MARTY SUPREME ***
Josh Safdie2025
IDEA: In 1952, a cocky young table-tennis player from New York gets into worsening straits on his journey to prove his greatness.
BLURB: In the vein of the last two films Josh Safdie made with his brother Benny — and the gritty New Hollywood tradition that inspired them — Marty Supreme is a raucous, whirlwind portrait of a monomaniacal schemer who can’t help digging himself into deeper holes as he rushes headlong toward some elusive reward. Working on a broader historical and sociopolitical canvas than he has before, Safdie casts this character as an embodiment of American ideals in toxic overdrive, a hyperbolic national avatar of self-sufficiency, exceptionalism, and ruthless striving. Timothée Chalamet dives into this role with nervy, full-bodied gusto, darting through the film with an indefatigable flop-sweat energy that is equaled at every turn by the breakneck pacing, cacophonous soundtrack, and restless camerawork that captures a teeming ensemble of faces in extreme closeups. Among several subversions of sports-movie conventions, Safdie refuses to make the narcissistic, immoral Marty easy to root for. At the same time, he makes him impossible to despise, and this is why the character is compelling. If Marty signifies an unabashedly swollen American ego, he also represents working-class mettle and Jewish perseverance. An unusual vignette about a Holocaust survivor underlines a crucial theme: for a disadvantaged minority, survival takes on a different form. For Marty, that form is an overcompensating audacity revolving around an embryonic ping-pong ball that entangles him in Oedipal relationships and the dark heart of capitalist ethics. His perdurance is less a triumph of the American can-do spirit than the raw, existential will to keep on going.
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