@Courtesy of A24
For the whole 150 minutes of the movie, you would gladly punch Marty Mauser in the nose. He is a true antihero, especially because he is so annoying, snobbish and self-centered that it becomes incredibly difficult to feel any empathy for him. And nonetheless you can’t help to see his drive and to be absorbed by the character’s energy. In order to achieve his quite absurd goal, he goes and puts people around him through hell, in a movie that in the end is controlled by a screenplay that shows organized chaos.
The best quality of Marty Supreme is in fact this crazy energy, a sort of cinematic force released b y its protagonist. This is where Timothée Chalamet is absolutely fundamental with his craft: the actor delivers an A-Level performance, unstoppable, gritty but somehow elegant. It is almost impossible to believe that this is the same guy who played Bob Dylan with such contained and stylized precision.
If you compare A Complete Unknown’s work on the character with Marty Supreme’s, you can really understand that Chalamet’s range has become something that a very few actors nowadays own, especially at his age. In this feature film he is capable to go constantly over the top and still result believable, probably helped by the fact that he doesn’t have to be nice. Both Marty Mauser and the actor who plays the role remind us of Jack Nicholson’s first great parts like the ones in Five Easy Pieces, The King of the Marvin Gardens or The Last Detail, where he could go completely sideways and still be believable, almost grounded.
The director Josh Safdie uses the camera in order to accentuate this sense of fragile balance, shaped by a frenetic mind which doesn’t compromise at all in order to fulfill the dream. The mise en scene is coherent with the universe its protagonist lives in, creating a realistic and at the same time surreal environment around Marty. Same for the supporting cast, without any doubt valuable – in particular Odessa A’zion – even if sometimes the supporting actors are suffocated by Chalamet’s presence and his charisma. It is also a pleasure to see on the big screen filmmakers we once loved like Abel Ferrara and David Mamet, plus basketball legends like George Gervin and Tracy MacGrady.
In its own strange way, Marty Supreme is the perfect movie for our times, meaning that it represents them quite accurately. Josh Safdie pays an explicit homage to the great cinema of the ‘70, building both the narrative and the aesthetic of his production with a freedom that nowadays cinema seems to have lost: this rollercoaster created with crazy, often absurd situations and characters, blessed with a cinematic vitality that is honestly contagious even when it goes far too long (why does it last 2 hours and a half?) is absolutely worth watching and appreciating. At the same time, it remains a movie about a self-centered young prodigy that wants to become the best tennis-table player in the world, and goes way too far in order to fulfill his dream.
@Courtesy of A24
How much can you relate to that? The slightly unsettling feeling that, beyond the sheer entertainment, this is a quite vacuous project is quite legitimate. It doesn’t matter that much in the end, most of contemporary mainstream American cinema is in the end exactly this. At least Marty Supreme dares to own a specific, personal point of view and a main character who isn’t going to please the audience.
Among its many qualities, Josh Safdie’s work tells us once more how good Timothée Chalamet is. At 30 years he masters the art of acting with a precision and a stage presence that a very few colleagues have. The variety of tones, nuances and complexity that he shows in the last few years, last but not least in this feature film, make him one of the greatest of our time. He deserves his third Academy Award nomination without any doubt, and has a very good chance to get the statue…
@Courtesy of A24
Rate: B+
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Here’s the trailer for Marty Supreme: