“The most dangerous thing you can do in life is play it safe.” Though it would not be difficult to imagine, these words were not spoken by the confidence man leading Josh Safdie’s latest film, Marty Supreme. They instead come from Casey Neistat, disgraced YouTube mogul, pioneering vlogger, and one-time creative partner of Josh and Benny Safdie. Self-determinism of this sort is embarrassing but necessary to independent filmmakers. Filmmaking is one of the most expensive arts, and, undertaken at any kind of scale, always involves gambling with other people’s money. It’s worth mentioning that the scene which reared Neistat and the Safdies also spawned Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig. To their credit, while Gerwig made odes to radical empathy, the Safdies made films about the sociopathy inherent to such a career choice. Later in the same video, Neistat describes quitting his job to pursue vlogging while his wife was pregnant.
Begging, borrowing, and stealing (and then gambling it all away) is the modus operandi of the DIY filmmaker. The Safdies, along with regular screenwriter Ronald Bronstein, have made it their calling card. They make films led by blinkered and magnetic narcissists willing to rob their mother if it means taking another step toward their goal. Harley (Arielle Holmes in Heaven Knows What) just needed another heroin fix. Good Time’s Connie (Robert Pattinson) wanted bail money for his brother. In Uncut Gems, Howie Ratner (Adam Sandler) bets because, like any gambling addict worth his salt, he knows the score to end them all is just around the corner. As their budgets have ballooned from $30,000 (Daddy Longlegs, 2009) to the $120 million split between this year’s The Smashing Machine (Benny’s solo debut) and Marty Supreme (Josh’s second solo feature after 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed), it’s perhaps telling that the stakes have in turn inflated from the everyday dice rolls of drug addiction and poverty to the made-up highs and lows of professional sports.
Into this lineage sprints Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, Jewish-American table tennis phenom of the Lower East Side in 1952. Taking off from real-life legend Marty Reisman’s autobiography, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Player and Hustler (1974), Bronstein’s script follows Mauser between the British Open, where he loses in the finals to Japanese player Koto Endo (played by table tennis champ Koto Kawaguchi) and his newly innovated rubber-lined paddle, and the World Championship to be held in Tokyo. Outside of his devotion to table tennis, Mauser maintains a longstanding affair with local girl Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), whom he impregnates in the film’s first scene, and begins a new one with past-her-prime Hollywood royalty Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), from whose husband, the industrialist Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary), Mauser also seeks sponsorship for his trip to Japan. To this last end, much of his energy is devoted. He hustles yokels, goes on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, robs a woman old enough to be his mother, and gets involved in a convoluted ploy to return a lost dog to his gangster owner (Abel Ferrara). All told, he begs, borrows, and steals, and occasionally plays ping pong at a very high level.
It’s difficult to beat odds that are stacked in your favor, and Mauser’s slim chances for success are dwarfed by Marty Supreme’s too-big-to-fail status. Having gone from industry outsiders to industry mainstays, whatever sense of risk Safdie and Bronstein want to cultivate with their new film they will need to remember or pull from elsewhere. Another Marty looms large over Marty Supreme — Mr. Scorsese — and with this film they aim to graduate from aping his adrenaline-laced vibe to his historical sweep, to spin the hubris of one man into the story of a whole subset of ethnic whites in postwar America. The Icarian flight of Marty Mauser will need to take him further than any of his predecessors, and it’s here that the Safdie/Bronstein reach (typically not far) threatens to exceed their grasp (typically quite tight). This is a period piece, their first, and as such it must be About History, however tall an order that may be for a filmmaking team more comfortable at the gut level.
Scaled closer to The Brutalist (2024) than Good Time, Mauser’s rise to the unhallowed halls of table tennis glory is tied to both the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and America’s postwar rise as an international superpower — a chosen man, people, and country. The Jewish thread is picked up intermittently: Mauser tells British reporters that he’s “Hitler’s worst nightmare”; he brings a chiseled chunk of the Egyptian Pyramids home to his mother’s tenement apartment, telling her, “We built this”; a dog named Moses wanders eternally in the New Jersey desert. One British table tennis bureaucrat (played by, of all people, Pico Iyer) disdainfully refers to Mauser as “the American,” and the film is somewhat more comfortable negotiating this legacy. Much enjoyment is derived in pitting the irreverent Mauser against O’Leary’s sanctimonious Rockwell. “My son died liberating you,” the industrialist tells a Holocaust survivor. Mauser interjects: “Weren’t you liberated by the Soviets?” As never before in a Safdie film (one thinks of Connie pouring LSD down the security guard’s throat in Good Time, ensuring he wouldn’t talk), competing narratives are given space to challenge the lead’s oxygen-draining perspective. Unfolding against Mauser’s Jewish-American dream is the nascent Japanese Economic Miracle, symbolized by their invention of the superior rubber-lined paddle. Mauser vs. Koto is the brash occidental upstart versus the emotionless oriental champion, but in a very 2025 — and very worthwhile — turn (think Eddington’s data center), forces of capital supersede these petty tribalisms: “The world writes with a Rockwell.” If these are all relatively easy and risk-free jabs to make, they’re nonetheless new to the Safdie milieu, and they add needed dimension to the one-note-played-very-hard nature of previous scripts.
