Marty Supreme reviewed: Timothée Chalomet’s street-smart hustler leads screwball caper

If the Safdie brothers have a major theme it’s male chutzpah. From Lenny, the dreamy, deadbeat dad in Daddy Longlegs (2009), through Connie, the budding criminal mastermind in Good Times (2017), planning both a heist and a jailbreak over one weekend, through Howard in Uncut Gems (2019), frantically pursuing a lost opal to pay off his gambling debts, their heroes have a shameless, chaotic impudence and audacity, flying by the seat of their pants through a Manhattan, full of goons, cops, mob lords and extremely long suffering wives and girlfriends.

Though the brothers have now split to pursue their individual paths to glory, (Benny delivered The Smashing Machine, a brutal and tender biopic of UFC champ Mark Kerr earlier this year), chutzpah is still the fuel driving their madcap picaresques and Marty Mauser must surely be its ultimate expression. “I am the Nazi’s worst nightmare!” he boasts to a skeptical audience, like some nebbish Ali or McEnroe of the pingpong table, near the start of Marty Supreme. “I am Hitler’s ultimate defeat!”. There has not been a finer display of chutzpah since Moses suggested Yahweh had another think about that whole sins of the fathers shmegegge.

It’s a role that Timothée Chalomet seems born to play. All the messianic freaks he has portrayed over the past five years, from Paul Atreides to Willy Wonka and Bob Dylan, now seem like warm up acts for Marty Mauser. Loosely inspired by the real life post-war table tennis champion Marty Reiser, he’s a force of nature, temporarily taking the form of a very unhumble shoe store worker on the lower East Side. In the cramped claustrophobic streets and apartments of 1950s Manhattan, Marty has big, biblical, cinemascope dreams – of winning the British Open, becoming the face of the world’s fastest growing sport, ultimately creating a monument of glory to rival the pyramids.

On the way to this manifest destiny, Marty faces a few obstacles. His mom and his boss have a different, more responsible future in mind, managing the shoe store. His girlfriend Rachel (the magnificent Odessa A’zion, who deserves a film all of her own) has just become pregnant. There’s a rising star in the east, the mysterious Japanese player, Endo, who was deafened during the bombing of Tokyo, and plays with preternatural samurai grace, armed with a revolutionary two-sided paddle.

But above all there’s his relentlessly self-sabotaging arrogance. While at the British Open, he racks up unpayable room service bills at the Ritz, then flames out in the final. He seduces a gloriously faded movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow), only to fall foul of her vengeful tycoon of a husband. All his hustles to earn his fare back to Japan for a rematch and to claim his rightful title come to a series of spectacular dead ends.

If Uncut Gems sometimes felt like an escalating two-hour panic attack, Marty Supreme is even more relentless, somehow upping the ante at every turn, a rollercoaster to rival One Battle After Another. Safdie recalls other directors and frequently surpasses them. Marty is like a Wes Anderson character – Max from Rushmore – set loose in a stinking, honking Manhattan rather than a stage-managed diorama. He moves through a world of endless kvetching and chatter like a Woody Allen lead adrift in Scorsese’s mean streets. He’s caught up in the surreal screwball escapades of prime Coen Brothers (notably Raising Arizona and Barton Fink), while never seeming lost in pastiche. He touches glory in the subterranean spotlights of the table tennis halls, like a Raging Bull of the small plastic ball.

It’s astonishing, bravura cinema and you’re seduced just like one of Marty’s marks falling for his indomitable confidence. But it’s ultimately one more story of a feckless, reckless, heedless, young man, callously casting aside friends, family and women once they’ve served his purposes. There are irresistible hints in Odessa A’zion’s performance that the women in Marty’s life are as full of strange dreams and desires as he is, if only he’d slow down for a second to listen to them. It may be Josh Safdie’s great challenge, as it was for the supreme Marty Scorsese before him, to make a movie that doesn’t relegate these women to the background.