Director: Josh Safdie
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher
Rating: (R13)
★★★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
Marty Supreme is electric! Timothee Chalamet plays fast-talking New York hustler Marty Mauser — a self-destructive egomaniac who uses loved ones for personal gain and signs off every argument with a perfunctory ‘‘I love you’’.
The seed for the film was planted when director Josh Safdie came across The Money Player: The confessions of America’s greatest table tennis champion and hustler — a memoir by its subject, Marty Reisman. Safdie, whose uncle was closely connected to New York’s table tennis underworld, fictionalised his life, and Marty Mauser was born.
Immediately after a romantic storage closet encounter with the woman he’s helping to have an affair, Marty and the audience are swept into purgatory.
Dumped out of the British Open in the finals, Marty’s life spirals: an unpaid Ritz-Carlton bill catches up with him, he has a run-in with the police, he attempts to ransom a local mob boss’ dog, and so on, and so on.
Marty’s brash ambition and fast-paced wit are distinctly New York, elevated by Safdie’s turbulent cinematic style. Almost the entire film exists in tight close-ups and quick-cut editing, scored by a humming classical-synth blend. For a character who sees himself as bigger than the world, we rarely see Marty in a wide shot — only in those rare moments where he feels small.
His unrelenting drive is reflected in his obsessive pursuit of Kay Stone, the sultry and sophisticated former movie star played by Gwyneth Paltrow. He wants her simply because she’s shiny.
Stone is married to Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), the bloodthirsty chief executive of Rockwell Ink pen company and antagonist of the film. Marty’s relationship to the industrialist is fraught, conflicted in his eagerness to exploit and need to entertain him.
This conflict is perfectly illustrated when Marty persuades the Hungarian table tennis player and Auschwitz survivor, Bela Kletzki, to tell Rockwell a story from the camp.
It’s a deeply powerful story of Jewish survival, with an incredibly dark and provocative cinematic rendering, but to diaspora Jew Marty, it’s merely a shocking anecdote — a way to impress a goy he wants money from.
