Marty Supreme

dir: Josh Safdie

2025

Now this is a movie. This is a FILM.

Not an enjoyable one, at least for me, but you have no doubt while watching this that it’s an actual, honest to Gods, film.

Fucking hell it is exhausting, though. Oh my stars it is like a two and a half hour migraine in the back of a stationwagon driving down a very bumpy road with no suspension whatsoever.

Some people might compare it to the films of John Cassavetes, or maybe the Crank movies, but to me this is, like many things from the 1990s, the wrong lessons learned from the “right” movies.

This is what I mean: a lot of people watched and liked Boogie Nights. Regardless of its subject matter, and regardless of the profound dumbness of one of the central actors, it’s a remarkable, propulsive experience. Towards the back end of the movie, there’s this sequence which very loosely is based on the so-called ‘Wonderland Murders’, or at least the precipitating event being when some foolish fools tried to rip off a drug dealer.

In that movie, everything that can be done to ramp up the tension onscreen and in the audience is done. There’s a too loud soundtrack, there’s people acting erratically before and after doing copious amounts of blow, there’s our knowledge that they’re all about to commit a terrible mistake, and there’s a half-naked Asian-American chap striding around in his underwear letting off firecrackers.

It’s all too much, but it’s just a sequence, a set piece, so to speak, one which happens before everything falls apart for a lot of the characters. It’s maybe ten minutes, fifteen minutes at most?

The Safdie Brothers saw that scene and thought “we need to make movies, and all our movies will be like that sequence, but for two hours plus, every fucking time!”

That’s why Good Times exists, that’s why Uncut Gems exists.

This cinema is not for the faint of heart. Or maybe I’m not doing enough work to imagine that there might be people out there who enjoy feeling like they’ve downed 7 Red Bulls in a row.

It looks amazing, I mean, making something now that looks like the 1950s is far more complex than slapping a few filters on or getting the costuming right. I think that’s mostly down to the skills of legendary cinematographer Darius Khonji, but what do I know. Maybe Timothée Chalamet made it all happen just with the power of his poxy teenage mo.

I cannot stress enough how irritating Chalamet’s character is in this movie, the one named after his character. He is fucking annoying, and a reprehensible piece of shit throughout. I don’t need to make apologies for him – he’s going to annoy his way into getting an Academy Award for his ‘work’ here, so that’s hardly a mark against him.

This character is only loosely based on an actual person, mutated into Marty Mauser, a ping pong player who alienates and screams at everyone around him. He believes he is destined for greatness, at least in the field of ping pong, and will not allow anyone to divert him from his goals.

His goals… his attempts to reach his goals keep putting him further and further behind the eight ball, yet we think / hope that maybe things will work out for him in the end(?) (for some reason?) In wanting to get to a championship in London, he resorts to stealing from his employer. Out of disgust with his accommodation, he incurs thousands in room service etc costs at a hotel, meaning he owes thousands to an organisation that dictates whether he can play or not, the thing that gives his life purpose and meaning.

In playing in the tournament he eventually loses. In having sex with a married friend, she ends up pregnant. In seducing an aging starlet (Gwyneth Paltrow) he somehow attaches himself to a demonic rich jerk who will make his life even more of a living hell (Kevin O’Leary) just because he can. In trying to take a shower in a hovel hotel he crashes through the floor below and nearly kills a guy and his dog, but then has to look after the dog, which goes missing.

An hour at least of the movie is devoted to the getting, and the losing, of this dog called Moses, which somehow results in the deaths of around four people, despite this being somehow billed as a comedy.

It’s not a comedy.

So much happens, of debatable consequence, that you might have difficulty figuring out what the flick is really about: is it about a jerk getting his comeuppance? No. Is it about class dynamics, and how we should eat the rich? Possibly, though no. Is it about getting the dog back? No. Is it about whether Marty wins against his Japanese nemesis Todo Endo? Well, maybe, but then no.

Is it about whether this pipsqueak can sexually satisfy a fading Hollywood starlet? Or whether he’s going to score a bunch of money off of her so he can repay his debts and get to Japan?

If you’re detecting a theme here, it is of a driven person never giving up even if he should, never backing down especially when it would benefit almost everybody and his can’t-stop-won’t-stop attitude to life, and being perpetually thwarted at almost every turn, and having absolutely nothing to show for it. And it’s not because he’s an arsehole to absolutely everyone, including his poor mother (it's delightful to see Fran Drescher in a movie role again, she looks amazing) and his sort of girlfriend (Odessa A’zion), who’s eight months pregnant for most of the movie and a piece of work herself. He may see himself as being burdened with glorious purpose, but the universe, as it should be, is not indifferent; it’s actively working against him.

