Movie Review : Marty Supreme (2025)
I might be the last critic on Earth to review Marty Supreme, but I don't care. Even though the marketing campaign was obnoxious and unavoidable, I've developed contradicting thoughts about this movie before even seeing it. The first was that I dislike Safdie cinema, which often feels to me like gritty Under Armour commercials for people who mistake panic attacks for realism. So, obviously, there was no way I could like Marty Supreme. The second was that Timothée Chalamet playing a cocky ping-pong player felt cosmically correct, do it couldn’t be a fiasco.
As it turns out, both instincts were more or less right. Marty Supreme doesn’t suck, but it’s only marginally better than the Safdie movies I already don’t like and almost entirely on Chalamet, who plays a controlling wacko with more nuance than the movie probably deserves. My gut was on the money here, which is unfortunate, because the worst thing a movie can be is mid and it’s exactly what this is. Sorry to break it to you.
Marty Supreme tells the story of Marty Mauser (Chalamet), a professional ping-pong player with aspirations to win a world championship even though no one around him cares. When his uncle (and boss) denies him the money to travel to qualifying tournament in England, Marty does what any self-serving narcissist would and robs his uncle’s store vault. He also gets in trouble over there for fraudulently staying at the Ritz hotel and sees himself facing a fine or a shitty faustian bargain to make it to the championships in time.
The Ethics of Being an Asshole
The only question that really interests me in Marty Supreme is this: was Marty morally right to bulldoze law, order, and the personal integrity of everyone who loved him in order to play in the table tennis world championships? Because if nobody around him gave a shit about ping-pong, he had two options. He could accept his fate as a guy without the socioeconomic privilege to become a star athlete, or he could force destiny by breaking relationships he could theoretically repair once he became a sports superstar.
This is more of a quandary than anyone wants to admit, because sports movies have trained us to see obsession as noble because the obsessed person almost always wins.
But Marty Supreme isn’t really a sports movie. It’s a thriller about an egomaniac who believes catastrophic life decisions can somehow add up to a better future, because this is the movie Josh and Benny Safdie keep making over and over again. What makes Marty slightly more sympathetic than their previous human car crashes is that his obsession isn’t greed, status or survival exactly. He’s trying to prove a point that is completely intangible and matters only to him.
There's an abstract level of self-respect to Marty that you have to admire. It’s not about failure or triumph. It’s about being acknowledged for the one thing he does better than almost anyone else, which is what makes him interesting to me. The fraudulent Ritz stay is a perfect example. Ping-pong is not just a sport for Marty. It’s a passport into the life he believes his talent should have already granted him. He doesn’t want to win as much as he wants to prove he belongs above the people who don’t share his level of commitment.
But You Seem To Have Liked It. What’s The Problem Then?
My issue with Marty Supreme is that it follows the same rigid and obvious structure as every other Safdie brothers movie: a ticking clock, a rising sense of panic, a series of short-sighted transgressions committed in pursuit of a goal that seems both illusory and self-defeating, and an aesthetic that feels way too slick for characters this grimy and rudderless. This is supposed to feel like life spiraling out of control, but it often feels more like chaos arranged by someone with a very expensive mood board.
If Uncut Gems felt like an Under Armour commercial for lowlives, Marty Supreme feels like a Tag Heuer commercial for mid-century narcissists. It has the texture of desperation without ever fully surrendering to it. Everyone is sweating, lying, scheming, gambling their future on the next five minutes, but the movie itself always looks like it knows exactly how cool that is supposed to be and it's trying sell you the idea that these scheming pimps are so much cooler than you are just as hard.
Could it have been another way? Can Josh Safdie expand his cinematographic vocabulary beyond basic film noir and tell stories without mechanically whipping the audience into a frenzy with editing and sound design? I admire the originality of his imagination, but his movies never quite feel like they belong to him. They feel like visual quilts stitched together from magazine ads, vintage crime photography, prestige menswear campaigns and old movies about desperate men making terrible phone calls. I find that both obtrusive and infuriating.
As great as Chalamet is as a cocky ping-pong icon, he’s squeezed into a narrow corridor in the editing room. The performance wants oxygen. The movie keeps converting it into momentum.
*
Alright, I’ll say it: Marty Supreme is, by default, the Safdie brothers’ best movie. It’s visually and thematically different enough from Uncut Gems and Good Time that it’s almost a shame it’s structurally the same movie again. There’s a more interesting filmmaker trying to get out of this thing, but he’s still trapped inside the same panic machine.
As hard as Marty Supreme went for the Oscar, there were three or four movies more deserving. It’s a step in the right direction for Josh Safdie, but not the triumph it’s been hailed as. I’m reviewing it last, but that feels correct somehow. This is the kind of movie you can only appreciate for what it is once the hype has died down and the room has stopped applauding itself for understanding it.
7.1/10
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