The last major player to enter the arena smashes their way onto the Oscars podium with the brazen guile of a contender so high on their own myth that any number of battles after another or wicked things that come their way couldn’t possibly stop them.
It’s not Josh Safdie’s “sports comedy-drama” (as Wikipedia laughably, misleadingly called it) itself that’s barnstorming a path to victory, although it is a riot of muscular film-making that will surely swing a best picture nomination.
We’re talking Timothée Chalamet, or rather his delirious transformation into cocksure narcissist Marty Mauser – ping-pong legend in waiting, hustler, woman-slayer and then some – who comes to the table all bats blazing (although they call them “paddles” in the States).
Like his five years spent learning the guitar and singing to become the “total Bob Dylan” in A Complete Unknown (which got him within finger-picking distance of a golden statuette), Chalamet spent another six years practising table tennis to inhabit Mauser. Sheesh!
Whatever’s driving him (some have cynically suggested it’s purely to win The Big One), the result is a melt-the-screen-down-to-gold performance. With the steamroller audacity of his character, Chalamet has staked a massively confident claim for his first Oscar. If you must gamble, lay it all on Chalamet. Now.
It's 1952 in the push-shove, cheek-by-jowl Jewish heart of New York’s Lower East Side and shoe shop assistant Marty (loosely based on real-life table tennis showboater Marty Reisman) has just whipped his girl Rachel (Odessa A'zion, who directors should be clamouring for after this) into the storeroom for a quickie. Cue an opening credit sequence of wiggling sperms that will come back to nibble on Marty’s conscience.
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Marty has more pressing business on his mind than baby-making though, like getting the cash for a plane ticket to London, where he’s gonna stun the world in a big ping-pong tournament. Or course, for a workshy shyster, the revolver and safe in his boss’s office is Marty’s chosen route to Europe.
He's no violent crim though (that’s left to other characters) and everything Marty gets is hoodwinked out of the world by absurdly ridiculous levels of self-belief – his are supremely, unfeasibly large balls for a ping-pong whizz.
You want a script with gigantic cojones, too? You got it. When he lands in London, screenwriters Safdie and Ronald Bronstein hand Marty a line about an opponent who’s an Auschwitz survivor that’s so darkly droll it necessitates him qualifying his right to utter it: “I can say that because I’m Jewish.”
The follow-up shell-shocker about Marty planning to drop a third atom bomb on the heads of the Japanese doesn’t have any justification. Although real-life deaf Japanese table tennis champ Koto Kawaguchi plays Marty’s arch rival and a large chunk of the film was shot in Tokyo, so perhaps they find it funny in Japan (it is kind of outrageously good in the context).
While being essentially about the calamitous, all-swaggering rise of Marty, this is shaggy dog tale of wildly contrived subplots. So we get Gwyneth Paltrow on smoulderingly good form as an ageing, married film star who, Marty being Marty, just has to be seduced and financially shafted. The payback for Marty is a gloriously humiliating spanking scene (any detail here would spoil the fun).
Musician Tyler, The Creator shines (and bleeds) as Marty’s sharp-hustling friend and then there’s an actual shaggy mutt, owned by the increasingly menacing Ezra (Abel Ferrara), which forms a ramblingly spectacular part of the story. Let’s just say, if you know Ferrara (former self-confessed crackhead and director of Bad Lieutenant), you know not to get between him and his beloved hound.
Safdie and his brother Benny directed the excellent Uncut Gems, and while Benny went solo with The Smashing Machine (starring Dwayne Johnson) recently and left audiences unbruised and underwhelmed, Marty Supreme is far better than anything either of them has done previously.
It’s tempting to moot a “Cohen Brothers Syndrome” here, where after parting ways one of the pair (Joel) made the decent Tragedy of Macbeth while the other (Ethan) came up with the disappointing Honey Don’t! and Drive-Away Dolls.
The whirling human energy and rat-a-tat “New Yoik” repartee is off the scale (audiences are in danger of death by chutzpah), while Safdie somehow manages to find the most beauteously misshapen, wizened, crag-faced extras to populate every scene. Is Safdie set to inherit Scorsese's New York crown?
Among the maelstrom of splendid exhaustion, Marty has some awful, egomaniacal flaws (not least the way he treats pregnant Rachel, despite the uplifting ending). Those aside, this is an out and out humdinger of a ride – and with his grandstand performance it’s match point Chalamet as awards season gets underway.
Marty Supreme is in cinemas from December 26
