OSCARS 2026: Marty Supreme (2025)

I hope the following admission doesn't get me kick out of the Film Bros Association of America: I've never seen a Safdie Brothers film before. “Good Time” managed to pass by my attention before it started to pick up acclaim as a modern classic. I witnessed people losing their minds over “Uncut Gems” but... I don't know, man. I just never got around to it. There's so many trashy horror movies I need to see first, you guys! And it's all a moot point now, of course, as the Safdie Brothers are no more. At least the formal duo has split up for the time being. While Benny's attempt at a solo outing barely caught the Academy's attention – review of that one coming soon enough – Josh's “Marty Supreme” is one of the big titles at this year's Oscars ceremony. This is my first stop into Safdie-ville so the question remains to be answered. Have I actually been missing out?

Loosely inspired by the life of a real table tennis pro, the film follows Marty Mauser, a Jewish young man living in fifties New York City. By day, he works in his uncle Murray's shoe shop and fucks his married girlfriend, Rachel. By night, he's a rising name in the world of table tennis, an internationally popular sport that still hasn't caught on in America. He needs 700 dollars to travel to London and compete in the British Open. When Murray won't give him the cash, Marty steals it from the store's vault. In London, he meets and seduces washed-up actress Kay Stone and draws the attention of her husband, the rich CEO of a pen corporation. Marty also loses the final match against a Japanese player, Koto Endo. Upon returning home, he's arrested for robbing the shoe store and receives a letter from the Table Tennis Association that says he can't compete again until he pays a $1500 fine. Also, Rachel is pregnant and claims the baby is Marty's. Marty does everything possible to raise enough money to pay the fine and fly to Japan for a rematch against Koto. Orange ping pong balls, a stolen dog, a gangster with an arm crushed by a falling bathtub, the Harlem Globetrotters, a shootout, an exploding gas station, and another fling with Kay follow. 

From a narrative perspective, “Marty Supreme” acts mostly as a series of chain reactions. I went in expecting the “Timothee Chalamet table tennis movie” but there's actually not much ping pong action in the film. Instead, the movie is more about the various insane schemes Marty attempts to raise the necessary funds, each one spiraling wildly out of control very quickly. A good example is a sequence that begins with the simple idea of hustling some guys in a bowling alley, challenging them to a match they can't win with funds that are already secured. In a way that seems amusingly, horrifyingly plausible, this somehow escalates to an entire gas station going up in flames. Keep in mind, this is after a bathtub smashes through the floor and into the apartment below. “Marty Supreme” is probably the only Oscar-nominated inspiration sports drama that features multiple shoot-outs. The entire film manages to capture the feeling of a machine that is always merely seconds away from spinning out of control.

Often, that sense of barely controlled chaos is darkly amusing. Such as when an argument in an apartment is repeatedly forced to occur at a lower volume, least the other tenets be awoken. Once the mysteriously rich gangster – played by, of all people, Abel Ferrara with the exact level of gravelly, mush-mouthed street smarts you'd expect – an unavoidable sense of danger is present in the story. This leads to an increasing uneasy feeling, Marty and Rachel flung into the middle of a violent situation that they have zero control over. Frantic but precise editing creates a visible momentum throughout the film, furthering the atmosphere of uncertainty. When cops interrupt Marty and Kay's park date, how sure are we that this isn't going to get much worst? Daniel Lopatin's vibrating electronic score and a production design that seems to delight in the dingy, filthy squalor of the various locations the story takes place in. This confirms “Marty Supreme” as both a darkly hilarious comedy of errors and a slow-mo car crash of piling-up mistakes that is impossible to look away from.

