There’s a specific kind of high that screams out as your immediate reaction after seeing Josh Safdie’s first solo feature. Long tied to his brother Benny over the years, producing the kind of nervy, anxiety-inducing cinema that really caught on with Adam Sandler running around New York City for his life in Uncut Gems, but also has some precedent in the similarly rushy Good Time. It’s funny to think about how that duo’s two biggest smashes are about people running from place to place, usually arriving somewhere filled to the brim with chaos, rinse and repeat.
At first blush, Marty Supreme is a fun ride. In the story of Ping Pong wiz, Marty Mauser (a pencil-moustached Timothée Chalamet), Safdie has basically taken the broader Rocky/Karate Kid formula of “someone fighting against the odds and their own personal demons to give their best, scrappy shot at their given sport” with the tenor of his previous films. A re-teaming with longtime co-writer/editor Ronald Bronstein and composer Daniel Lopatin, the ground floor that’s a part of the broader architecture of those aforementioned films (and more) is well in place. As such, it’s a movie that acts as a sports drama, but is actually about the moments in between matches. It’s there where we see Marty struggling to scrape together the dough to go to Europe for a tournament, becoming increasingly desperate in his plotting to get a cash infusion. Be it scamming local nootniks at the bowling alley (that also happens to have ping pong tables), trying to cuddle up to a Hollywood starlet trying to revitalize her career on the stage (Gwyneth Paltrow), or getting wrapped up in a scheme with a missing dog whose owner (Abel Ferrera, yep, the filmmaker) is a real nasty piece of work.
It’s a journey that never really lets up, and is anchored at its various pivot points by another standout Chalamet performance, who somehow is able to make you root for one of the more self-centered figures in the Safdie pantheon, as well as a literal breakthrough for Odessa A’zion, who plays Marty’s best friend and the mother of his child (not a spoiler, the movie literalizes this right at the opening credits in a sequence lifted from Look Who’s Talking, of all places). That Paltrow is finally back in a real movie, doing real acting itself is its own minor miracle. And then there’s Kevin O’Leary, who plays what more or less amounts to the film’s antagonist, though there’s a few, and if I told you he gave one of the best performances of the film, I’m sure you’d think I was crazy. But here we are.
But as the days have gone on, and keep in mind I saw Marty Supreme two weeks ago, I have felt my enthusiasm and that rush of energy for the film flag a bit. Much of that thinking has been percolating on the cluttered nature of the script. There’s so many detours and a ton of characters, that when Marty Supreme is at its best (the tournaments themselves, the love triangle between Chalamet–Paltrow–O’Leary’s characters) its deflating to see attention pulled away from that for the usual Safdie hijinx and everything wrong just at the wrong moment. A little of that is good, but as we’ve said, this is territory so well paced over for him that his shoe prints are everywhere. Somehow this screenplay has made Uncut Gems seem like a tight little crime thriller by comparison.
But I’m kvetching at what is a good film, in the final analysis. And the real takeaway here is that it’s probably the most commercial effort of Josh Safdie’s to date, if only because it will hit the expected “struggle and redemption” arc that a general audience has come to expect in a movie of this mold.
I think I’m just ready for Josh to offer up a different kind of serve now that I’ve seen him do this sort of thing so many times before. That’s certainly one thing I can say about The Smashing Machine to its credit, even if a far less successful film.