2025’s cinema crop can partly be noted for a strong tendency towards genre subversion and perversion. Take, for instance, the salient examples of Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and Eddington, all of which defy the rules and tropes of genres they pretend to inhabit, and sometimes with a prankster-ish glee.
In line with that attitude, director/co-writer Josh (Uncut Gems) Safdie’s Marty Supreme may be the supreme example of a retooled sports film, upended and gone every which way but loose. On paper and in various ways, the film follows the sports flick formula, but detours and narrative rope-a-dope turns abound along the way. Twists begin with the very sport in question — table tennis — with our feverishly determined hero (or antihero?) Marty Mauser, furtively played by Timothée Chalamet, fighting and bullying his way to the standard climactic game at film’s end.
But by the film’s end, our senses have been battered and bruised by the previous two-plus hours of narcissistic overdrive and whiplash plot turns. Some part of us actually would like to see our “hero” lose, and get some retribution for his young life badly lived.
A certain mad and freewheeling energy drives the film, which Safdie audaciously steers and careens through. We join the story in a relative “calm before the storm” moment, meeting Marty as a reluctant shoe salesman in N.Y.C., circa the fraught and frothy post-WWII time frame of 1952. Immediately, we recognize his hyperactive drive and blind ambition as a monstrously and pompously talented table tennis player with his eyes on the prize of a tournament in London.
As his fixated plan for a rise to the top fizzles and he is reduced to playing in stunt gigs and scrappling around the Big Apple, his life and the film’s narrative start to go desperate and Gonzo. In the periphery of his circle of exploited friends and a would-be lover/mother to his child (played with ferocity by Odessa A’zion), the plot thickens to start piling up, to a comic degree. The story trail is littered with startling upsets — such as the startling bathtub-on-bathtub collision moment — a coveted dog leading to an affair with and robbery of a bored and affluent society wife (Santa Barbara’s own Gwyneth Paltrow), bloody bang-ups on the outskirts, kidnaping, and more, in rapid succession.
Given the general level of the film’s unfurling bedlam, it almost feels like what can happen in a writer’s room when unhinged, unchecked imagineers, possibly hopped up on controlled substances, start riffing without constraint. “Hey, what if this happens and then this happens?” “Yes!,” says writer number two, “and then, out of the blue, this and this happen!” “Whoa, is that going too far?” Writer number two: “Fuck it, let’s have some fun.”
Through it all, our distaste for the presumed protagonist grows, even as he (and the virtuosic Chalamet, by proxy) keeps our senses reeling and glued to the screen. One mediating force on his bad behavior in the tale also comes with a local pride factor. Santa Barbara–born and occasionally based legendary writer Pico Iyer, himself a strong table tennis player, was wisely inducted into Safdie’s project. He delivers an impressive and dramatically important role as a table tennis world administrator eager to give Marty some comeuppance with a smack down. We share his character’s sentiment. (See interview with Iyer here.)
Win or lose, good or bad, Marty Supreme may enjoy status as a major 2025 film scene contender, but as one we might simultaneously love and loathe — or at least have serious questions about. It’s all about cinema as a contact sport.
Marty Supreme is currently showing at the Riviera Theatre and the Metropolitan Hitchcock and Paseo Nuevo theatres. View trailer here.
