Jewish man working in a shoe store in New York in 1952. He dreams of global success in the up-and-coming sport of table tennis and patents his own brand of ball called Marty Supreme. He is having an affair with married childhood sweetheart Rachel (Odessa Azion) and is saving his winnings to travel to Britain for a table tennis tournament at Wembley. (There’s an interesting shot of the Twin Towers at the old stadium, which American audiences might think is a Tolkien reference.)

Getting the promised money is the first of many strange noises, but once in Blighty, the hotheaded Marty deliberately shocks British sports journalists with crude jokes about his friend and fellow player, a Hungarian Jewish camp survivor named Bela, played by Gésa Rohrig (from Laszlo Nemes’ Holocaust film Son of Saul).

After quickly and noisily making his way to a free room at the Ritz, Marty envisions a sexual obsession with fellow guest, retired film star Kay Stone — a role in which Gwyneth Paltrow came out of retirement so elegantly — and Kay’s Broadway debut is wonderfully realized with a transfixed Marty in the audience. Marty’s table tennis showdown with Japanese table tennis star Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) ends in disaster, and Kai’s husband and potential sponsor, Milton (Kevin O’Leary), turns out to be a fanatic for both Marty and Bella. Back in the States, it’s pure chaos, a massive, non-stop meltdown as Marty frantically tries to scrape together the money for a rematch with his Japanese opponent, and with the charismatic Kai.

The film’s comedic and absurd effect lies in the slow realization that it’s not actually about table tennis. Marty Supreme doesn’t act like a sports movie: there are no training montage sequences, no scenes in which Marty explains his technique in voice-over, no scenes in which he humbly listens to some ping-pong teacher or is rejected by Oedipalli. And unlike Forrest Gump, who became a national celebrity through his talent at table tennis, Marty is always a reprehensible figure and no one really trusts him – although it was arguably his pioneering work in the 1950s in popularizing the sport that enabled Forrest to excel at ping-pong in the 1960s.

Rather, the film itself is a game of ping-pong; There is the rhythm and spirit of table tennis in every scene and the mesmerizing effect of the dizzying, dizzying back and forth. Marty Supreme has his own spectrum of determination and emotional wounding, and Chalamet hilariously delivers a direct, unstoppable shudder, fueled by indignation and self-pity. And Paltrow gives us a smart, witty counterweight to Marty’s astonishing narcissism; She is entertaining and sensual, and sees what Marty is up to and understands it better than he does himself.

By the end of this movie my head was swinging from side to side as if it had been hit by gongs. Disasters, stunts, shocks, talkative despair, and Marty’s extreme neediness, with everything important in his life about to be thrown away, like Marty’s patented box of ping-pong balls sticking out the window. And yet, somehow, our young hero always comes back and achieves a poignant kind of maturity in the final shot. Pure madness is a marvel.