Marty Supreme

 

Director Josh Safdie 

Timothée Chalamet on the set

Safdie with Timothée Chalamet

Darius Khondji on the set

Tokyo set

Marty Reisman, 1946

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARTY SUPREME              B-                                                                                         Finland  USA  (150 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Josh Safdie

I have a purpose.  You don’t.  And if you think that’s some kind of blessing, it’s not.  It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.  And with that obligation comes sacrifice. 
—Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet)

A bit of a hot mess, a sprawling, anxiety-ridden, and extremely over-produced film with loud, instrusive music by composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) that plays throughout, though there’s an exquisite use of popular songs of the 1980’s, also synthesizer sounds from the same era, opening and closing with Tears for Fears, but the original score offers no hint of subtlety, as if the entire film is a remix video.  Made by Josh Safdie, the first time not working with his younger brother Benny, the makers of Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), excelling in expressing that New York City vibe, where this has the same frantic, adrenaline-laced energy, loosely inspired by the life of early 1950’s ping pong aficionado Marty Reisman ("Marty Reisman – US Table Tennis Hall of Fame") and his book, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler (1974), where in the 40’s and 50’s, New York City table tennis was a collection of misfits and gamblers, where betting on the game drove the sport, with a talented player able rake in hundreds in a single night, which would be the equivalent of thousands today.  There already is a documentary made about the flamboyant Reisman, Leo Leigh’s FACT OR FICTION: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A PING PONG HUSTLER (2014).  The hustler aspect of the sport recalls the eloquent pool playing grace of Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats, the best player in the world, and Paul Newman’s rising star Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), though this doesn’t come close to the tension-filled, insatiably-interesting character study of that memorable film, which perfectly captured the stench and dingy atmosphere of the smoke-filled poolroom.  The raison d’être of this film is Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, so good in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), who has secretly been preparing for this role for six or seven years, continually training and becoming familiar with the game, even traveling with a table while he worked on other films, creating a fictionalized portrait of the most flamboyantly charismatic table tennis player the world has ever witnessed, whose live-wire approach carries nearly every scene of the film, literally careening from place to place.  Written by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who both co-edited the film as well, this becomes a collaborative effort in creating an immersive portrait of what’s commonly known as a bullshit artist that feels like a psychotic-driven, impressionistic mosaic of neverending mood swings.  While ostensibly about ping pong, the protagonist feels more like the volatile and ferociously temperamental chess champion Bobby Fischer of table tennis, both viewing the game as nothing less than armed combat, as the film reveals just how difficult it was to build a career around a sport that still hadn’t caught on in the United States.  Table tennis didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1988 (no American has ever medaled), so Marty had to go to great lengths to hustle money in the most unorthodox of ways, bordering on criminality, to finance his dream of becoming a world champion, knowing he was talented enough, but finding his way into international tournaments on the other side of the world was another story.

Listed at #2 at IndieWire: The 25 Best Movies of 2025, and #3 at The Playlist: The 25 Best Films of 2025 and New York Times: Manohla Dargis: Best Movies of 2025, it’s all about having a single-minded purpose, as we initially find Marty, a Lower East Side Jewish kid stuck working in his uncle’s shoestore, where we hear him bragging that he could sell shoes to an amputee, taking a break from fitting women’s shoes to have a backroom tryst with his childhood sweetheart, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to someone else that treats her badly, exuding passion in everything he does as he desperately tries to raise the money to afford airfare to England to play in their invitational.  Crossing the line at every turn, Marty justifies his deplorable antics by thinking the ends justify the means, but not everyone else sees it that way, as he’s a natural born street hustler and swindler, where many are swayed by his charms, including Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired Hollywood movie actress from the 30’s on the verge of A Streetcar Named Desire theatrical comeback, who he sees across the room in a fancy restaurant at the Ritz in London, finagling his way into her hotel room, where she doesn’t know whether to call security or embrace his hare-brained schemes, as he exudes such a sense of feverish urgency that she’s inevitably drawn into his youthful sexual orbit, actions she later regrets.  Invariably, it’s her incredibly wealthy and supremely successful businessman husband that peaks his interest, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), thinking opportunity knocks as he sees dollar signs, playing out like some twisted and demented version of the American Dream, with Marty trying to promote his own idea of orange-colored ping pong balls entitled Marty Supreme, with the words “Made in America” printed underneath the name, thinking this will change the game, as a white ball against white shirts is hard to see.  While Marty is supremely confident, to the point of arrogance and cockiness, he’s also deluded and self-destructive, prone to creating chaos wherever he goes, thinking Rockwell should just throw money at him, as he’s such a sure bet, but Marty shoots down all his offers that are little more than an excuse to promote his own business product, using Marty as an exhibition act to help sell his world-acclaimed pens, a proposal Marty finds deeply offensive, always believing that he’s the star, not some novelty act playing second fiddle, so these discussions are a little rocky, with the businessman quickly losing patience on this unproven commodity.  It’s only a matter of time, however, before Marty’s life deteriorates into utter mayhem, having to deal with one disaster after another, finding himself destitute and all alone, where playing ping pong is the only thing that he’s actually good at, supremely confident in his abilities, just oozing with braggadocio, belittling others as not in his same league, described in the press as “the Chosen One,” bragging that he is “the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” where he’s a consummate trash talker before the phrase was even invented, something Mohammad Ali elevated to an artform in the sport of boxing in the 1960’s.  Shot on 35mm in ‘Scope by Darius Khondji, who shot the brother’s previous film, this tries to recreate the nuances of the early 50’s, with some degree of success, but mostly this is shot indoors in claustrophobic hotel rooms, small spaces, or cavernous arenas with multiple ping pong matches being played at once.         

