The opening scenes of “Marty Supreme” consist of colorful microscopic shots of sperm wiggling their way to a human egg, which then morphs into a white ping pong ball with the movie’s title printed on it.
It’s clever — the kind of trippy sequence you might expect in a Coen Brothers movie. The same might be said of the movie’s title character, who is very loosely based on a real-life person, Marty Reisman. His character in the movie is Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet.
Marty is a guy living in New York in 1952 — a young man with formidable athletic talent as a table tennis player. He plays a fierce, fast, acrobatic game. He exudes self-confidence and cockiness. He is convinced he could be a real contender.
But that dream gets shattered when he plays in international competition in London and is handily defeated by Japanese superstar Koto Endo, a real-life table tennis champ played by another real-life table tennis champ, Koto Kawaguchi. In postwar Japan, Endo is a beloved national hero in a defeated, war-ravaged country yearning for some glimmer of hope.
Marty soon finds himself back in New York City with no money, a pregnant, married girlfriend and huge debts that he can’t begin to repay. It’s here that we begin to discover the real Marty – a sleazy hustler who will do just about anything to earn a buck. His character quickly shifts from hero to antihero, as every one of Marty’s schemes becomes thwarted in one way or another. Things get ugly. People in his path become collateral damage, getting scammed, hurt and occasionally killed.
Among the people he meets is a former Hollywood star, Kay Stone, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Though she is married to a wealthy, powerful husband who owns a ballpoint pen company, Marty hotly pursues her, seduces her and eventually tries to rob her. In the end, it’s just another failed scam. What becomes increasingly clear is that the only thing getting in the way of Marty’s success is Marty.
He’s a loser, a bonified tragic character in this frenetic, but spiraling story of self-destruction. Writer/Director Josh Safdie tries hard to pull us into Marty’s chaotic world, but with only mixed success. What works is a real sense of complexity, tension and suspense. It’s palpable. What doesn’t work is the story arc and our diminishing sympathy or interest in Marty. The more we know him, the less we like him.
To his credit, Chalamet does his best exploring and developing his character. He’s one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars as evidenced in movies like 2024’s “A Complete Unknown,” “Wonka” (2023) or “Dune: Parts One and Two” (2021 and 2024). He turns in another noteworthy performance in “Marty Supreme.”
The movie benefits from other notable performances, including an unrecognizable Fran Drescher as Marty’s mom and Odessa A’zion as Rachel Mizler, Marty’s pregnant girlfriend.
There are some plot twists like the devil’s bargain of an offer for Marty to return to Japan for a rematch with his nemesis Endo. The catch is that it can only be an exhibition match and he must agree to lose. It’s a crushing a moral dilemma.
Watch: Marty Supreme | Official Trailer
Though “Marty Supreme” is being touted as the Best Picture of the Year, it may turn out to be more of a hit with critics than general audiences, which almost guarantees that despite its performance at the box office, it will probably rack up Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Direction, Best Actor and possibly Best Supporting Actress, just to name a few. Chalamet recently won the prize for Best Actor in the Critics Choice Awards.
The question here is what kind of profit it will make for the studio A24. By early January it had earned a respectable $58 million at the box office worldwide, on a reported budget of $70 million — A24’s largest movie budget to date and its biggest opening weekend.
For the record, success or failure shouldn’t stand in the way of at least a few Oscar wins for “Marty Supreme” since Oscar Night is the one night of the year that Hollywood puts popularity and profits aside and only thinks about cinematic art.
“Marty Supreme” is a project that Chalamet has wanted to do for quite some time, so much so that he has been sharpening up his table tennis skills for years while working on other movies. It’s certainly a challenging role for a young actor to play. The question is whether it is a character that movie audiences are going to continue to pay to see.
DREW’S TAKE:
“Marty Supreme” is the latest film starring the very talented Timothée Chalamet as a gifted but emotionally flawed, self-destructive table tennis superstar.
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