Movie Review: Marty Supreme
Marty Supreme follows Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, in an undeniably great performance, a young man who thinks he is something that he is not. Set in 1950s New York, Marty Mauser has dreams of becoming a world-famous ping pong champion. The sport is still on the rise, and nobody takes his dream seriously. Marty will literally do anything to get to the top and see his face on the front of a Wheaties box.
And by doing anything, I mean Marty has no regard for anyone or anything, especially after he loses to Koto Endo (played by professional ping pong player Koto Kawaguchi) at an international tournament in London. Following the loss, Marty not only wants to be the best ping pong player in the world, but he also knows he must go through Koto to achieve this goal. He has the narrowest tunnel vision anyone could have, and all he sees is himself at the top of the ping pong mountain. Anyone who crosses his path is a pawn in his life; he tries to use them to help him achieve his ultimate goal of becoming a ping pong star.
Marty’s path to superstardom is a kinetic and intense rollercoaster ride of constant ups and downs. Every time Marty gets ahead, like when he and his friend Wally (rapper Tyler the Creator) have a successful night of hustling ping pong games at a local bowling alley, the men they hustled find and attack them, which leads to a gas station blowing up and Wally’s car getting trashed, which is a problem since he’s a cab driver. Every time Marty takes a step forward, he takes five steps back, and every time it’s his fault. Whether it’s putting himself in a terrible situation, not listening, or running his mouth too much – and boy, does his mouth run – Marty is the reason for all his troubles and the messes he gets into. It all leads to thousands of dollars of property damage, several legal charges, people being shot, and lives and relationships potentially being ruined.
Worst of all, he drags those who are closest to him into his messes. From Wally to Rachel Milzer (Odessa A’zion), a married woman Marty got pregnant, to Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), an actress Marty has an affair with, he brings them all into his nonsense and uses them only for his gain, never once thinking about their well-being. But hey, all to be the best ping pong player in the world, right?
Marty thinks he’s bound for greatness, but he’s really just an arrogant sociopath who plays ping pong. Throughout Marty Supreme’s exhaustive two-and-a-half-hour runtime, I was never once rooting for him. I never once hoped that he would achieve ping pong stardom, and there were times I wished he were caught by the cops and put in prison so he could stop his reign of mayhem.
Marty Supreme isn’t an underdog sports story, despite what the marketing and some other reviews make it seem. Director Josh Safdie, half of the duo that brought us Uncut Gems and Good Time, made a bad sports movie that gives us nobody to root for and barely shows the sport it is about. We see Marty playing ping pong the most in the first hour of the film, especially at the international tournament. But after that tournament, we get a couple of moments of him playing when he and Wally are hustling at the bowling alley, and a brief glimpse of Marty practicing at a ping pong club, but most of Marty Supreme is watching Marty make people’s lives hell for a goal he can’t reach. When we do get the ping pong sequences, they are flat and edited to shreds.
The film’s final ping pong match, where Marty finally gets his rematch against Koto, is a match that doesn’t matter narratively or emotionally. It’s an exhibition match where the only prize is Marty’s pride. It’s not in a tournament or a championship match, it’s at a USO-type show. And after 150 grueling minutes of watching Marty ruin people’s lives and break the law, I didn’t care one bit if he won or lost, which is ultimately a failure on the movie if it was trying to become a classic sports movie.
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