Josh Safdie | Marty Supreme / 2025

paddling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie (screenplay), Josh Safdie (director) Marty Supreme / 2025

 

Both the character Marty Mauser (loosely based on the table tennis plater Marty Reisman and his 1974 memoir The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler) and the movie Marty Supreme might easily be described as intensely frenetic, irritating, violent, and utterly charming all at the same moment. This is most definitely not a film for those who like quiet, gentle narratives that push them into confident and pre-determined boundaries. Or, perhaps, this film is not even for those who like tense action movies with, nonetheless, predictable endings wherein the hero, having proved his worth, lives on.

     Marty, a figure who actor Timothée Chalamet embraces so fully that you might describe him as possessed, also survives at film’s end. But at what cost to himself and to everyone around him, you have to ask.

      A lot of things happen in Safdie’s busy film, but I am not going to describe every twist and turn of events. And I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t seen the film would be able to understand such a description were I determined to recount it.

    What is important to note is that Marty, an American second-generation Jewish man, is almost doomed by birth. Coming of age in the 1950s, his constantly “suffering” mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher) is the major reason why his uncle, Marray Norkin (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), who owns a shoe shop, is determined that Marty will become manager of the place; besides Marty is good with the customers.

    Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), with whom Marty has occasional sex, is a childhood friend of Marty’s, now married to a mean slob Ira (Emory Cohen), also determined to use Marty to find a way out of her relationship, at one point pretending Ira has severely beaten her after having discovered their affair.

    Dion Galanis (Luke Manley), one of Marty’s friends, a man who still lives with his parents, also would like to stop form trying to involve him and his father in obtaining financial support, and argues for him just to settle down, presumably like the dumb obedient son his has become.

    The entire world which Marty inhabits, in fact, including those whom he tries to hustle for money and those he accidentally encounters in his money-raising adventures, want the man to cease and desist becoming one of the normalized “dead.”

    But Marty, a truly excellent table tennis player (better known in these days as ping-pong) has a dream, first to defeat the current table tennis champion, Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig, playing a role loosely based on real-life player Alojzy Ehrlich), and later to defeat the new table tennis winner, Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, inspired by Hiroji Satoh).

     But first he has to get to London in order to compete in the British Open, and that’s the rub. To keep him home and safe, Murray denies him his wages for the summer, forcing Marty to have to rob his uncle’s money vault by threatening a co-worker, Lloyd, with a gun, an act that begins a series of catastrophes that combined with Marty’s own egotistical behavior generally conniving ways swirls him into a world that eventually will so challenge and demean him that he has no choice but to surrender.

     Yet what an epic adventure he dares to undertake, first winning most of his table tennis matches in London—all except, of course, to Koto Endo, a loss which forces him to find a way to attend the next World match in Japan—by seducing a famous a former noted actress and socialite, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and entering into what he hopes will be a successful business deal with Kay’s wealthy husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) who is determined to sell his expensive pens to the Japanese market.

     If through all the events up to this point, we perceive Marty as an opportunist, hustler, and womanizer, he is also simply a man who, above all, is trying to live out his version of the American Dream, only the closed-minded USA doesn’t yet see the sport of Ping-Pong as even being a legitimate sport. And in that fact and the decade’s abandonment to the status quo, Marty’s dream—as so very many other American dreams of the day—does not correlate with US values. Marty might as well be trying to become the world’s greatest dancer, actor, poet, someone trying to create a computer, or even an openly gay man. There is no ready place for him in this society. This straight dreamer is doomed by the world in which he lives.

      And even more important, he is destined to become a loser because he is determined, despite his worst tendencies, to play it straight, to stand for the very ideals that most US citizens believe are behind their actions.

     Charges for a clean and silent hotel room (and a few unnecessary splurges on the side to impress Kay) get him into trouble with the International Table Tennis Association (represented by Ram Sethi, performed by Pico Iyer), and is fined $1,500.

     Rockwell is willing to support him, but only if he first plays a series of pre-professional matches with Koto Endo in Japan in which, to please the Japanese audiences to whom he hopes to sell his pens.

     Marty refuses, but severely pays the price when even the money he has successfully raised for the trip is reclaimed by his uncle who will otherwise have him arrested for robbery. Rachel shows up pregnant, claiming the child is his. And quite by accident, Marty becomes involved with a mobster Ezra Mishkin (played by film director Abel Ferrara) who, while recuperating, entrusts his dog Moses, to his keeping, promising to pay him for the dog’s care.

    With Rachel’s and his taxi-driving friend Wally’s (Tayler Okonma) interventions even worse things begin to happen, until finally, again encountering the actress Kay Stone, he has no choice but to beg the pen magnate Rockwell to let him play and lose the Japanese demonstration match.

     The cost this time is not only a loss of all principles but a total abasement, both sexual and societally, as Rockwell demands that Marty, in front of his wealthy male friends, pull down his pants to that he might ruthlessly paddle him with the very tool of Marty’s trade. The red butt the camera watches in this voyeuristic affair, so Chalamet assures us, is that of the actor himself, who was also one of the producers of this film.

     At least Marty is now in Japan! But even then Marty reaches an impasse when the Table Tennis Association head, Ram Sethi, tells him that he is not even registered to play in the contest, and no exceptions will be made.

     Despondent, but not yet ready to give up, Marty is ready to reveal the lie of the demonstration match, demanding that Koto Endo play a real match with him as opposed to the intended sham game. Advised of the change of plans, Rockwell tells Marty that he will find no chance of happiness in his life ahead, revealing, perhaps metaphorically, but what we fear what may be actually the truth, that he is a vampire.

     Even he has to give some credit to the little loser who, despite all blocks put in his way, wins the unofficial match. Marty actually wishes Endo well, hoping that we will win the international tournament so that we can at least know within that perhaps he really is the best table tennis player in the world.

     With the help of US servicemen who have watched the match, Marty returns to the US just in time for the birth of Rachel’s baby, a child who he now recognizes as his own and like all model fathers watches with love and even tears through the protection of the glass panel behind which newborns are kept, the nurse holding up perhaps a child who may in the future be able to break the boundaries society would attempt to contain his or her life.

     When I originally announced to my queer blog audiences that I had seen this film, I reminded them that I do still watch and review straight movies from time to time, and that this film most definitely had no gay content.

     But I think I was probably wrong. Safie is known as a director open evidently to some improvisation. In an interview with director Sean Baker on an A24 podcast, O’Leary revealed that the suggestion that his character was a vampire was an ad-lib, which was so supported by the director and his co-writer, that they planned for an ending in which an older Marty would take his granddaughter to a 1980s concert, only to again meet up with Rockwell who, being an actual vampire, would bite Marty in the neck.

    Clearly, Rockwell’s interest in paddling young men’s butts extended to an interest into a vampirish bite of love to keep the boy near him throughout eternity. The studio heads, however, obviously having never imagined the success of a movie like the same year’s Sinners (which shifts genre from a black blues musical to a vampire blood bath), nixed the changes. Besides, Rockwell is not the only loving villain of the piece; the entire society has also taken its bite.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).