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.
