Old Yorker

  • Equus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1977)

    Although I’m not a Peter Shaffer fan, his play Equus delivered one of my most exciting and memorable evenings in the theatre.  There were several reasons for that – Michael Jayston in the lead role, John Dexter’s direction, John Napier’s design.  This was the original production of Equus, first staged at the National Theatre in 1973 but which had transferred to the West End when I saw it at the Albery Theatre in November 1976.  My recollection of a stark, cold set may well be coloured – monochromed – by the black-and-white cover of the theatre programme (which I’ve kept), and by the production’s sustained tension.  Jayston became the third actor to play the Equus protagonist, psychiatrist Martin Dysart, in London, after Alec McCowen and Colin Blakely.  The play was also successfully staged on Broadway, running for almost three years from late 1974.  When it closed in New York – in October 1977, days before the release of Sidney Lumet’s film in both Britain and the US – there’d been no less than four new Broadway Dysarts, including Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Perkins and Leonard Nimoy.  The fourth was Richard Burton, who also stars in the film.

    Between 1964 and 1978 inclusive, prolific Sidney Lumet released at least one feature film each year, but bringing Equus to the screen, according to Wikipedia, was no rush job:  Lumet had been keen to direct the film after seeing the play on both sides of the Atlantic; he and Peter Shaffer ‘spent more than one year preparing the screenplay before filming began’.  The fundamental problem with their adaptation (never mind that Shaffer received the sole screenplay credit) is Lumet’s unwillingness either to lose the play’s words or to waste the opportunity of making Equus more ‘cinematic’, by shooting outdoor sequences and so on.  (Lumet did resist the temptation to open out Eugene O’Neill’s text for the film of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) – the result an artistic success and a commercial failure.)  In Equus, Lumet repeatedly reconstructs on screen events that a character’s voiceover is describing simultaneously – a tautology that makes for the worst of both worlds.  Even as images are reduced to visual aids, voiceover is rendered largely superfluous.

    The film’s first few minutes give a good idea of what will go wrong during the next two hours or so.  Accompanied by Richard Rodney Bennett’s discreetly ominous and melancholy music, the screen shows a ceremonial dagger.  The camera travels up, and closes in on, the dagger’s handle, which represents an equine skull, shown in sideview.  (The image calls to mind a memorable element of the original stage version, which featured a chorus of human actors wearing horse-head masks.)  The skeleton horse’s eye-socket is empty; a large red jewel in the nostril suggests blood.  This stylised skull morphs into the head of a living white horse, its bridle replicating the chains on the dagger handle.  The white horse stands in darkness, cheek by jowl with a naked youth whose head is obscured from view by the horse’s.  A voice – unmistakably Richard Burton’s – likens them to ‘a necking couple’; the boy rather than the horse is doing the nuzzling.  This image, like that of the preceding dagger, is very striking but, unlike the dagger, rather silly too.  The obviously real horse, nearly but not quite motionless, somehow gives the impression of putting up with what the filmmakers have asked it to do.

    The camera moves slowly sideways into dark woodland as Burton’s voice asks:

    ‘Is it possible, at moments we can’t imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together – the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life – and turn them into grief?  What use is grief to a horse?’

    As his face appears for the first time, in close-up, Burton’s Martin Dysart explains, ‘You see, I’m lost’.  This would be a visually and verbally fancy introduction even if Lumet had ended it there, but Dr Dysart has plenty more to say:

    ‘What use, I should be asking, are questions like these to an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital?  They’re worse than useless.  They are, in fact, subversive.  The thing is, I’m wearing that horse’s head myself, all reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed onto a new track of being I only suspect is there.  I can’t see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle.  I can’t jump, because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force.  My horsepower, if you like, is too little …’

    This opening speech in the film is one long spoiler.

    It’s the opening speech in the play, too, but the effect is – or was, in the stage Equus that I saw – different, and not just because Dysart in the theatre isn’t competing with images of an actual, restrained horse.  The actor playing the psychiatrist can keep something up his sleeve by giving the words a dry, pedantic edge.  Such a reading will prove to make complete sense – a verbal flight of fancy is Dysart’s only way of soaring – but doesn’t give the game away immediately.  Richard Burton’s screen presence doesn’t, of course, naturally suggest a spiritually or sensually desiccated man, but he created one superbly in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), so it’s not simply a matter of his being miscast as Dysart.  Here, though, Burton’s haggard face and infinitely world-weary voice prematurely reveal his whole characterisation, as well as Shaffer’s central idea.  Over the course of Equus, Dysart has eight substantial speeches addressed direct to the audience.  In the theatre, these soliloquies, as quite a familiar stage device, seem natural enough; on screen, they’re artificial.  It’s not as if Dysart switches from analyst to analysand in the film monologues; the audience must listen, but we’re hearing a sermon as much as a confession.  The speeches smack of Lumet’s wanting to showcase his star – and, since Burton kicks off at a vocally intense level, there’s little scope for development.