Why? Because he doesn’t deserve good things. Someone this awful, this annoying, doesn’t deserve good things.

I wasn’t sure at first if his sort of girlfriend Rachel is as much of an arsehole, on the same level of general shittiness as Marty, but the flick goes to great lengths to show how appalling she is, and thus makes sure we know they’re both as appalling as each other, so they’re a match made in hell.

There are so many physiognomies in this flick, and what I mean by that is, there are a lot of faces with ‘personality’, let’s put it that way. Such faces. I don’t just mean people who look like me, as in, just brutish, heavy-featured galoots. I mean, these faces, goodness, they’re so craggy. There’s so much life that’s been lived into these faces. Legendary anti-magician Penn Jilette of Penn and Teller fame plays a small role as a jerk with a shotgun, and man does he look old.

Older than all is legendary director Abel Ferrara, who looks so worn out that I’m amazed he’s still alive. He’s the menacing owner of a dog that plays so much of a pointless role in a flick in which the entire story arc with the dog could be extracted and it wouldn’t change a thing, and he’s not, unlike Keith Richards, a walking advertisement for the benefits derived over decades of heroin addiction. He is surely not long for this world, may he eventually rest in peace, and this will be the best film he’s been associated with in decades.

It is funny for me that Gwyneth Paltrow, of premier wellness brand GOOP fame, and some film roles, is playing an over the hill actress when she is actually a couple of years younger than me, came out of “retirement” for this role, whatever the fuck that means, and looks like her face has been worked on in a carpenter’s shop, with chisels, sanders and saws, to within a millimetre of specifications. Good luck to her in all her future endeavours. She really nails the aesthetic and the mannerisms of a very wealthy actress who doesn’t need to act for a crust anymore but is desperate for the adulation.

There is a Hungarian chap in this that rounds out my Show and Tell about people with distinctive faces called Géza Röhrig, who’s hardly a household name. He did play the lead in a bruising, soul-destroying Holocaust flick from about ten years ago called Son of Saul, about the trials and tribulations of one of the Sonderkommandos who worked in the furnaces.

I mention this because there’s a lot of disturbing elements captured in this flick, and a few casual mentions of the Holocaust, but one of Geza’s key contributions is playing a character based on someone who did survive Auschwitz (Alojzy Ehrlich), and who did relay that appalling story about smuggling honey back into the camp, but good goddamn did I not need to see or hear about it ever, and I will be doing some serious drinking this weekend coming in order to erase those memories specifically.

Because I’ve been talking / writing at length for this, it may obscure the fact that while I may have much to say about it, this was not an enjoyable viewing experience at all. I wanted to run away from the film at a speed to be matched by how much Chalamet runs and runs and runs like an Energizer rabbit from days of yore, runs and gets nowhere. It may be a triumph of acting, but damn did I loathe his character and almost every single thing he did and the ways that he did them.

And it all leads up to an ending I’d argue is completely out of nowhere and completely unearned. Maybe that’s why it works, as an ending? I don’t know. The ending is bolstered, if that is truly the word I’m looking for, by its use of Tears for Fears’s Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Sounds like a strange needle drop for something set in the 1950s? The entire soundtrack is 80s pop ‘classics’ which sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. It does take you out of the film a bit, a reminder that we’re watching a (very) contrived contrivance. There’s more to life than policing anachronistic song usage in movies, though, surely?

I hated it from almost start to finish but the level of skill involved in pulling it all together and keeping it ticking over with a maddening pace and with oodles of style is undeniable, in that I can’t deny it. It is a staggeringly well-made movie, made for evil purposes, but well made all the same.

Which reminded me again: there are people pretending to be monsters in this flick, and then there is Kevin O’Leary, as Milton Rockwell, who is clearly a monster inside and outside of the flick. He pretty much confesses as such during the movie. Do not leave him alone in a room with babies, is all I’m saying. He wouldn’t even leave behind any bones.

Marty Supreme is a great film about terrible people and a curious time in post-World War II American history… and, uh, the way some people seem to annoy reality into bending enough to accommodate them.

I will never watch it, ever again, as long as I live.

8 times Chalamet is going to become a Johnny Depp after Pirates of the Caribbean level of egomaniac out of 10

--
“I have a purpose. If you think that it's some kind of blessing it's not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.” - like I saw through seeing this movie, very relieved at the end, thanks - Marty Supreme