Last year, while accepting a Screen Actors Guild award for A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet told the audience, “I want to be one of the greats; I’m inspired by the greats.” Many criticized him for his immodesty, but I found it refreshing: After all, Chalamet has never made a secret of his ambition in his interviews or his choice of material.
In his best performances, you can see both the character and the actor pushing themselves to greatness, the way Chalamet did playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which earned him the second of two Oscar nominations. He’s widely expected to receive a third for his performance in Josh Safdie‘s thrilling new movie, Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet pushes himself even harder still.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a 23-year-old shoe salesman in 1952 New York who dreams of being recognized as the greatest table-tennis player in the world. He’s a brilliant player, but for a poor Lower East Side Jewish kid like Marty, playing brilliantly isn’t enough: Simply getting to championship tournaments in London and Tokyo will require money he doesn’t have.
And so Marty, a scrappy, speedy dynamo with a silver tongue and inhuman levels of chutzpah, sets out to borrow, steal, cheat, sweet-talk and hustle his way to the top. He spends almost the entire movie on the run, shaking down friends and shaking off family members, hatching new scams and fleeing the folks he’s already scammed, and generally trying to extricate himself from disasters of his own making.
Marty is very loosely based on the real-life table-tennis pro Marty Reisman. But as a character, he’s cut from the same cloth as the unstoppable antiheroes of Uncut Gems and Good Time, both of which Josh Safdie directed with his brother Benny. Although Josh directed Marty Supreme solo, the ferocious energy of his filmmaking is in line with those earlier New York nail-biters, only this time with a period setting. Most of the story unfolds against a seedy, teeming postwar Manhattan, superbly rendered by the veteran production designer Jack Fisk as a world of shadowy game rooms and rundown apartments.
Early on, though, Marty does make his way to London, where he finagles a room at the same hotel as Kay Stone, a movie star past her 1930s prime. She’s played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in a luminous and long-overdue return to the big screen. Marty is soon having a hot fling with Kay, even as he tries to swindle her ruthless businessman husband, Milton Rockwell, played by the Canadian entrepreneur and Shark Tank regular Kevin O’Leary.
Marty Supreme is full of such ingenious, faintly meta bits of stunt casting. The rascally independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara turns up as a dog-loving mobster. The real-life table-tennis star Koto Kawaguchi plays a Japanese champ who beats Marty in London and leaves him spoiling for a rematch. And Géza Röhrig, from the Holocaust drama Son of Saul, pops up as Marty’s friend Bela Kletzki, a table tennis champ who survived Auschwitz. Bela tells his story in one of the film’s best and strangest scenes, a death-camp flashback that proves crucial to the movie’s meaning.
In one early scene, Marty brags to some journalists that he’s “Hitler’s worst nightmare.” It’s not a stretch to read Marty Supreme as a kind of geopolitical parable, culminating in an epic table-tennis match, pitting a Jewish player against a Japanese one, both sides seeking a hard-won triumph after the horrors of World War II.
The personal victory that Marty seeks would also be a symbolic one, striking a blow for Jewish survival and assimilation — and regeneration: I haven’t yet mentioned a crucial subplot involving Marty’s close friend Rachel, terrifically played by Odessa A’zion, who’s carrying his child and gets sucked into his web of lies.
Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and co-edited the film with Ronald Bronstein, doesn’t belabor his ideas. He’s so busy entertaining you, as Marty ping-pongs from one catastrophe to the next, that you’d be forgiven for missing what’s percolating beneath the movie’s hyperkinetic surface.
Marty himself, the most incorrigible movie protagonist in many a moon, has already stirred much debate; many find his company insufferable and his actions indefensible. But the movies can be a wonderfully amoral medium, and I found myself liking Marty Mauser — and not just liking him, but actually rooting for him to succeed. It takes more than a good actor to pull that off. It takes one of the greats.