What’s important to understand is that the sport itself is overlooked, small, and dismissed, yet the film is driven by Marty’s relentless obsession to be the best ping pong player in the world, which may as well be the ambitious pursuit of flying men to the moon, as it just fails to register with anyone else around him, who see it as little more than a hobby.  At the time, American players met in dingy basements on the margins of anything resembling a sport other than maybe high-stakes poker, while attracting large crowds filling stadiums in Europe and Asia.  Yet for all the negativity he encounters, it only drives him more, hustling his way from table tennis tables in New York to Paris, Tokyo, and even the Great Pyramids of Egypt, shamelessly chipping off a souvenir from one of the giant blocks at the base and handing it to his mother, reminding her, “We built that” (a common misconception), where the film is defined by his daring physicality, putting himself on the line, creating a fully-charged persona that lives on the edge, that thrives in adversity, where he’s a bit of a showman, doing trick shots for curious spectators who are in awe of his unleashed talent, as he was known for using a Coke bottle for a paddle, or a garbage-can lid, a shoe, a light bulb, his eyeglasses, while making behind-the-back or under-the-leg returns, Marty Supreme Exclusive Clip - Semifinals (2025) YouTube (2:08).  His pièce de résistance was to place a cigarette at the opposite end of the table and then, crushing the ball with his powerful forehand, break the cigarette in two.  The entire film is an adrenaline rush, thwarted at every turn, denied the opportunities of a lifetime, so he just doubles down on his dream, where his deluded sense of entitlement is distinctly American, yet his sharp wit, brash impulsiveness, astonishingly cruel and inappropriate language, and giant-sized ego will simply not be denied, matched only by his superlative talent.  A narcissist in development, the changing parts all around him are a revolving door of whoever happens to benefit him the most, as he’s constantly charging ahead, like a bull in a China shop, where calamities are an everyday occurrence, harming anyone and everyone around him, but he refuses to let that stop him.  This gargantuan obsession with a dream both propels and consumes him, where at times it feels like a demolition derby, as it’s an exhausting journey built around a transformative performance by Chalamet, an inveterate liar and relentless scoundrel who’s always working the angles, but continuously gets sidetracked by a myriad of side journeys that lead to personal disasters and self-inflicted catastrophes.  The problem is there’s not an ounce of self-reflection in the film, no pauses to think and re-evaluate how best to get his life on track in order to achieve his real purpose and main goal.  Hell, we never once even see the man practice or train, so apparently he just expects to win, like wishful thinking.  Despite spending two and a half hours in what amounts to a psychological character study with one central character onscreen nearly the entire time, in the end we still know next to nothing about him, while none of the secondary characters are allowed to have their own developed lives apart from Marty, instead they disappear just as quickly as they are seen.  What that leaves is a pervasive emptiness that, despite the whirlwind of kinetic energy, saturates the mood of the entire film.    

