Set in 1952, mostly in New York City, Josh Safdie's tense new film “Marty Supreme” is essentially “Uncut Gems” but with a happy ending. This swashbuckling 2019 drama, which Safdie co-directed with his brother Benny, stars Adam Sandler as a Manhattan jewelry dealer and compulsive gambler who takes exciting risks to pay off his creditors and learns that the house always wins. In Marty Supreme, the Safdies' first feature film without Benny since 2008, the happy ending, so to speak, follows logically from the happy beginning. The first scene of the film is a date in the back room of a shoe store between the main character, a twenty-three-year-old salesman named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), and a young married woman named Rachel (Odessa A'tzion).
But Marty's greater happiness lies in another secret, which he plans to reveal to the world: he, a ping pong player who plays locally for modest stakes, intends to prove at the international table tennis tournament in London that he is the best in the world. For a lively kid from the Lower East Side, this is no easy task; however, with his indefatigable energy and cunning, he makes his way out of his low-rent neighborhood and performs increasingly wild feats that, over the course of the eight-month story, challenge him and force him to change—perhaps even for the better.
Marty's insolence is justified by the story; the character is loosely based on athlete and table tennis champion Marty Raisman, who died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two. Like Marty, Raisman came from the Lower East Side and went overseas in 1952 for an international tournament. Other details, freely customizable, are also the same, but the main similarity is in temperament – a megawatt personality and a penchant for bragging.
Unlike Sandler's gambler in Uncut Gems, Marty doesn't bet on anyone but himself. Marty, who lives with his emotionally and financially dependent mother (Fran Drescher), has a hard time financing a trip to London: it requires subterfuge, threats and some maneuvering from his boss, his loving but tough uncle Murray (writer Larry Sloman). So, once Marty gets there, he has to make the most of it. He finds the competition tougher than he expected, especially from a Japanese player (real-life table tennis star Koto Kawaguchi) who uses a new type of paddle and grip. But what's even more important than winning any match is getting into the spotlight and into the upper echelons of society, since Marty needs wealthy backers to launch his international career – and, in any case, he craves fame and the trappings of success. Bulldozing his way into a room at the Ritz, Marty focuses his brash charm on glamorous former movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) while also ingratiating herself with her husband, a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell (entrepreneur, politician and “Shark Tank” judge Kevin O'Leary) with a thirst for publicity and, he says, a nose for bullshit.
There, Marty also collaborates with a former Hungarian champion and Auschwitz survivor (Géza Röhrig, who played an Auschwitz prisoner in the film Son of Saul) in a table tennis stunt duet. His relationship with Rachel, who works at a pet store and has an awkward husband, Ira (Emory Cohen), grows stronger—or rather, she tightens it with her own ruse. Marty then faces a predicament similar to the money emergency that screams like a siren in Uncut Gems: having received a fine from the table tennis commissioner (writer Pico Iyer) for boorish behavior in London, and with little time left to pay it off and enter a tournament in Tokyo, he begins hustling again at ping-pong in the company of a taxi driver friend named Wally (rapper Tyler, the Creator). The result is a whirlwind of chaos, including such out-of-control elements as a gangster (directed by Abel Ferrara), a dog, a car crash, a break-in, a shootout, a fire, a flood, another affair, and a display of public defiance so brazen that it risks becoming an international incident.
Safdie delivers this noisy, hyperkinetic story with a hyper-fast aesthetic: fast-paced camerawork (overseen by cinematographer Darius Khondji) that gets very close to the actors and exaggerates their frantic movements, a clatter of high-speed dialogue that seems hammered into the screen, characters expressing themselves with impulsive gestures, editing that cuts off any moments of rest, a script filled with twists and turns. Marty Supreme, with its gripping pace, favors a style of acting that relies far less on technique than on personality and presence to create moments – which explains the film's juicy mix of professional actors with standouts from other fields. It's a practice the Safdies have relied on in previous roles, but never so widely or effectively. The drama built into the cast of “Marty Supreme” reaches its climax when, playing tycoon Rockwell whom Marty pleads with in a crucial moment of need, O'Leary utters the word “power” with seasoned authority.