It's a film of undeniably bold decisions. The opening credits occur over close-up footage of Marty's sperm fertilizing Rachel's egg, which then dissolves to a ping pong ball. Despite the fifties setting, the soundtrack prominently features several eighties New Wave songs, like two separate Tears for Fears' needle drops and Public Image Ltd.'s “The Order of Death.” (Suggesting the possibility that Josh Safdie has seen “Hardware.”) This is the kind of shit that easily invites mockery unless the film around it is properly confident. Marty Mauser is certainly very sure of his own abilities. At least, this is the image of himself he presents at first. He's a nobody in a sport few people on this shore take seriously but he acts like a superstar, bragging to reporters, proclaiming his own greatness, successfully seducing movie stars. The reason Marty commits numerous crimes is because he's so certain his ultimate plan will be successful. It's the kind of character that might have come across as insufferable, if the film didn't make it so abundantly clear that this is an invented persona. Marty Mauser has nothing but his dream of being the greatest table tennis player of all time. If his dream fails, he's dead. Every thing that happens in the film is his attempt to manifest a seemingly impossible ambition into reality through sheer brute force.

It's a narrative that resembles star Timothee Chalamet's award season story, of proclaiming himself the best and willing that recognition into being. He supposedly has been training in table tennis for the last six years to assure realism in this performance. Again, this would be very annoying if Chalamet and the film around him wasn't very careful. Despite his apparent, partially put-on self-confidence, Marty screws up a lot and in huge ways. The script repeatedly sees him thrown to the ground, his possessions destroyed, his plans going awry. A key sequence has one of the film's primary antagonist, a man with all the power Marty lacks, ritualistically humiliate him in public. The question floats throughout, over whether this is the athlete being punished for his hubris or if Marty's life is merely one indignity after another. It creates an interesting push and pull, between the audience feeling like this guy is a jerk who probably needs to be humbled and ultimately rooting for him to succeed despite how cocky he was at the start. It's a balance that Chalamet, with his ability to appear both deeply vulnerable and obnoxiously self-aggrandizing, is uniquely gifted to walk. 

That brings another interesting idea to mind. Marty Mauser is very Jewish. He's so Jewish that he's got an actual Uncle Murray. He's so Jewish that Fran Drescher plays his guilting, pressuring mother. “Marty Supreme” is a film so deeply invested in the cultural archetype of the hard-boiled, Jewish youth growing up in the big city that its protagonist can't help but emerge as symbolic of the entire East Coast Jewish identity. Marty Mauser is a perpetual underdog, a frequent target of harassment from a world that hates him because of his genes. One of his few close friends is Wally, a black man who faces similar prejudice every day. At the same time, most of the bad shit that happens to Marty is his own fault. He wouldn't become the target of a gun-totting asshole farmer or a petty mobster if he hadn't tried to extort both parties earlier. A moment in “Marty Supreme” that has attracted some minor controversy is when Marty brings his mother a piece of the Great Pyramid of Gaza, saying that “we built that.” (I hope this doesn't need saying but: We did not.) This, when paired to an earlier sequence concerning another player being a Holocaust survivor, has led some to assume a Zionist undertone to the film. If we are to take Marty as something of a stand-in for the Jewish condition, at least how it exists in the United States in the 20th century, his debatable unearned sense of self-importance and being the source of much of his own misery makes “Marty Supreme” a self-reflective perception on a cultural identity that is simultaneously God's Chosen People and the whipping boy of a hundred other kingdoms. If nothing else, that suggests a point of view more complicated than blind support for Israel. 

Honestly, I wasn't sure I totally loved “Marty Supreme” throughout. The performances are great, the cinematography and sets are fantastic, the soundtrack drew me in. I wasn't sure if the piling up of misadventures that composes the story was going to come together in a satisfying manner. However, by the time the climax arrives, of Marty's rematch in Japan with the champ that bested him in the first act, I realized I was totally hooked and couldn't look away from the screen. That's a good indication that a movie is a masterful piece of filmmaking that has truly succeeded. From what I've read, it sounds like a lot of the Safdies' previous work walks a similar fine line of anxious filmmaking as this one does. Yes, I am forced to conclude, this is my type of thing and I'm annoyed I didn't check them out sooner. Far from a typical sports biopic, “Marty Supreme” is a wilder, more intense, and more interesting picture than its log line suggests. [9/10]