‘Marty Supreme’: Timothée Chalamet Chases After Table Tennis Glory in Josh Safdie’s Electric Portrait of American Ambition

Alci Rengifo

Marty Mauser is one of those characters who feels so vivid that you wonder how he could ever be fiction. Timothée Chalamet brings him to gloriously self-assured life in “Marty Supreme,” driving this film’s frenetic energy. Director Josh Safdie has indeed taken inspiration from real life, basing his creation on some details of table tennis champ Marty Reisman. As a persona operating within the world of this film, Marty is so memorable it is a brilliant choice to have his defining passion as table tennis. Most sports movies deal with the usual, overgrown disciplines like football or boxing. At the heart of this movie is the idea that any vocation can drive someone to recklessly dive for it while ignoring the burned bridges in their wake.

Marty Mauser bleeds confidence that borders on obnoxiousness. He is a young Jewish guy in New York’s Lower East Side in 1952, at a time when table tennis is not seen as a serious sport, dismissed mockingly as “ping-pong” by naysayers. For Marty, who speaks with the velocity of a machine gun, there is no question that table tennis is his calling. To make a living he works at a shoe store owned by his uncle (Larry Ratso Sloman). He also has sex with his childhood friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion). Marty is a born hustler, saving (and stealing, if need be) to pay his way into important tournaments. He most likely got some of his brio from mom Rebecca (Fran Drescher), who will make up stories to get her son’s attention. Despite everyone pushing him to settle down, not least Rachel, who announces she is pregnant, Marty literally gets money at gunpoint to compete in the British Open in Wembley, London. While rambling to journalists in London, Marty meets Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a faded movie star married to a corporate tycoon. He is smitten, in his own cocky way. Yet, victory is snatched from his fingers when Japanese table tennis star Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) beats him. Marty returns to New York with lots of debt, life pressures and a need to get back in the game.

Safdie directs “Marty Supreme” with a feverish energy that he sustains for its entire 150 minutes. Safdie was once the other half of a directing duo with his brother, Benny, the director of a much tamer sports opus earlier this year, “The Smashing Machine.” This film is closer to the kinetic style of their best work such as “Uncut Gems.” As a filmmaker, Safdie is in love with playing with cinema as an art form that allows you to do anything. When Marty and Rachel have sex in the back of the shoe store early in the film Safdie cuts to a sequence showing sperm swimming into a cervix, with Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” on the soundtrack. It is not easy to use anachronistic music but here it is done with a perfect understanding of mood and tone. Tears for Fears’ “Change” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” make absolute sense in the scenes where they are applied, capturing the essence of Marty’s grandiose sense of himself. Cinematographer Darius Khondji, one of the modern greats, shoots with a period film grit while making every camera gesture feel as if it’s evoking the moods of the characters. Elegance and hand-held frenzy dance together in his work.

In a film with several strong performances, Chalamet reaches a new level in his acting career. After the success of his breakthrough role in “Call Me by Your Name,” Chalamet has starred in several notable films. But his Oscar-nominated role as Bob Dylan in last year’s “A Complete Unknown” heightened the sense that there is much more to mine in this actor. The structure of “Marty Supreme” helps propel his delivery in the way it takes on the form of a picaresque journey. Marty is always on his toes because he is essentially on the run at all times. He denies Rachel’s baby is his. He hustles gullible marks at underground table tennis games with his friend, taxi driver Wally (Tyler Okonma aka Tyler, the Creator), getting them both into a spiral of trouble involving a dog and an exploding gas station. His affair with Kay feels like pure adventurism, which she, being older and more experienced, clearly notices. Chalamet finds the fine line between charming and obnoxious. People are taken aback by Marty’s presence but could easily find it grating (“I’m going to do to him what Auschwitz didn’t! It’s ok, I’m Jewish. I can say that”). This is the case with Kay’s husband, Milton Rockwell. In a stroke of rather brilliant casting, he is played by Kevin O’Leary, a panelist on “Shark Tank” who, being such a capitalist on reality TV, has no problem playing an icy tycoon here. He does not sympathize much with Marty, but might buy into one of his business proposals. He will also humiliate the younger man later on just to teach him a lesson on social food chains.

Safdie directs all of “Marty Supreme” as if he might not get a chance to do another film. He packs small roles with cameos that are cinematic nods. The great director Abel Ferrara plays an old-time gangster attached to a dog that causes Marty a world of trouble, including a bathtub collapsing through a ceiling. Spot David Mamet as the director of Kay’s latest doomed stage production. They have great faces as well that capture something about the New York of post-World War II America, when the economy was on the rise and the world was constantly changing. In Japan, Marty finds himself with a different weight on his shoulders when his defeat to Endo turns him into a punching bag for a country recovering from defeat. Our “hero” is certainly not a nationalist, since his ambitions come before anything, so his drive for a rematch is out of a personal need to win. Maybe Safdie is commenting on the character typical to so many winners. Dogged determination at times needs to go hand in hand with talent. Marty is definitely a good player, as we can see in the well-staged table tennis matches. If he didn’t have his particular, full throttle obsession, he could just play as a hobby while minding the shoe store. By the climactic final match, we root for him despite his glaring personal flaws, because ambition on this scale can be infectious.

“Marty Supreme” releases Dec. 25 in theaters nationwide.