Film Review: Marty Supreme 癲造之才(2025) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a moment early in Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” when Timothée Chalamet, playing the 1950s table tennis savant Marty Mauser, stands alone in a smoky New York hall, paddle in hand, and grins. It is not a nice grin. It is the grin of a man who has just realized he can manipulate the very air around him, that the little white ball is not his opponent but his accomplice. It is the grin of a someone who has discovered he is a god in a minor religion, and intends to milk the devotion for all it’s worth.
The movie runs two and a half hours. You feel every minute of it, which is both the point and the problem. Safdie, working without his brother Benny for the first time here, has not so much made a sports biopic as he has strapped a rocket to a pinball machine. This is a fictionalized, hallucinatory riff on the life of Marty Reisman, the real-life ping-pong hustler who saw his sport democratized and commercialized right out from under him. But the film isn’t interested in history. It’s interested in velocity. In anxiety. In the sound a celluloid ball makes when it hits a wooden paddle 150 times per minute.
And in Chalamet, who has finally found a role jagged enough to cut him open. His Marty is a narcissist, yes— we can keep using that word, but narcissism in movies usually looks like vanity. Here, it looks like hunger. Chalamet plays him with a cockeyed shuffle, shoulders perpetually hunched as if he’s already mid-rally, jaw set in a permanent sneer that occasionally collapses into genuine wonder. This is a performance of twitches and impulses. When he wins, he doesn’t celebrate; he tilts his head, confused that the universe has stopped feeding him balls. When he loses, he doesn’t mourn; he schemes. It is, by any reasonable measure, the best work he has ever done. The Oscar talk is not hype. It is surrender.
Around him, Safdie constructs a New York that smells like newsprint and failure. Darius Khondji’s 35mm cinematography is so grainy you could mill flour with it, and so lovingly composed that every pool hall and basement tournament feels like a Caravaggio of competition. The anachronistic synth score, courtesy of Daniel Lopatin, doesn’t so much accompany the action as antagonize it. Those ’80s pulses don’t belong here, and they know it. They’re crashing the party, just like Marty.
The supporting cast can been described as zesty, which is what on earth are these people doing here? Gwyneth Paltrow, returning to cinema like she’s checking a suspicious package, plays a bored socialite with the distant benevolence of a woman who has already seen the future and found it understocked. Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank investor, appears as a venal promoter and is somehow not embarrassing. Tyler, the Creator slinks through two scenes as a jazz drummer who also runs an underground gambling ring, because of course he does. It shouldn’t work. It works like a charm. The movie is so confident in its own fever dream logic that you stop questioning it around the 20-minute mark. You just hold on.
But “Marty Supreme” has a second act problem, and it is the same problem that plagues all epics about obsessive men: The obsession, after a while, becomes routine. The film sags noticeably in its middle hour, repeating rhythms we’ve already internalized. Marty hustles. Marty wins. Marty alienates someone who cares about him. Marty returns to the table. The ball goes back and forth. The ball always goes back and forth. Some viewers will find this exhausting, and they will not be wrong. Greatness, the movie argues, is tedious to witness. It’s a brave thesis. It’s also a long one.
Then comes the climax. I will not spoil it, except to say that Safdie understands something few directors of sports movies do: Table tennis, at its highest level, is not about athleticism. It is about anticipation. About reading intention in the micro-movements of a wrist. The final match is staged less like a competition and more like a duel of telepaths. It is thrilling. It is stupid. It is pure cinema.
“Marty Supreme” is too long. It is too loud. It is too much. I mean all of this as praise, mostly. Safdie has made a film about a man who refuses to stop swinging, and he has refused to stop swinging right along with him. The result is messy, indulgent, occasionally insufferable—and alive in a way that most prestige pictures wouldn’t dare attempt. I walked out of the theater exhausted. Two hours later, I wanted to go back. That’s the trick, isn’t it? The ball keeps coming. You keep swinging. (Neo, 2026)