Now on HBO Max: Timothée Chalamet Reigns in the Ping-Pong Opera 'Marty Supreme'

The world’s divided into rats and super-rats, with just a few scared little mice running around living off what crumbs they can conjure—or so that relentlessly upward-striving New Yorker named Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) would’ve had us believe. And it would seem that writer-director Josh Safdie believes it as well—six years ago he gave us his (and his brother Benny’s) portrait of one of the rats (Howard Ratner, that is) in Uncut Gems, but the time’s come for the filmmaker to turn his singular eyes upon a little mouse instead. Marty Mauser, that is, Timothée Chalamet’s character in Safdie’s master-class in inexhaustible cinematic anxiousness and the great sport of ping pong, perhaps not in that order, titled Marty Supreme. (And forgive me my run-ons, but if ever a movie demanded them this be the one.)

Anyway, supreme it is—or even “supremo,” as one character misspeaks—as Chalamet unspools the performance of his career-to-date here (and this is coming from a person who saw Call Me By Your Name upward of twenty times in the theater in 2017 so no small potatoes, that statement). Marty’s a role laser-precise tailored to Chalamet’s boisterous teetering-on-obnoxious public persona—well aware that for many he’s teetered right over, and so goes Marty with dogged determination. A unibrow cuts across his forehead like an underline emphatically written; pockmarks like constellations he’s smashed together from the stars. Love him or hate him, the film says… well love him and hate him, actually. It’s gonna be a lot of both. It’s gonna be a lot of everything, when it comes down to it.

Even Marty’s ejaculate won’t quit, as a mid-day back-of-the-shoe-store dalliance with his childhood friend slash married next-door-neighbor Rachel (Odessa A’zion, perfectly matching Timmy’s freak every time the plot finds its way back to her) animates across the opening credits—nevermind that Look Who’s Talking did this comic bit decades ago; Safdie’s only borrowing from the best. That sprightly sequence, set to Alphaville’s 1984 classic bop “Forever Young,” morphs with hilarious ease into a backroom table-tennis match where Marty’s other set of balls are getting him into trouble. And so it goes as we bounce back and forth two plus hours between these ever-duelling instincts—will Marty find a proper work-life balance, and what will be left of them???

Anyway, disseminating Marty Supreme’s plot is a fool’s errand, and defeats its point—the wild journey’s the destination, and it only makes sense (or meaning) once it’s found its screaming infant summation nine and a half months later. But don’t be tricked into thinking Safdie doesn’t have his hands on the reins across every mile of the chaos he’s unleashed—what, you think it’s a mistake that the literal first shot of the movie is the number 9 ½? The director plays ringmaster of a sometimes literal circus, with a man happy to play the clown when it benefits him grinning dementedly at center stage, spinning and gleaming beneath the sweatflop spotlight. There are enough tracking shots here to make that other Marty (Scorsese, that is) positively seasick, all in service of a madcap cinema that it’s impossible to look away from. Or come up for air.

Really, truly—best of luck finding a bathroom break here. Every scene dissolves into the next with deceptive simplicity, as if the next sequence had already started before we managed to get there. Like Marty himself, we constantly have to wonder how the heck we’ve gotten where we’ve gotten, minute to minute, act to act—Mauser’s a liquid, slithering through cracks while splitting the cement open behind him. Destruction in his wake, sure, yes, one hundred percent. But what a show!

And it’s not for naught either, as Safdie ties his myth to the post-war midcentury immigrant experience—Marty exists in the same world as Brady Corbet’s László Tóth and Christopher Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, surfing the wake of terrible world-change. You could say Mauser is what stepped out from underneath those terrifying explosions—the supercharged will to succeed at any cost, as if the Atom Bomb itself is licking his heels. A quick side-jaunt into the actual camps of Auschwitz won’t slow Marty Supreme’s roll as that becomes yet another hustle—from a buzzing hive of honeybees to a prisoner’s armpit, life will always find a way. Science ain’t got nothing on the survival of the shrewdest.

And so a sweaty panic nips at the man-boy’s little behind, but he wipes his brow and presents honey, sucking everyone from a formerly major movie star named Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow, deftly reminding us why she’s always been and will always be a movie star) to a terrifying gangster (Abel Ferrera, fitting that bill to a tee) and his unyieldingly yapping dog named Moses (because of course, as a Red Sea beckons) into his whirlwind. You couldn’t fit these pieces into place yourself if you shoved at them with brute force, but Marty, and Marty’s maker, makes it work and then some. (And a film like Marty Supreme is the reason that the Oscars finally invented a Casting Oscar this year—every face from co-lead to teensiest tiniest extra carries an entire world on it. This thing bursts its seams and spills its guts with untold tales.)

There’s maybe a hint too much table-tennis in this table-tennis-movie—by film’s two-plus-hour end it turns out that Safdie has actually been making a Sports Movie after all, which seems a bit silly by that point. It’s at its best when it’s defying those odds and just being, well, odd. Chiseling chunks out of the Great Pyramids, wheeling in elephant seals and Japanese boars from behind stage curtains, all booming to the noise of one after another New Wave banger—Marty Supreme comes in roaring like a lion and then exits stage left if not quite a lamb, well, definitely a mouse. Locating the scared little mouse under the wannabe rat ends up its raison d’être. And as such, it’s still pretty much whatever the ping-pong equivalent of a slam dunk would be. Point Marty.