Run, scrounge, abandon, serve, backhand, forehand, backhand. The American dream is to hustle and to hustle is to sacrifice and to sacrifice means never once sacrificing your dreams. Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser couldn’t imagine not achieving his dream just as he couldn’t fathom sacrificing a thing he has for it. Everyone around him? That’s a different story. Finally, some real food.
Josh Safdie’s much-hyped “Marty Supreme,” a sweeping 1953-set and 1980s-sounding epic about one endlessly driven New Yorker’s journey through the highs and lows of mid-century table tennis, couldn’t come at a better time. Through the dim noise of a sluggish fall movie season, Safdie has bestowed December a richly textured and gleefully galvanizing heater. “Marty Supreme” is the real deal.
“Uncut Gems,” Safdie’s previous film that he made with his brother, Benny Safdie, is a hard act to follow. It was and is a definitive American film of the 2010s that, more than most, perfectly understood the always hungry, striving, desperate and ruthless American psyche. “Marty Supreme” arrives just months after Benny’s solo follow-up, “The Smashing Machine.” While both films are portraits of a certain American dream, “Marty Supreme” expands the inward gaze of “The Smashing Machine” outward to an entire century of capitalistic American excellence, which prioritizes greedy individualism and an endless striving for greatness, no matter who gets left behind to clean up the wreckage.
Like Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner and Robert Pattinson’s Connie Nikas before him, Chalamet’s Mauser is a perfect Safdie protagonist. Each role is intrinsically tied to the image of its movie star, and each character is a different representation of great evil. In other words, they are the average American man.
Mauser, a 23-year-old Jewish American living in the Lower East Side, toils practicing table tennis in hopes to compete at the World Table Tennis Championships again, despite being stuck working at a shoe store. Mauser’s grind toward greatness leads him on gonzo tangents to hustle for the money needed to get there including seducing Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a former Hollywood bombshell from the 1930s, and sweet-talking her pen business mogul of a husband (Kevin O’Leary), while abandoning and rekindling relationships with Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion) and Wally (Tyler Okonma) and getting involved with the wrong dog.
For sheer entertainment value, “Marty Supreme” already blows past many of its contemporaries this season and even this decade. Safdie’s direction is a level up from his previous films, ambitious and fluid, while every craft department expands upon his vision. Particularly dazzling are Darius Khondji’s lush cinematography and Jack Fisk’s expansive production design, both of which entirely immerse the audience into the NYC of the ‘50s. “Marty Supreme” sings just on the wings of this flair, but it’s Chalamet’s showstopping channeling of Safdie’s continued preoccupation with the seductive grotesqueries of American ambition that distinguishes this film as something truly magnetic.
The 29-year-old megastar is no stranger to ambition. In his Screen Actors Guild Award acceptance speech earlier this year, Chalamet declared, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats.” Anyone who knows of his stints as Lil Timmy Tim should know how much Mauser is a role the LaGuardia alum was born to play. After breaking through playing sensitive young men who yearn and suffer silently in films like “Call Me By Your Name” and “Little Women,” to see Chalamet tear into a character as volatile and hyperactive as Mauser is astonishing to behold.
Chalamet fits into Safdie’s non-stop freneticism like a glove and relishes the opportunity to go big as this slimeball hustler whose charm is his greatest strength and weakness. From the opening scene to the closing frames, Chalamet’s grasp of this character never lets up, nor does his grasp upon the audience. He’s transfixing as a guy whose dreams outweigh his morals, family, dignity, future and maybe his life. Donning a wispy mustache and accentuated unibrow, Chalamet’s wiry physicality and slick demeanor call back to every slimy Safide protagonist, but he makes the role entirely his own. Mauser’s ambitions are, baffling and inexplicable as they are, rendered so resolutely by Chalamet that, when he commits unimaginably heinous and cold-hearted acts in pursuit of greatness, you are as compelled to follow him as you are to shun him. So goes the hustle.
Chalamet’s unrelenting propulsiveness would overwhelm most films if he were their only center of gravity, but Safdie’s obsession with truly wonderful oddball New York characters perseveres here. Not one scene goes by without someone new entering the frame and, whether for 10 seconds or 10 minutes, dominating the screen. It always helps that Safdie and his longtime casting director, Jennifer Venditti, seem to only cast those whose faces contain centuries of multitudes or stars whose images map perfectly onto this world, even those who aren’t known to act.
Real-life business mogul O’Leary, or Mr. Wonderful, immediately commands attention in one of the slimiest and most electric performances this year. Okonma, or Tyler, the Creator, similarly steals his scenes as Mauser’s friend, confidante and one of the only people who can tolerate his inanities. The roster is littered with standouts like Abel Ferrara, Emory Cohen and newcomer Luke Manley, but they come and go, scoring from half-court and exiting.
More uniquely, in the midst of this uniformly knockout but mostly male ensemble, Safdie has pinpointed two women as the axis points opposite Mauser in Paltrow and A’zion. Paltrow’s return to the screen in her first non-Marvel role in far too long is more than welcome. She carries an in-her-bones movie star glamour and an innate melancholy that Stone necessitates and as a foil to Mauser. Stone outclasses him in social standing and clearly enjoys lording that over him, but is still trapped in O’Leary’s vice and sees Mauser as an escape. A’zion bursts with earnestness as someone whose standing is even lower than Mauser, trapped in a violent marriage and desperate for a way out.
Mauser represents some sort of escape for both women, but, despite Stone’s higher and Mizler’s lower statuses, they still end up as emotional casualties of his callousness who would be unequivocally better off without him time and time again. They aren’t the only characters who suffer at Mauser’s single-minded hand, but their pains are felt the deepest. Safdie’s deft emotional touch is part of a tightrope he walks the whole film through, as he balances his trademark gonzo go-for-broke hysterics with an earned pathos. This balancing act can usually only succeed in the hands of someone whose complete confidence in their vision transcends traditional tonal registers and blusters forward regardless, and Safdie certainly fits the bill.
Those bypassings of tradition include soundtracking the film with Daniel Lopatin’s synth-forward, heavily ‘80s-inspired score and a collection of certified ‘80s classics. The anachronisms are beyond intentional; they speak to the rot that Safdie and his film obsess over. American excess and greed are inextricable from its foundation, but, through the 20th century and into this 21st, Safdie seems to posit that every 30 years, the country will come back to its vainglorious roots. The ‘50s, defined by a post-war trauma just as much as a post-war malaise, drove men like Mauser to chase what they saw as greatness. In turn, the ‘80s, a decade mired in reactionary conservative politics, glommed onto by a nation in the wake of 1970s paranoia, was similarly driven by a capitalist forward and consumerist greed. By this nature, the 2010s followed. Wars, unrest, recessions can drive nations toward what they see as greatness, no matter who gets lost in the dust. “All God’s Chillun Got Wings, “It’s Morning Again in America,” and “Make America Great Again.” Who can argue with that?
“Marty Supreme” opens in limited release on Dec. 19 and goes wide on Dec. 25.
