Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is doing excellent business and inspiring great reviews. It looks like it’s going to be a triumph for A24, which gambled $70 million on this oddball comedy-drama about a working-class ping-pong prodigy named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) hustling to finance his trip to big overseas tournaments by any means necessary.
It was no doubt helped along by a surge of holiday moviegoing that also boosted an eclectic range of new releases including Avatar: Fire and Ash, Song Sung Blue, and Anaconda. But Marty Supreme is arguably the hardest sell of all of them, and enthusiastic word of mouth is really helping it along. The film boasts a colorful script by Safdie and favorite cowriter Ronald Bronstein. They also edited the film together, setting a rapid-fire, nerve-jangling pace. It’s got exciting ping-pong competitions along with edgy performances by Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator), Abel Ferrara, and Fran Drescher, superbly grubby cinematography by Darius Khondji (Eddington, Mickey 17, Uncut Gems), a wildly eclectic and anachronistic score by Daniel Lopatin, and a wonderfully low-down production design, especially in its representation of 1950s New York City, by Jack Fisk, whose collaborations with Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese have made him an eighty-year-old legend in his field.
Everyone agrees the movie’s an end-of-the-year must-see. I disliked it intensely, but there’s no denying that it’s a must-see.
Why did I dislike Marty Supreme, this film I ought to like so much, made by people of tremendous talent? This film that’s all about lower-class struggle against impossible odds in a world designed to thwart working people at every turn, which is practically my biggest obsession? I’ve been wrestling with this very question for days.
But first, let me tell you more about the film.
Marty Supreme is loosely based on the…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
