A day after suffering through one of the worst movies of the year, I was able to watch one of the best: Marty Supreme, a fast-paced, unpredictable, anxiety-fueled, and funny drama of sorts from the mind of Josh Safdie.
Similar to Uncut Gems and Good Time, and thankfully not at all like his brother’s movie The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme follows a fast-talking, ultra-confident, and narcissistic young man named Marty who thinks he’s going to be the next world pingpong champion and won’t let anything stand in his way, including family, friends, or lovers.
Timothée Chalamet delivers a silver-tongued performance, among the best of the year. His mouth moves a mile a minute, doling out compliments and solutions and grand proclamations, most of it bullshit. He’s a shit-slinger with some talent (but enough talent, remains to be seen?) to back it up, a man who relentlessly pushes forward even when his actions often just makes things much worse. Much, much worse.
Between the clinic Chalamet puts on in front of the camera and Josh Safdie’s devil-may-care cinematic approach behind the lens, Marty Supreme oozes with energy, excitement, and confidence. This is raw entertainment value at its finest, the type of modern filmmaking you want to see more of. The energy is through the roof, the story aloof and uncompromising. The end result is explosive.
Beyond Chalamet the rest of the cast is great too, most notably Odessa A’zion as his friend/lover/mother of his unborn child (the opening credits depict Marty’s sperm swimming their way to her ovaries, an early sign of how Safdie was just going to go for it all). Gwenyth Paltrow and even Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O’Leary, get to feast on the vibrant script at hand. There are lesser known actors with smaller roles who dot the Marty Supreme landscape as well, many of them adding incredible color and defining moments to this defining film.
Marty Supreme is an unequivocal winner from start to finish, even if the title character is a loser. Safdie gets close to pushing things too far and long—it’s two-and-a-half hours of anxiety and bullshit-spewing and other exhausting endeavors—but even when it starts to feel tiring, Safdie and Chalamet continue to propel things further. Few films this year feel quite so ambitious, or exhilarating, as Marty Supreme.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.