    The youth in that opening nighttime idyll with the horse is seventeen-year-old Alan Strang (Peter Firth).  He has a job in an electrical supplies shop during the week; at weekends, he works at local stables.  One Saturday night, he uses a metal spike (a hoof pick) to blind six horses there.  In a magistrates’ court, JP Hesther Saloman (Eileen Atkins) persuades her colleagues on the bench not to impose a prison sentence but to place Alan on remand, pending a psychiatric report.  Hesther is a friend of Dysart’s. She comes to the mental hospital where he works to ask him to take on Alan as a patient.  At first, Alan won’t speak, except to recite jingles from television adverts, but his parents, whom Dysart visits at their home, are more revealing.  Dora Strang (Joan Plowright) is a Christian fanatic; the boy Alan absorbed biblical language and imagery as mother’s milk.  Dora’s husband Frank (Colin Blakely), who runs his own printing business, is decidedly anti-religious.  Dora tells Dysart how her son has always loved and been drawn to horses – as a child he was fascinated by the word equus because he’d ‘never come across one with two U’s together before’.  It’s soon clear that Alan has replaced his mother’s God with his fantasy of a horse god – Equus.  Even though he still doesn’t trust Dysart, Alan begins to open up to him about his regular secret outings from the stables with the white horse, culminating in their after-dark communion.

    This isn’t the only instance of Alan’s extraordinarily physical worship of Equus.  Frank Strang tells Dysart about the time he looked through the open door of his son’s room to see Alan wearing a halter and whipping himself to orgasm.  Detective Dysart also talks with the stables owner (Harry Andrews), who mentions Alan’s friendship with Jill Mason (Jenny Agutter).  She also worked weekends at the stables but suffered a nervous breakdown in response to Alan’s attack on the horses.  It emerges that, on that fateful evening, Jill and Alan went out together for the first time – to watch, at her jokey insistence, a crummy porn film.  Back at the stables after the cinema, Alan and Jill, also for the first time, literally had a roll in the hay.  Or started to – Alan couldn’t go through with it:  his god got in the way.  His mother drilled into the child Alan that God saw everything.  Equus does, too.  The all-seeing horse deity is all that Alan can see when he tries to have sex with a woman.  His solution is to blind the horses looking on from their stalls.

    After two or three of the monologues, as delivered by Richard Burton, you wish Dysart would give it a rest:  we’ve already got Shaffer’s message, although it takes the psychiatrist longer to work things out.  Nevertheless, and despite the welter of words, Shaffer puts some intriguing details into Equus and manipulates them cleverly.  Alan’s fascination with the spelling of equus is of a piece with his preferred choice of TV commercial jingle, ‘Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double-good, double-good, Doublemint gum!’, with his bedroom antics, with what his mother tells Dysart about Christian cavalry in the New World – ‘Did you know that … the pagans thought that horse and rider was one person … they thought it must be a god’.  Alan’s desire to become one with Equus also carries echoes of Christianity’s conjugal relationship between the Church as ‘the bride of Christ’ and ‘Jesus Christ her Lord’.  Shaffer’s choice of surname for his main character is very expressive.  As we learn from one of his exchanges with Hesther, Martin Dysart the child psychiatrist has no children of his own.  He’s in a passionless marriage to a Scottish dentist:  at one point, he refers to his wife (who’s never seen) and himself as ‘Dr and Dr McBrisk’.  Speaking the two syllables of his real name aptly connotes dissection, playing dice, even cutting into a heart.

    Dysart is increasingly tormented by what he sees as a dilemma.  Is it reasonable, in view of his own arid, agnostic existence, to use his doctor’s skills to deprive Alan Strang of the bizarrely passionate side of his life?  Theatrically seductive as the idea may be, it doesn’t convince.  This crisis of professional faith and conscience isn’t much of a doctor’s dilemma, given the patient’s violently aberrant behaviour and that, as Hesther also points out to Dysart, Alan’s ‘in pain … and you can take it away’.  While it’s not clear quite how Dysart will do this, there’s no suggestion that anything as savage as lobotomy is on the cards – or even long-term medication.  That Dysart can, as he fears, reduce Alan to ‘a ghost’ of himself through the talking cure alone seems grossly to overstate the powers of psychoanalysis, taking other fictional shrinks, rather than real-world ones, as a guide.  This is a fallacy at the heart of Equus, yet a compelling production of the piece can make you suspend disbelief for as long as you’re watching.  This film, though, falls far short of compelling.

