What’s to glean from Marty Supreme? 🤓 Hey, that opening line took me all afternoon to conspire. Be kind! 😂 But look, I saw Hamnet recently, so I suppose my 2026 Best Picture exploration has begun! This’ll be Best Picture nominee number six, for me. I feel bad that I didn’t see brother Benny Safdie’s movie, The Smashing Machine, while I’m sitting here getting ready to watch the movie by Josh. I would’ve liked to compare the pair, and I am a completionist. But… Oh well! There’s always time in the future.
In the 1950s, Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet) is America’s most promising ping pong player – a sport yet to reach prominence in the US despite Marty’s supreme confidence that it will. We pick up with Marty while he’s working for his uncle, compiling the last of his funds for a plane ticket to London, where he will compete in the Ping Pong World Championships. While there, he will be taken by retired film star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) and impress his ardency for Ping Pong on her husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), as a growing market for business. Marty certainly has the ambition and gumption beyond his years to make his dreams come true, but as with everything, there threatens a darkened underbelly to his compulsions, depending on the eye of the beholder.
So, is the movie any good? …😬 I really don’t want to tell you what I think. Okay, I’ll tell you, but only because you kept reading. For almost the entire runtime, I couldn’t shake the thought that a young John Turturro would eat this role up. That’s not entirely fair on Timothee Chalamet, but I guess I’m old enough to access a lived-in prior era of filmmaking, with a previous generation of actors, in the nineties and eighties; and once I made the association to Turturro, all I could see was Chalamet doing an impression of the great man. If it ever comes out that early works of Turturro, Miller’s Crossing or maybe Barton Fink, were an inspiration for this character, I’m going to feel completely vindicated. But I understand the irony, for I’m sure John Turturro was a product of actors thirty years his senior, and so forth, as the great baton of performance is passed on and on. It’s unfair, I know, but these emotions, I feel them in my bones! As for the movie as a whole, again, I liked it more the first time when it was called Uncut Gems. The Safdie brothers, along with Adam Sandler, already did this – the tightening of tensions, and the character incapable of getting out of his own, or keeping himself out of trouble. This movie is a series of scenarios designed to go awry, and although they’re inventive and completely vary scene-to-scene, the resulting feeling is like going over the same size bump on a rollercoaster over and over again, almost mimicking the gyrations of one of those coin-operated kiddie rides in repetition outside supermarkets. Don’t get me wrong, the ride was exhilarating, but I’ve been here before; it’s all familiar now.
But, you get to see some things on film that may have never existed before. I’ve never seen a bathtub crash through the floor to squish a random mobster’s arm. I’ve never seen a thousand ping pong balls thrown askew out a third-story window either. Points for the inventiveness of the set pieces, I guess. I’ve never seen Penn Jillette as a grumpy gun-toting farmer as well. Yet, even the Gwyneth Paltrow character, who exists in only, around, three portions of the movie and stands out – if she wasn’t played by someone so renowned, would I even care? I doubt it. I sensed too, that Rachel (Odessa A’zion) might be wearing make-up to cover her eye – not to big-note myself, and A’zion acts well, but since she’s as deceitful as Marty Supreme, on more than one occasion, there’s not enough shading in her character to contrast Marty for a satisfying dynamic 😕 And through all this, this movie got to a point where it felt really long. Marty gets off the plane in Tokyo, and I was like, “oh jeez, we’ve still got the Tokyo trip of the movie to go 😮💨” It felt like a century since we’d been rooting for Marty – since he was a charming shoe salesman or living his best life with half-naked film stars seduced in his lap. Sure, he’d robbed a fellow employee, but he was owed that money, and he had a dream! I can’t recall the exact moment it becomes clear that Marty Supreme is a megalomaniacal narcissist who would lie, beg, borrow, and steal until his voice ran out – which would be never – but it was clear at some point, and caused me to unimpressively exhale. I’m thinking of a character like Jake Gyllenhal’s in Nightcrawler maybe, who is also a stain, but still held enough grey to be intrigued in how he would succeed. I don’t know. Marty moves in straight lines, forward towards his goal; it’s less interesting than it could be, like a rat trapped forced to take deeper swings – Oliver in Saltburn, Walter White in Breaking Bad.
The biggest surprise of the movie is that Milton is a vampire 😮 I mean, is he? In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, “I choose to take that literally!” It really has no bearing on the overall story, but it adds pep to the movie’s mixture. Actually, there’s two surprises, because Kevin Leary can act! He has a pretty chunky role, and I thought he was up to it. I may have to think again next time I see him get into a heated hullabaloo on CNN, if it’s all just performance 😮 I also enjoyed the spotty make-up on Chalamet’s face as if he was cursed with some affliction or acne scars. It added another layer to the character. And the movie’s conclusion is appropriately bittersweet. Because you know a mile out that Marty is going to blow up this charity event to make it all about himself, but as he claims victory, you see the air go out of the room for Japan, who were really enjoying having a national champion, and had pride in something following on so shortly from the humiliation and devastating defeat of WWII. But Marty only sees his last chance for personal gain, inadvertently putting the US back on top. In fact, as Marty wins, it was the only time Chalamet’s performance was able to penetrate through for me; in his feeling of accomplishment, seemingly reflecting on all that went in to get himself there. It was nice, and I’m left hoping that he becomes a model parent, now having achieved something. Because the movie could’ve easily suggested that he’s the type where one win, any win, will never be enough, but it doesn’t. The movie shows restraint, and sometimes a choice not made is as good as one taken.
But, I’m sorry, Mr. Chalamet, for if it were up to me, you wouldn’t be getting your Oscar this go round either. Three times nominated, and empty handed each time?! That would be my call. But then again, my pick so far isn’t even nominated, based on the movies I’ve seen (Paul Mescal in Hamnet), and Chalamet does carry this movie, doing more than DiCaprio and Jordan in their respective roles 🤷 It would be sad if either Chalamet or Josh Safdie were my good friends showing me this movie as their creation for my personal reaction, because I bring with me my own specific hang-ups highlighted above. Marty Supreme just doesn’t work so well for me despite the high energy clearly put into it. I am not the audience, but I’m sure this movie will have its admirers, and I don’t begrudge a single soul. Soak it up, people. But the best I can give Marty Supreme is 3.5.
3.5
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