Marty Supreme and the desperation-humiliation vortex

Timothée Chalamet's best role yet sees him play a talented but manipulative table-tennis player.

Note: Contains mild spoilers for Marty Supreme, which is in cinemas now.

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“I really don’t like this guy much,” is what I’m thinking throughout the film Marty Supreme. ‘This guy’ being Marty ‘Supreme’ Mauser, the protagonist in director Josh Safdie’s first solo film. He’s a table-tennis whizz-kid constantly in forward momentum, always seeking out the literal prize, and always totally oblivious to who gets knocked off their perch by his single-mindedness.

If you’ve seen any Safdie Brothers films - Uncut Gems, Good Time, Daddy Longlegs, etc - you’ll know that they specialise in depicting what I like to call the ‘desperation-humiliation vortex’. Their films ramp you up into a frenzy as you watch their protagonists attempting to leap from their current situation into a better situation, but actually leaping into a worse situation, while f**cking up everything around them in the process.

These protagonists often fool themselves into believing they’re doing the right thing. They don’t want to be the baddie, yet find they are the baddie anyway. They see that the world is out to manipulate them, so they try to stay one step ahead. They don’t want to mess up their mother’s life, or hit this stranger in the face, but these are the cards they are dealt - and anyway, they will one day escape the mess they have been thrown into. They will, won’t they? And when they do, all of the drama will have been worth it.

Their constant search for an easier, more prosperous life invites the chill of pure desperation into their bones, and this desperation leads them into the path of humiliation. The world, the Safdies tell us, is always out to get you. It will wring you out in front of everyone else. It will haul you up by your underpants before flinging you into a pile of shit. That’s just how it is.

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In the early 2020s, the Safdie Brothers stopped making films together. But like Marty Supreme, Josh (41) and Ben (39) are wunderkinds themselves, co-creating films as a pair from a young age before releasing their first feature in 2007.

Their films are singularly weird and incredibly impressive. They’re populated by the sorts of folks you would cross the road to avoid in real life, even if you ache over their predicament. The kind you’d observe with a wary eye, praying they don’t spot you in the crowd and wave. Like Scorsese at his peak, the Safdies want their audience to feel like someone has been knitting with their intestines during their movies. There’s no time for complacent relaxation here.

The Safdie Bros’ films always make me feel uncomfortable and itchy, anxious about the disasters that I know are going to unfold. But I stick around because this tension is released with bursts of comedy, thanks to the brothers’ eye for the strange and uncanny.

Both brothers set their first proper solo directorial features in the world of sports - Ben Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (also out this year) is about the MMA fighter Mark Kerr. Josh sets Marty Supreme in the world of table-tennis, specifically that world as it was in 1952.

I haven’t seen The Smashing Machine yet, but know that it’s accepted that it forks off the road that the Safdies were travelling along together.

Yet Marty Supreme feels like a ‘Safdie Bros movie’, which is undoubtedly because it was co-written by Josh and longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, who also co-wrote Good Time and Uncut Gems. It is frenetically paced, constantly surprising, an absolute thrill.

It also has a protagonist who is narcissistic, selfish, sexist and quite annoying. A man who focuses on himself above everyone else.

So what makes Marty Supreme, the film and the man, so appealing despite him being so unlikeable?

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Image source: IMDB

It all goes back to that desperation-humiliation vortex that Marty is swept up in. Safdie and Bronstein’s script gives Timothée Chalamet an incredible character to get absorbed in, and he does the best work of his career so far with Marty.

The expressive dialogue and action show us from the get-go that Marty is a firecracker. We learn within minutes that he’s a youngster who sees himself as a fully-grown adult, and not a 23-year-old shoe salesman with scars from his teenage acne still sprinkled across his cheeks. We see that he’s willing to be manipulative and indeed stupid in order to get what he wants. But that’s because he knows he has something special: talent.

The world doubts him, but Marty never doubts himself. He is a hugely talented table-tennis player, a born winner in a life that has so far been all about failure.

We feel for Marty because while he glitters with gritty charisma, it becomes clear very quickly that only a few people around him care in any way about this charisma or indeed his table-tennis talent. The intensity of his belief in himself butts up against the reality that he was born into a world with little opportunity, living on the ‘wrong side’ of New York City, teetering on the edge of poverty.

The film’s colour palette reminds us constantly of the downtrodden world Marty inhabits, with its dreary navy-blues and dirty creams. Hovering in the background is Marty’s Jewish identity, and the relatively recently ended World War II. (One of Marty’s friends survived a concentration camp, and gets sneered at by a rich businessman in a particularly shocking scene.) He is subjected to anti-semitic abuse, while his Black friend Wally (played by Tyler the Creator) is racially abused.

