The Ultimate Hustle

Josh Safdie seems to have composed so much of Marty Supreme under the lamplight of one thought: “Can I get away with this?”

Grade: A+

Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme stars Timothee Chalamet as table tennis player Marty Mauser in 1950s New York, but this film is not about ping-pong, anymore than Challengers was about tennis. Like in Challengers, the sports drama is just the easily perceivable entrance to an entirely different film, but whereas the film at the hot centre of Challengers was an erotic thriller, when you travel to the centre of Marty Supreme, you’ll find frantically glorious noise and motion rather than still and smouldering heat. This film’s not a sexy volcano but a loud-mouthed freight train darting off the rails. It’s an anarchically zany tale (the most anarchic and zany since Anora) of the ultimate hustler, Chalamet’s Mauser, who will earn your fiercest scorn, most intense admiration and deepest pity by the film’s (unusual) end. His daring is beyond devil-may-care. It’s devil-can-go-fuck-himself, and it catapults what on paper is a banal story (at least for those not interested in table tennis) into realms of hyper-kinetic comedy, shoot-and-run gangster action and tragedy to call forth the tears of all nations.

Safdie both directed Marty Supreme and co-wrote it with Ronald Bronstein. He seems to have composed so much of it, dialogue, characters and whole scenes, under the lamplight of one thought: “Can I get away with this?”

Chalamet’s Marty Mauser competes professionally in table tennis but he can’t earn a living from it and must scrap by with what jobs he can get. When the film starts, he’s working in a shoe shop owned by his uncle Murray played by Larry Sloman. When his uncle weasels out of giving Marty the pay Marty was planning to use for his plane ticket to the World Championship in London, Marty robs his uncle’s shop. This is a real gun, he tells his coworker Lloyd (played by Ralph Colucci with a funny-bone tickling deadpan expression) while waving a pint-sized revolver he’s improve-grabbed from his uncle’s desk. This is a real robbery, Marty continues, and my prints are on the gun, you can press charges if you like once I get back, but right now give me the money. Such is Marty’s determination to play ping-pong, yet that’s not his boldest (you may say craziest) move. Marty seduces an actress, Kay Stone played by Gwyneth Paltrow, and steals her necklace while having sex with her and then pawns it to pay for his plane ticket to a table tennis competition. At the World Championship in London, he says of a Jewish competitor: I’m going to do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t – I’m going to finish the job. At times, you’ll wonder if Marty is just being outrageous to see how far he can take it and he’s not alone. Amongst Safdie’s own thrusts of boldness, he rolls the opening credits over a montage of Marty’s sperm rocketing towards his girlfriend’s egg and fertilising it. Your eyeballs will pop open wide enough to stick ping-pong balls in your sockets. The montage is so blatantly courting disgust and scorn from the prudish and you can’t help admire Safdie for his boldness as you admire Marty for his. Marty Supreme is nothing if not surprising and always in ways that you thought no one would think of, or if they did, would not dare put on screen.

There will be times in the film where you may think: and this is all about ping-pong? The primary inciting incident of the film is that Marty needs cash to get to the next table tennis World Championship in Tokyo. He begins a quest to scrounge the money together, but this quest begins with him fleeing a policeman (who’s come to arrest him for robbing his uncle) down his fire escape, accidentally blowing up a gas station and becoming mixed up in a gangster’s (played by Abel Ferrara) very bloody search for his missing dog. Shotguns are fired through windows. Baths fall through hotel room floors. A billionaire with wounded pride spanks Marty using a ping-pong paddle. I have a purpose, Marty tells his girlfriend Rachel, played by Odessa A’zion, and that means my entire life is the product of a determination to see something through. Marty’s monomaniacal devotion to playing table tennis means he will court any danger, jump down any hole, and shake hands with every devil to reach the World Championship. At times, you’ll admire him for his purpose that is makes him seemingly invincible, at other times, you’ll think he’s insane, but you’ll never be able to scratch the grin off your face when looking at him. For you know that this pint-sized titan, in his determination to bulldoze his way to his dream, will yank you along on one wild ride after another.

Played by another actor, Marty would just look phony or cartoonish. You’d think no one could be this unfailingly and fanatically confident in themselves, to the point that they think they can do and say no wrong, unless it was an act or they were related to Bugs Bunny. Chalamet never looks like he’s pretending or he’s an animated rabbit in disguise. Chalamet has always had an unflagging vigour to his acting. He seems almost immortal in his abundancy of youthful energy that he’s turned towards roles in which he’s played adults who still act like kids (Wonka) or kids forced to become adults with all the grit and blood in between your nails that transition involves (Bones and All, the Dune films). He invests Marty Mauser with this energy. The smile Chalamet gifts Mauser looks like it wouldn’t slacken even if you shot him dead and let rigor mortis set in, but when Marty gets angry (and there’s plenty times he does) Chalamet’s glare could melt iron. Chalamet gives every line of dialogue and every gesture from Marty a relentless and divine (and often joyous) ferocity.

There are cases where such an incandescent lead has made the remaining cast seem weak and pale by comparison and thus reduced the film to a series of shadows circling around one bright sun. You may call this the cinematic A-bomb effect. The fantastic lead casts an incinerating light and if the other cast members aren’t strong enough to withstand it, they’re reduced to shadows. That doesn’t happen in Marty Supreme. Safdie’s picked and marshalled a cast of supporting players who can play their roles with the same spiky vigour as Chalamet plays Marty. Ferrara plays the gangster with a steely and snarly inflection of the old yet intimidating, Godfather-type meanness. Paltrow carries both herself and her lines with the streetwise dignity you’d expect of a retired Hollywood starlet of the 30s, imagine a middle-aged Catherine Hepburn, and that makes her more than a match for the relentless upstart Marty Mauser.

Her husband is billionaire pen magnate Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary. O’Leary isn’t sprightly like Chalamet. He doesn’t act energetically or fast but his performance is nonetheless highly muscular. His eyes are as hard as marbles and he’s always looking down upon Mauser and speaking to him like he’s eager to (and could very easily) strangle the impudent young man. A’zion playing Rachel is the weakest of the cast but not by much and largely by necessity. She’s consigned largely to the role of the girlfriend hopelessly in love with Marty and chasing after him or driven to him by need, and thus she is mostly timid and pliant before Marty’s insistence that she matters less than his dream. Yet when Rachel loses it with Marty, A’zion knows how to cut loose and crack her tongue like a whip. The fury she brings into her eyes is terrifying.

Those who seek films that “pulse,” as Truffaut said, that sweep you away, that make you feel something so exhilarating and so profoundly that nothing else seems to matter, should see Marty Supreme. This film’s got pulse.