Marty Supreme

The Gravity of the Hustle

Roughly twenty minutes into a Josh Safdie movie, a particular kind of tension starts living in my body. It isn’t boredom. It’s the strain of watching somebody charge headlong at catastrophe while remaining absolutely certain the laws of consequence won’t apply to them. *Marty Supreme* runs on that feeling from start to finish. Safdie takes the raw, nerve-shredding energy of *Uncut Gems* and relocates it to the 1950s New York table tennis scene, a niche little world he films as if the fate of the republic depends on every serve.

This is his first solo feature since he and Benny split off into separate projects—Benny heading toward the wrestling drama *The Smashing Machine*, Josh staying exactly where you’d expect him, in the company of desperate men and terrible ideas. If anything, working alone seems to have concentrated his instincts. The movie is shot with a suffocating intimacy by Darius Khondji, who keeps shoving the anamorphic frame so close to faces and fabrics that you can almost smell sweat, dust, and stale tobacco. For a period piece, it has zero nostalgia in its bones.



Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a pencil-thin, pencil-mustached hustler loosely modeled on real table tennis shark Marty Reisman. Chalamet’s recent screen persona has gotten so polished, so remotely princely, that seeing him here feels mildly startling. He’s wiry, twitchy, irritated, all exposed nerve endings and grievance. Marty lies as naturally as he breathes, steals when it suits him, and treats the women around him—including Odessa A'zion’s Rachel, a married friend from childhood—as temporary rest stops on the road to his own legend. He wants one thing with total, embarrassing sincerity: to be World No. 1 in ping-pong.

(And yes, there’s something inherently ridiculous about applying Gordon Gekko-level ambition to a game built around a tiny plastic ball. The film knows that. What it never does is sneer at the sport. For Marty, that table is sacred ground.)



Safdie’s craft decisions are almost aggressively anti-period-piece. Instead of the expected lounge jazz, he scores the film with anachronistic 1980s synth-pop from Tangerine Dream and Tears for Fears. The effect is dislocating in the best way. It makes postwar hustling feel possessed by Reagan-era greed. Peter Bradshaw at *The Guardian* called it "a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks," which sounds insane until you hit the sequence with the seedy hotel room, the dog, the bathtub, and Abel Ferrara showing up as a gangster. Safdie piles ringing phones, barking, overlapping dialogue, and human panic on top of one another until the scene feels less watched than endured.

But beneath all the noise, there’s a more complicated current pushing Marty along. He isn't just chasing titles. He’s trying to force the world to acknowledge that he exists. At one point he boasts to a room full of reporters that he is "Hitler’s worst nightmare"—this ultimate living proof of Jewish survival and persistence. The line hits hard because it suddenly exposes the raw inheritance under all his swagger. Marty’s selfishness doesn’t become noble, but it does become legible. He’s trying to outrun history with a paddle in his hand.



Gwyneth Paltrow arrives as Kay, a washed but still magnetic movie star who clocks Marty’s narcissism almost instantly. She brings a slower, sadder frequency to the film. Around him, she barely seems to move; that stillness becomes its own rebuke. The way Paltrow holds herself—easy, unreadable, thoroughly unimpressed—gives the movie a center of gravity it badly needs. She doesn't redeem Marty. She just refuses to be absorbed into his myth.

Eventually even Safdie has to let the adrenaline drain out. What the film keeps circling, and finally says pretty plainly, is that obsession is a lonely religion. You spend years worshipping your own ascent and wake up to find everyone who loved you has been pushed outside the temple. So *Marty Supreme* doesn’t end on a glorious sports-movie crescendo. It lands on a blunt biological image—a sperm meeting an egg, fatherhood approaching a man who has never looked less prepared for it. Messy, abrupt, unresolved: of course it is. Whether that final note reads as punishment or possibility depends on how much faith you still have that Marty Mauser might one day stop turning every human interaction into a scoreboard.