Marty’s lack of money means he understandably is mesmerised when he sees it. In one pivotal scene, he risks death to thumb through a pile of dollars and witness with his own eyes exactly how much cash he will soon have in his raggedy pocket. This is the sort of comedy that Safdie/Bronstein conjur up: pitch-black laughs that also function as a way of highlighting a character’s sheer desperation.

Another way that our pity is stoked is through how Marty’s attempts to literally get clean end in disaster. Bathing is enough of a rarity in his life that it twice becomes a plot point, and both times his attempts to slough off the grime turn into a metaphor about the grime always creeping back.

So when Marty takes a wrecking ball to his life and the lives of almost everyone in his orbit in order to take part in a major table-tennis championship, we, the audience, still maintain more than a modicum of sympathy or indeed empathy for him. We see how he has been trapped in the desperation-humiliation vortex. We understand that circumstances have made him desperate - just like Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems, or Connie Nikas in Good Times - and we are willing him to push through whatever jungle he’s mired in and emerge in the meadow at the other side. We want him to survive. Collateral damage, be damned.

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But there’s one element of that collateral damage that made me feel uncomfortable, and that’s in how he treats his girlfriend/lover (or ‘friend’ as he calls her, hiding fact beneath fantasy), Rachel Mizler, played by the luminous Odessa A’zion. He treats her abysmally. To Rachel, Marty is a golden escape from a loveless life; to Marty, Rachel is a pair of handcuffs ready to snap across his wrists.

I didn’t love how the script treats Rachel, never mind how Marty treats her. There’s one revelation towards the end, where she is seen to be as apt for sneakiness as her wayward boyfriend, that I felt didn’t attempt to stoke up the same level of sympathy or understanding from the audience that Marty is afforded. If anything, Rachel is the person in the most danger at several points in the film, yet our eyes are always drawn back to Marty, and in particular his baffling relationship with a washed-up, cynical actress - Kay Stone - played with aplomb by Gwyneth Paltrow.

It’s implausible how Marty ends up seducing a glamour-puss like Kay Stone. But at the same time, even up in her glittering castle, Kay is desperate too.

There are some moments of glory for Marty in Marty Supreme, but to get to them he has to do an awful lot of suffering. He’s surrounded by oddballs - the casting in this film is truly next-level on that front - and is a weirdo himself. Nobody attempts to understand him, he can’t understand why people can’t just see his talent, and every time he tries to make things better he does so with pure ineptness. The vortex is always there, ready to suck him back in.

But still: he is talented at table-tennis, and no one can take that from him.

In the final scene, a new character provides Marty with a form of almost spiritual redemption. Or do they? While Timothée’s emotion rings pure and true, I leave the cinema feeling that Marty is forever doomed to set fire to his life, and the lives of others, over and over again.

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The tagline for Marty Supreme is ‘Dream Big’. I couldn’t help but try to find threads connecting Marty’s life with Timothée’s: neither are nepo babies, both were born with preternatural talent and the belief that they should shoot like an arrow towards the full expression of that talent.

Inside Marty’s story I felt I could find allegories about the drive for success, and the need to shrug off anything that holds you back. I felt I could apply what happens in Marty Supreme to Hollywood too, and that Safdie/Bronstein were using Marty’s interactions with Kay Stone and her rich, odious husband to point to the humiliations that independent filmmakers can suffer within an established system.

Marty Supreme left me wrestling with a lot of conflicting emotions, and the sense that a moral reading of the film is impossible. Marty lives in an amoral, hardscrabble, seat-of-your-pants world that I have no personal experience of. But don’t we all, to an extent, know the pinch of desperation, the dream of a bigger life, the gut-punch of the rug being kicked out from beneath us?

His story doesn’t encourage me to ‘dream big’, necessarily - it certainly doesn’t tell me that aiming towards a goal will result in anything other than chaos - but in his story I find… what do I find? I find a complicated form of sympathy for the sort of people who were dealt bad hands in life, but who choose the read the cards whatever way suits them.

That’s the gold within Safdie/Bronstein movies - you’re launched into a space in which there are no easy answers to anything, but where there’s a specific, tumbling, kinetic energy that lights you up like nothing else. For proof of that, know that I got up at 8am on a Sunday to write this piece, because I couldn’t get Marty and his journey out of my head. And if that’s not a mark of brilliant filmmaking, I don’t know what is.

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If you want to hear more about my thoughts on contemporary culture, I co-present the arts and culture podcast Get Around To It with fellow arts journalist Lauren Murphy.

It drops every Monday and you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast, and all other links can be found here. It’s sponsored by the fantastic Imbibe Coffee, an ethical coffee roastery based in Dublin. Thanks so much to everyone who has listened in so far - if you’re enjoying it, please do spread the word!

I’d love to know what you thought of Marty Supreme. Please let me know in the comments.