    Sidney Lumet makes too many mistakes.  Although Equus is set in present-day south-west England (Hampshire), it was filmed entirely in Canada, in and around Ontario.  When the action moves outside the mental hospital, the physical scale of locations is sometimes wrong.  Lumet shoots two conversations between Dysart and Hesther Saloman at her home, where she seems to live alone.  Both sequences – one outdoors, one indoors – are opening out for the sake of it.  Outside the house, Hesther rakes a few leaves in grounds so vast that their upkeep must be a painting-the-Forth-Bridge job.  In her similarly impressive kitchen, she prepares a meal, but the kitchen activity is just a means of giving Richard Burton and Eileen Atkins something to do as they talk.  The bits of lettuce that he dabs with a tea towel are destined for an enormous salad bowl where they’ll be very lonely.  Whatever she puts in the oven doesn’t evidently emerge.  It’s a pretend meal, fine on stage but which looks daft in a superficially realistic film setting.  Lumet’s description of the hospital is no great shakes either.  It’s quite a traditional movie madhouse, with Alan’s fellow inmates loudly gibbering in corridors or staring into space in a communal day room.  Not that there are many of them.  Despite describing himself as ‘overworked’, Dysart is never seen with a patient other than Alan.

    It’s no surprise in the light of his overall track record, but a pity nevertheless, that Lumet nails his colours to the mast of realism.  Although the introductory sequence of Alan and the horse together verges on laughable, the subsequent, more extended version of this, is one of the film’s most successful sequences.  Oswald Morris’ sensitive yet suggestive lighting of the scene briefly takes the film closer to the fantastical quality of its source material.  Lumet’s prevailing style, which goes against the grain of Shaffer’s original, reaches a disastrous climax in the decision to present Alan’s attack on the horses realistically.  Most reasonable viewers will probably blind themselves at this point, by looking away from the screen.

    It was usual practice at the time, in movie versions of successful stage plays, to involve even in the smaller parts names bigger than those who’d played them in the theatre.  In Equus, this turns out to be another mistake.  Joan Plowright’s Dora is far too imposing and actressy.  Eileen Atkins gives theatrical brio to a role that’s half-sympathetic ear, half-devil’s advocate, but hardly a character at all.  As the stable owner, Harry Andrews hasn’t much to do except clench his formidable jaw.  It doesn’t help that Lumet, who’d only once previously directed a film drama set in contemporary Britain (The Offence (1973)), hasn’t a firm grasp of English class and regional distinctions.  Peter Firth, born in Bradford, plays Alan with a light West Yorkshire accent.  Although this isn’t a big deal (Alan’s family could have moved down to Hampshire), you wonder if Lumet is even aware of it.

    On the plus side, Jenny Agutter is effective as sexy-horsey Jill, and Colin Blakely excellent as Alan’s father.  Giving a supporting part to an actor who, as noted above, had played Dysart on stage, epitomises the casting principles at work here, but they’re worth it in Blakely’s case.  The Strangs are an oddly assorted social unit, but that’s less of a problem thanks to Blakely’s Frank being indeterminate in terms of class.  Blakely even manages to give a semblance of truth to the bad scene where Frank slinks into the same blue-movie show that Alan and Jill are watching, and is spotted by his son.  But this is also an example of the folly of the film’s voiceovers.  Outside the cinema, Frank feebly tries to justify his presence there:  ‘I came to see the manager … the picture house needs posters … I had no idea they showed films like this … I’m certainly going to refuse my services’.  Alan’s voice describes the automatic sound of his father’s as he spoke those words.  Since Colin Blakely is already conveying that, we don’t need Alan’s explanation.