One of the more amazing stories comes from Marty’s friend Béla Kletzki (Hungarian actor and poet Géza Röhrig, who starred in the acclaimed 2015 László Nemes Holocaust movie Son of Saul (Saul Fia), a former Hungarian table tennis star from the 30’s, who survived Auschwitz when he was recognized by a German prison guard on his way to the gas chambers, then sent to defuse bombs on the camp outskirts, which is based on what actually happened to Polish player Alojzy Ehrlich (Alojzy Ehrlich: The Jewish Table Tennis Champion Who ...).  While there are some extraordinary shots of tournament play, accentuated by some exceptional production design by the legendary Jack Fisk, who over the past 50 years has worked with Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he runs into one particularly difficult opponent who becomes his nemesis, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, a 26-year-old real-life deaf table tennis champion from Japan), reportedly deaf as a result of the American firebombing of Tokyo, who has the entire Japanese nation behind him, a powerful outlet for national pride and identity in the postwar Japanese recovery, who are simply enthralled with his abilities.  Endo’s fictional character is based upon Hiroji Satoh, who won the World Table Tennis Championship in 1952.  While barely touched upon in the film, Endo’s prowess is largely due to the changed racket design, with a sponge-covered foam rubber on one side instead of a hard paddle, allowing him to place more spin and achieve greater speed than a traditional paddle, while also muting the sound that players take a lifetime to be able to detect, like getting a jump on a fly ball to the outfield in baseball.  At first this flummoxes Marty, as he’s never encountered this before, and it takes some time before he develops an answer.  This revolutionary development in paddles actually became a bone of contention with the real Marty Reisman, eschewing it as “fraud and deception” because overnight, former champions were suddenly reduced to has-beens, preferring the challenges of an original wood design, claiming it required greater skill.  This same argument happened in the game of tennis, as the wood rackets in the Rod Laver era gave way to the steel rackets of Jimmy Connors, as both he and Billy Jean King dominated the sport afterwards.  While this is a typical Safdie Brothers’ roller coaster thrill ride designed to be a crowdpleaser, where it’s relentlessly volatile at every turn, not sure it amounts to much more than that, despite being A24’s most expensive film to date, with the studio pulling out all the stops in a ridiculous, multi-month promotional campaign in an attempt to capture mainstream appeal, however, detours into violence and family melodrama feel like unnecessary distractions, with a less than scintillating and highly conventional finale leading to an epic Tears for Fears song over the end credits, yet the corrosive personality of the alienated protagonist does feel like a counterpoint to the Coen Brothers’ time capsule depiction of the early, pre-Dylan Greenwich Village folk scene of Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).      

Note

Easy to miss is director Abel Ferrara (a dangerous criminal, of course), and brief cameo appearances by Fran Drescher (Marty’s mother), Sandra Bernhard (her friend living downstairs), New York–based author Larry “Ratso” Sloman as Marty’s shoestore-owning uncle, billionaire grocery store mogul John Catsimatidis as the father of a friend, rap artist Tyler, the Creator as Marty’s cab-driving friend, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as Kay’s publicist who gets theater tickets for Marty, prolific writer Naomi Fry as Kay’s assistant, novelist Pico Iyer as head of the International Table Tennis Association, playwright David Mamet (an actual ping pong hustler in his early years) as a theater director, comedian Penn Jillette as a hair-trimmed, kick-ass farmer, high-wire act Philippe Petit as an MC, multiple medal-winning German table tennis champion Timo Boll, Hall of Fame NBA legend George “the Iceman” Gervin as a table tennis club owner, and also NBA greats Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker as Harlem Globetrrotters.  The real-life Marty Reisman died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two.

Son of Saul (Saul Fia)

SON OF SAUL (Saul Fia)         B+             
Hungary  (107 mi)  2015  d:  László Nemes 

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns,

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.

—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

A protégé of Béla Tarr, working as his assistant director on THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007), László Nemes in his premiere feature was the winner of the Grand Prix (2nd place), FIPRESCI, and François Chalais (Best Journalism) awards at Cannes with one of the most praised films in competition, finding a new and unique way to tell the story of the Holocaust, opening in a blur, where a character gets closer and walks into the focus of the frame, holding that individual steadily in focus and following him for the remainder of the film, as everything seen is presented from his point of view.  Shot by Mátyás Erdély, much of it in long takes, creating a strange, almost dreamlike effect, where everything around him remains in a blur, always out of focus, a technique that initially grabs the viewer’s attention, but becomes repetitive, perhaps even monotonous after awhile, and may not hold up for the duration of the picture.  Also winning the Vulcan award for technical achievement was Tamás Zányi, creating one of the most remarkable sound designs in cinema history, a relentlessly brutal depiction of the Holocaust as presented through background noises, where threatening Nazi commands are continually barked out, usually accompanied by the sounds of shovings, beatings, screams, machine gun fire, and ferocious dogs barking, a non-stop offensive barrage that becomes the most astonishing aspect of the film, especially considering viewers can only partially see what’s happening on the peripheral of the frame, yet remain intensely glued to the screen.  Géza Röhrig plays Saul Auslӓnder, a beleaguered Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz that is part of a Hungarian team of Sonderkommandos whose death sentences have been temporarily reprieved, offered special privileges, used by the Nazi’s to help herd each new arrival of Jews transported by trains into the gas chambers, helping provide reassurance that they were heading for showers instead of their instant deaths, then clearing out the bodies for burning or burial, cutting hair, extracting gold from their teeth, removing the clothes and personal belongings, basically doing the dirty work in order to maintain the efficiency this system of mass extermination requires.  After a period of about 3 or 4 months, the Sonderkommandos are themselves executed, replaced by the formation of new teams whose ghastly first job assignment is clearing the bodies of the previous group of Sonderkommandos.  In this way, if all goes according to plan, there will be no surviving Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust. 