Stretching from their usual tightly constrained settings to straddle months and continents, Safdie and Bronstein make space for honest to God digressions, the first of their kind in these films. In the same conversation with Mauser and Rockwell, survivor Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) prompts a flashback to Auschwitz for an impression of hunger bone deep enough to color the surrounding film, playing a role similar to the WWII flashback in Scorsese’s Irishman (2017). It’s a staggering moment for a film with few real surprises. Another two-scene subplot revolving around the orange-painted ping pong balls featured heavily in marketing seems to exist only as the raison d’être for a rather pleading image straight out of the brothers’ regrettable short The Black Balloon (2008), if not just for the ad campaign. There’s oxygen to spare for productive and unproductive asides, but evidently not enough to color Mauser’s mother (Fran Drescher) with any more intimacy than his boss at the shoe store. As is Sandra Bernhard criminally underused as their neighbor in the tenement, despite her experience grabbing the narrative reins from a narcissist in Scorsese’s King of Comedy (1982).
With the Aristotelian Unities no longer breathing down his neck, cinematographer Darius Khondji’s camera seems to withdraw as well. The long lenses formerly swinging around cramped urban spaces are here walked a few paces back to pull as much period detail into the scope frame as possible. A bigger budget imposes its own set of restrictions: just as it’s difficult to make Timothée Chalamet look like he was raised in a tenement, it’s difficult not to shoot establishing shots when you’re filming a midcentury hotel lobby designed by Jack Fisk (Days of Heaven, The Master). Chalamet flails about convincingly, but the camera too often refuses to match his freneticism, choosing to regard him instead from a distance. With this added space around the edges, the Safdie bag of tricks starts to look a little understuffed (how’s he going to get out of THIS one?! … oh, there he does it again..), and Mauser’s quest a tad more arbitrary. A Daily Mail prop headline captions his photo “THE CHOSEN ONE?”, and one feels that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t need to be said. Their lead is energetic enough, but he only seldom attains the proportions necessary to sell this thing. Marty Supreme cost three times as much as Uncut Gems, 30 times more than Good Time, and Marty Mauser too frequently appears dwarfed by this elephantine budget surrounding him. Perhaps this is why Sandra Bernhard had to be sidelined, as she might be liable to squish him otherwise.
Nevertheless, Marty Supreme frequently fires on all cylinders. Bereft, in his period setting, of the uppers that fueled his Safdie predecessors, Mauser gains his coked out energy from a smattering of anachronistic New Wave hits chosen by music supervisor Daniel Lopatin. In these musical montages, the film is able to access the elemental drive so fundamental to previous efforts: Mauser sweating it out training his forehand, Rachel, his pregnant mistress, abandoned to her abusive husband, New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss” blaring overtop. Mauser’s drive seems as unstoppable as its consequences are inevitable; it’s a horrible vibe worthy of Uncut Gems, if not Goodfellas (1990). All the pieces, in moments like this, feel harnessed toward an unknown and dreadful future singularity. And one feels this as well whenever Mauser picks up a paddle: ping pong is chess played at lightning speed, and he’s all offense. Dashing from side to side, windmilling his arms, if only for the duration of a rally, Chalamet doesn’t need the close-up to feel massive. It’s in these bits and pieces that the gap between Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme doesn’t yawn quite so formidably, that the proportions fit just right.
The title credits roll over a CGI rendering of one thousand Marty Mauser sperms besieging Rachel’s ovum, and it bears mentioning that Josh Safdie and his wife have welcomed two children into the world since Uncut Gems (Bronstein’s own growing household was dramatized in this year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You). Fatherhood, so it is said, entails a rapid expansion of one’s perspective, a new object of concern attaining primacy alongside the self. It’s a credit to the film that the sentimentality of the conclusion — not unlike the treacle concluding One Battle After Another — can arrive as a surprise. In retrospect, the nine-month countdown clock imposed by the opening can be seen to set the film’s central priority: the dilation of Marty Mauser’s perspective to include someone other than himself. There’s a disappointment in finding a film occasionally so nasty — “I have a purpose. You don’t,” Mauser tells Rachel at one point — ultimately harnessed toward something so nice, but it probably feels good for the filmmakers. The self-absorption they must depict in order to critique — its attendant sociopathy on the one hand, its winsome determination on the other — is simply not available to them anymore in the same way. Per Neistat, the most dangerous thing in life might be playing it safe, but with $60 million and a couple kids to take care of, it must be pretty tempting.
DIRECTOR: Josh Safdie; CAST: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa D’azion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler, the Creator; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: December 25; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 30 min.
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