    Peter Firth was the only member of the film’s cast who’d originated his role on stage.  When Equus opened at the National Theatre, Firth was barely out of his teens; by the time the film went into production, he was twenty-three but his limber, slender physique helps him pass convincingly as a teenager.  He gives a strong performance yet he’s always acting – you rarely feel Alan’s supposed wildness.  Peter Firth had probably played the part too often before – he was also in the first Broadway production – but there’s another problem with the character of Alan.  The Dysart-Alan opposition is essentially the same as the Salieri-Mozart one that Peter Shaffer went on to create in Amadeus; also as in that later work, he’s more comfortable writing the tormented rationalist than the undisciplined ecstatic.  With Alan Strang, Shaffer forces significant but discrepant elements into the same person.  (This happens with Alan’s mother too – Dora, a religious zealot, is also made to represent a traditional English horse world of jodhpurs and bowler-hatted riders.)  Dysart sees his patient as a virtually feral creature.  As he explains to Hesther, Alan ‘can hardly read … knows no physics or engineering to make the world real to him … no paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it … no music except television jingles’.  It’s as if Alan has never been to school – the same Alan who can reel off biblical genealogy and, as a young boy, was reading words in Latin.  In Alan Strang, Peter Shaffer does make two become one, but you don’t believe the merger.

    30 December 2025

  • Marty Supreme

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Safdie (2025)

    The Safdie brothers have always co-directed their features.  Until this year:  Benny Safdie’s first solo effort, The Smashing Machine, won him the Venice Silver Lion in September; Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme has already earned awards from American critics’ groups for its star, Timothée Chalamet (who also produced), with probably more to follow.  Beyond the single directing credit, though, Marty Supreme isn’t very different from the Safdies’ collaborations.  Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie wrote the screenplay and did the editing together.  Bar two episodes in London and Tokyo, the action takes place in and around New York City, the brothers’ hometown.  As before, the cast includes some big names and plenty of people who don’t act for a living[1].  Like its predecessor, Uncut Gems (2019), Marty Supreme, with only one real theme and no subplots, goes on too long (nearly 150 minutes).  Like Uncut Gems and its predecessor, Good Time (2017), this new picture is often violent, relentlessly dynamic and moves, until a sharply contrasting last scene, at an unvarying furious pace.  The narrative is eventful, yet the monotonous style and tempo make it tiresome.  On the surface, Marty Supreme seems different from earlier Safdie works in two significant ways.  First, it’s a sports drama (or sports drama-comedy) and Chalamet’s character – young Jewish New Yorker Marty Mauser, a would-be table tennis champion – is inspired by a real-life figure, Marty Reisman (1930-2012).  Second, the story is set in 1952 rather than the present.  But Marty Supreme turns out to be less of a traditional sporting story and a period piece than you’d expect.  This is an expression not of Josh Safdie’s originality, simply of his filmmaking priorities.

    Whether fictional or based on fact, screen accounts of successful sports careers usually illustrate the protagonist’s early promise and often meteoric rise; the ups and downs of professional life-at-the-top and its tricky intersection with personal life; a fall from grace that may lead to redemption, again in both the public and private spheres.  There’ll be several key stages in the main character’s sporting rise and fall and, if they’re lucky, resurrection.  At the start of Safdie’s film, twenty-three-year-old Marty has a job in the Brooklyn shoe shop owned by his uncle, Murray (Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman), but isn’t a novice ping-pong player:  he’s soon to head to London to represent the US in the 1952 British Open event at Wembley’s Empire Pool, though he has to steal cash from Murray’s safe to finance the trip.  Although ravenously ambitious Marty resents selling shoes, he can’t afford to do otherwise.  Table tennis has a low profile in America – something Marty is determined to change.

    Safdie devotes plenty of screen time to his London visit.  It’s here that Marty first meets and seduces ex-Hollywood star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) and gets to know her rich businessman husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), who’ll be half-benefactor, half-bête noire to Marty in what follows.  It’s in London too that Marty first incurs the displeasure of Ram Sethi (Pico Iyer), head of the International Table Tennis Association.  When Sethi dismisses his complaints about the lousy accommodation for competitors, Marty decides that if you can’t beat them, join them:  he books into the Ritz where Sethi and other ITTA top brass are staying – a piece of transgressive chutzpah that comes back to bite Marty.  In the tournament itself, he easily wins his matches all the way through to the final, trouncing the Hungarian defending champion, Bela Kletzki (Geza Röhrig, from Son of Saul) in the semis.  In the final, Marty is beaten no less decisively by an unranked contender, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), the first Japanese player to compete internationally in table tennis since the end of World War II.  Marty isn’t a graceful loser.  He yells repeatedly that he’s been cheated of the title because Endo uses an innovative foam-backed paddle rather than the traditional hard bat.