Without ever showing the graphic horrors that might be impossible to restage, this film instead recreates what it sounds like, where teams of Jewish workers are continually worked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, where they are under no illusion what awaits them.  However, the longer they are kept alive, fully aware of how the camps operate, the larger their threat becomes in exposing to the world just what the Nazi’s are up to, as the extent of deaths from these extermination camps was not revealed until “after” the war was over.  Always under the gun of the Nazi’s, the daily grind of living among the constant stench of such massive human slaughter becomes psychologically numbing.  By shooting the film in this way, holding the camera fixed on Saul’s anguished face, shot in a boxed, 1:37 aspect ratio, it literally takes us inside his head, accentuating the pressures of his psychological torment, where the film is largely a window into his distraught state of mind, forced to completely shut out the outside world, where he is considered a walking casualty among the dead, where there is little to distinguish between the living and the dead.  The onslaught of Nazi hatred and contempt is the same, where individuals are routinely ridiculed and shot on the spot for not following orders quickly enough.  The attempt to get under the surface is an altogether different one, using virtuoso experimental techniques to express the incomprehensible, as no one could fully grasp the totality of the death camp experience.  The extreme degree of horror of the death camps affects everyone differently, where the director is attempting to recreate the intensity of experiencing that horror by vividly personalizing it through one man’s ordeal.  Some may find that attempt distasteful, exploiting the memory of the dead through harrowing “action” sequences, actually borrowing techniques from conventional action thrillers mixed in with the experimentation.  But it’s important to consider the Holocaust created exceptional circumstances where a different set of rules applies to anything remotely defined as “human” understanding.  Hatred and an utter contempt for human life contribute to a collective demoralization the likes of which the human condition had never seen, where figuring into the making of every decision is an agonizing fear and the constant threat of death.  Who are we to question the acts or the mindset of anyone having to live through this unimaginable trauma? 

The film inhabits what Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi called “The Gray Zone” in his memoir collection of essays from his 1986 book The Drowned and the Saved, and recalls Tim Blake Nelson’s extraordinary play turned into a feature-length film, THE GREY ZONE (2002), which was also based on Levi’s essays and similarly featured the plight of a group of Sonderkommandos, but also included the documented, true life experiences of Dr. Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who was ordered by Nazi SS Officer and physician Josef Mengele to perform certain nefarious medical experiments due to his high expertise, who survived Auschwitz and lived to reveal what happened inside the death camps.  In both films, the story turns on the discovery of a miraculous child survivor from the gassings, perhaps buried underneath the dead bodies where air pockets remain uncontaminated, which turns into an obsession to save the life of the child, even if it endangers a planned uprising that could save thousands.  In this film, the Nazi’s brutally kill the child that Saul comes to believe is his own, which is the subject of some dispute, but may have been an illegitimate child he neglected while he was alive, spending the duration of the film desperately seeking to find a rabbi among the harrowing confusion of the camps, putting his own life at risk at least a dozen times as he becomes unhinged, obsessed with the all-but-impossible task of giving the child a proper Jewish burial where a rabbi can perform the kaddish.  Similarly, there is also a secretly planned Jewish rebellion, inspired by the actual events of an October 7, 1944 uprising at Auschwitz (The Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau | Jewish Virtual Library), where a unit of Sonderkommandos was largely made up of Hungarian Jews, becoming a last ditch effort that might impact upon their otherwise all-too-certain fates, while also hoping to smuggle photos of the crematoriums to the outside world. Throughout this ordeal, Saul is chastised by his fellow prisoners for not pulling his weight, for neglecting their cause, claiming “You’ve abandoned the living for the sake of the dead.”  This is largely the moral dilemma of Saul, who at least for a brief period rediscovers within himself the stirrings of life, even while totally surrounded by a system of enveloping madness and death.  For whatever reason, the director decides the release the claustrophobic vantage point, expanding the field of vision near the end with questionable results, but in doing so implicates the neighbors and surrounding community that witnessed the mass starvation, constant shootings, and the burning of human flesh in crematoriums built exclusively for that purpose, while remaining silent.