Timothée Chalamet recently said at an awards ceremony that he is in pursuit of greatness. Fittingly, the role that will almost certainly earn him his first Oscar is that of a man obsessed with greatness at any cost, through the bizarre arena of table tennis. Chalamet trained between Dune shoots for years, wore makeup to dull his natural beauty, and excavated the darkest side of the same ambition that drives him in real life. It is the perfect role for him: as a skinny man physically suited to the sport, culturally suited as a Jewish New Yorker, and psychologically like the characters relentless hunger. This may be the performance of the decade.
‘Marty Supreme’ is a quintessentially dark American hustler story, an optimistic yet brutal portrait of an amoral, egotistical, borderline psychotic man in absolute pursuit of a dream and the terrible price that pursuit demands. Marty is a truly awful human being, leaving destruction, narcissism, and chaos in his wake. Yet, like Scorsese’s Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’, he becomes an anti-hero we cannot help but empathise with. The film achieves that rare feat of making us feel for someone we know we should not.
Watching the film feels like having a prolonged heart attack. As with the Safdie brothers’ ‘Uncut Gems’, the frenetic pace is so unrelenting it becomes physically exhausting. The 2.5 hour runtime flies past in a cascade of escalating disasters, each sequence raising the stakes until the final, devastating climax. The editing, score, and screenplay mirror Marty’s manic psychology, everything vibrates with panicked energy. It plays like a series of emotional explosions. I was completely enthralled from start to finish.
In an age of hyper-competition and winner-takes-all ambition, the film feels profoundly timely. It asks when does a dream become a nightmare? Truman Capote once wrote that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. ‘Marty Supreme’ suggests that achieving our deepest desires may reveal the terrible cost of what it took to get there, and how the endless chase blinded us to what truly mattered, the relationships and lives already around us.
The film hints at redemption in its closing scene, which moved me to tears. People want to be great, but in that pursuit they often miss what really makes their lives great. 10/10
Jeremy Smith's Movie Blog 