    This burst of championship table tennis is never repeated.  A post-London montage shows Marty and Kletzki touring European cities as a novelty support act to the Harlem Globetrotters on promotional sporting programmes.  There’s a scene in which Marty, back in the US, hustles in a ping-pong game at a New Jersey bowling alley.  The table tennis action in Japan, in the last part of the film, is extended but the rematch of Marty and Endo there is only another promotional event:  the American has been banned from competing in the forthcoming Tokyo world championships because of an unpaid $1,500 fine (imposed by the ITTA in punishment for his unpaid bill at the Ritz).  Marty Supreme ends almost immediately after the Tokyo match.  We get no idea how Marty’s future career develops because Safdie has no interest in that.  Marty Mauser is, rather, a symbol of hellbent individualism, table tennis merely the means of portraying an American Dreamer in toxic, compelling action.

    Marty’s quest for funds to pay his fine is a continuing thread in the New York action between London and Tokyo, but the table tennis is peripheral.  Tricked by his mother (Fran Drescher), Marty is arrested for thieving from his uncle’s safe, though he soon escapes.  His friend from childhood, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), married to another man (Emory Cohen), is pregnant with Marty’s child:  he persistently denies paternity until Safdie’s ready for Marty to change his mind.  In a lower-depths hotel, a bathroom floor collapses; the bath and Marty, who’s in it, crash down to the floor below, injuring another guest, Ezra Mishkin (Abel Ferrara), and Mishkin’s dog, Moses.  Marty offers to take the animal to the vet while career criminal Mishkin is in hospital.  Marty loses the money Mishkin gives him for Moses’ treatment in the New Jersey hustle, which ends with Marty and his cab-driver friend Wally (Tyler Okonma), also losing Moses, and crashing Wally’s taxi.  Everything tends, sooner or later, to mayhem, including a boring episode centred on Kay Stone’s theatrical comeback in a production financed by Rockwell.  Marty and Rachel track down Moses to a farmstead; the farmer who now has possession of the dog fires a rifle at them.  There’s a subsequent shootout at the farm involving Mishkin’s men.  Just before Marty leaves for Tokyo, Rachel goes into labour.  He drops her off in hospital before catching his flight to Japan, where he travels with Rockwell and his party.

    Safdie uses two means to modify Marty Supreme’s 1950s credentials – both means designed to present Marty as ahead of his time and to help turn his ruthless self-assertion into something attractive to 2025 audiences.  In visual terms, the film is unequivocally a period piece, thanks to Jack Fisk’s excellent production design for early post-war New York’s physically and morally grungy side, reinforced by the predominant dark tones of Darius Khondji’s cinematography.  What we hear is another matter.  While music occasionally playing on the radio is contemporary with the fifties setting, Daniel Lopatin’s tachycardic original score and Safdie’s song choices to comment on the action, are not.  The songs are mostly well-known 1980s anthems, whose suggestive titles could be construed as ironic comment on Marty’s tunnel-vision egotism – Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, the Korgis’ ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime’, Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Have the Touch’ and, for the film’s closing moments and credits, Tears for Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’.

    Spoken or shouted words also occasionally time-travel a decade or two.  In response to Marty’s complaints about his accommodation in London, Ram Sethi brands him ‘entitled’.  The calls of encouragement for Marty from the Empire Pool audience don’t belong in 1952.  And when he starts trashing things in the arena, Marty is a super-brat before his time.  In New York, arguing for the standard black kit of table tennis to be replaced by the whites of lawn tennis, a respected sport, Marty invokes the name of late 1940s Wimbledon and US champion Jack Kramer.  Bawling about the outrageous unfairness of the British Open final, however, Marty’s a proto-McEnroe.  As far as Safdie is concerned, those song titles are only deceptively ironic (he ignores the fact that Tears for Fears were critiquing their title’s sentiment).  However badly Marty behaves, Safdie is rooting for him and wants the audience to do the same.  Marty is exemplary of a young person dead set on asserting himself and reaching his destiny.  That, according to Safdie, has to be a good thing.

    Marty Reisman hailed from New York’s East Side, honed his playing skills and startling gamesmanship as a ping-pong hustler, and was keenly interested in the technology and visuals of table tennis.  Marty Mauser shares these characteristics.  At Marty’s insistence, his long-suffering friend Dion (Luke Manley), with the financial help of his father (John Catsimatidis), works on developing an orange ping-pong ball, to be called the ‘Marty Supreme’.  (The project ends in tears but also in one of the film’s most arresting images, as myriad balls are thrown through an upper-floor window, descending as an orange rain.)  There’s little in Wikipedia’s account of Reisman to suggest that other elements of Marty Supreme derive from his life story and personality.  Between 1948 and 1952 inclusive, Reisman won five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships, only one of them in the singles event.  It’s extremely hard to imagine Marty Mauser as a doubles partner.

    Few sports movies show their sports as neglected species, so exceptions can be fascinating.  One of the strengths of Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2013) was its description of the unglamorous life of an Olympic champion in an unfashionable sporting discipline (wrestling as a sport, as distinct from a form of show business).  Marty Reisman did raise the profile of table tennis in America – to the extent that he became a media celebrity – but not that much.  Table tennis first featured in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, as an exhibition sport.  Since its introduction to the main Olympic programme in 1988, there’ve been no US medallists.  This suits Josh Safdie’s purposes well enough.  In Marty Supreme’s final scene, Safdie asks us to forget entirely about Marty as a table-tennis player.

    When Milton Rockwell first offers him the chance of a promotional match against Endo in Tokyo, for a good fee and on condition that Marty agrees to lose, he furiously refuses.  Later and desperate, he changes his mind, confronting Rockwell at a party and pleading for the rigged rematch.  Rockwell agrees, provided Marty drops his pants (in both British and American meanings of the word), so that Rockwell can express his hostility and entertain his party guests by paddling Marty’s backside with a table-tennis bat.  This is how Marty gets to travel on the plane taking Rockwell and his entourage to Tokyo.   Marty duly loses to Endo but then announces to the massed ranks of Japanese fans and ITTA bigwigs that the match was fixed.  He demands, and gets, another match immediately, a nailbiter that Marty narrowly wins.   He collapses to the ground in tearful exhaustion and relief.

    The Japanese element of Marty Supreme is among its most interesting aspects – the country’s return to international sporting competition, the American military occupation.  The climactic Marty-Endo match is watched by, as well as Endo’s adoring compatriots, US soldiers supporting Marty.  His behaviour infuriates Milton Rockwell, Ram Sethi et al, but Marty gets a ride back home on a military plane, alongside the American servicemen to whom he’s now a hero.  Back in New York, he races to the hospital, where Rachel has given birth to a boy.  As Rachel sleeps, Marty holds his baby son in his arms and sobs.  The film’s climax and coda are absurd.  Why is the Japanese crowd so quickly persuaded by Marty’s claims of foul play?  Why aren’t the powers-that-be shown to be alarmed by what he’s revealed about them?  Why does Endo, who’s party to the deception, agree to another match on the spot?   The answer to these questions is that credibility doesn’t matter to Josh Safdie.  He just wants to ensure that Marty’s eventually a winner, to see him back home and in the maternity ward, to show that he’s suddenly turned compassionate and sensitive.

    Marty Supreme rattles along:  the grandstanding editing emphasises the storytelling tempo.  The film’s rhythm and flashy shallowness are perfectly aligned with Timothée Chalamet’s acting.  Whippet-thin, he physically looks the part, and Marty Supreme, like A Complete Unknown (2024), is designed to showcase Chalamet.  Also as in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, the result here is narrowly effective:  Chalamet locks into a single aspect of the character – Dylan’s self-absorption, Marty’s merciless selfishness – and pushes it for all it’s worth, and to the exclusion of other qualities.  There’s evidence (chiefly his undeserved Screen Actors Guild win for A Complete Unknown) to suggest that Chalamet was the runner-up to Adrien Brody in last year’s Best Actor Oscar race – and good reason to think he’ll go one better for Marty Supreme.  Safdie’s film is, far more than Mangold’s, a one-man show.  And because he’s continuously hyped up and physically energetic as Marty, Chalamet is almost cast against type, which usually helps in Oscar races.  The same applies to the film’s closing scenes:  Chalamet hasn’t had emotional breakdowns on screen, at least since the finale to Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, which seems a long time ago now (2017).  Dedicated research and training on an actor’s part also often counts on the awards circuit.  Chalamet has put a lot of time – years, supposedly – into developing his table-tennis skills, and there’s no denying that they give the film’s ping-pong sequences an exciting immediacy, but they’re not evidence of great acting.  Chalamet’s Marty adds up to little more than a pain in the neck, which makes Marty Supreme an unusual sports movie in one other important respect.  The driven hero is so obnoxious that I always wanted him to lose.

    28 December 2025

    [1] But who may well be big names in other spheres.  The Marty Supreme cast includes in small roles, for example, the magician Penn Jillette, the playwright David Mamet and Philippe (Man on Wire) Petit.

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