The obvious comparison for Marty Supreme is Uncut Gems. Same director, same kind of protagonist, same sustained anxiety humming for two and a half hours. But the more productive comparison, I think, is with Goodfellas. Not because of genre, which they share nothing of. Because of moral architecture.
Goodfellas tells the story of a guy who comes from nothing, wants everything, gets a good deal of what he wants, and in the process reveals something about the nature of the system he operates in. Henry Hill is not an aberration of America. He is America at its most honest: the will to arrive, never mind how. The mob in Goodfellas is not a deviation from American capitalism. It’s the version without the varnish, without the euphemisms, without a compliance department. Scorsese understood this with a clarity that thirty years on remains difficult to sit with.
Josh Safdie understood the same thing, but found a vehicle that makes the thesis even harder to ignore: table tennis.
The Choice of Sport
The smartest decision in Marty Supreme is not the casting, not Darius Khondji’s cinematography, not the anachronistic soundtrack full of eighties tracks laid over a story set in the fifties. The smartest decision is the sport.
Ping pong. A sport that in 1952, when the film takes place, almost nobody in America considered a real sport. A basement game, a social club game, a game for immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side playing on makeshift tables. It’s not boxing, which carries epic. It’s not baseball, which carries national mythology. It’s not even chess, which at least has the prestige of intellectualism. It’s ping pong. A celluloid ball bouncing back and forth across a green table.
And that’s precisely why it works. The more insignificant the sport, the more exposed the pure mechanics of ambition become. If Marty Mauser were a boxer, his hunger for greatness would fit inside a familiar narrative frame: the neighbourhood kid who punches his way up, Rocky, Raging Bull, every variation. We’d understand his obsession because boxing culturally justifies obsession. But Marty is no boxer. He’s a guy who wants to be the best in the world at something the world doesn’t care about. And that strips bare something conventional sports narratives tend to disguise: that ambition is not a proportional response to an external stimulus. Ambition is an internal force, blind, that latches onto whatever happens to be nearby. Marty doesn’t care about ping pong as such. He cares about being the best. At anything. Ping pong is the available channel, not the cause.
Safdie knows this, which is why he chose the most improbable character for the most American story imaginable. A Jewish hustler from the Lower East Side who plays table tennis is, in terms of the American Dream, the purest possible case study, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, clearing the path for him. No money. No connections. No sport the culture respects. He has talent and he has will, and that’s supposed to be enough. The question is whether it is, and what it costs.
Marty as Operating System
Timothée Chalamet does something in this film I hadn’t seen him do: disappear. Not in the sense of doing less, but in the sense that Chalamet, his beauty, his delicacy, his indie-prince aura, vanishes entirely behind Marty Mauser. What remains is a skinny guy in glasses who cannot stop talking, who walks into every room as though he owns it, who lies with the same ease with which he breathes.
Marty speaks in declarations. Every sentence begins with “I” and ends with a full stop. He doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t consult, doesn’t hesitate. He says “I’m the best” with the same conviction he’d use to say today is Tuesday. It’s not arrogance in the usual sense, because arrogance implies a gap between what you believe about yourself and what you are. Marty has no such gap. For him, believing he’s the best and being the best are the same thing. The confidence isn’t performative. It’s his operating system.
And the remarkable thing about the film is that it refuses to decide whether this is good or bad. Safdie shoots Marty with the same distance a nature documentary would use on a predator. No judgement, no admiration, no condemnation. There he is. That’s how he works. Watch.
Marty robs his own uncle. Lies to everyone around him. Gets Rachel pregnant, his childhood friend, who is married to another man, and when she tells him the child is his, he denies it. He seduces Kay Stone, a retired actress married to a magnate, not because he loves her but because her glamour pulls him the way any form of greatness pulls him. He tells Rachel he has a purpose and she doesn’t. He uses people as resources and discards people as obstacles, with no visible transition between one and the other.
And the film doesn’t punish him. Or not entirely. That’s what makes it subversive.
The Logic of the Hustler
In Goodfellas, Henry Hill ends up in witness protection, eating mediocre pasta in the suburbs, mourning the life he lost. It’s a punishment, but an ambiguous one, because what Hill mourns is the thrill of the crime, and the film manages to make the audience mourn it too. Scorsese didn’t moralise. He showed the seduction of wrongdoing and left the viewer to deal with that seduction on their own.
Safdie does something similar with Marty, but without the rise-and-fall arc that organises Goodfellas. Marty’s trajectory is not linear. He doesn’t climb and then crash. He zigzags. Moves forward, hits a wall, bounces, moves forward again. He robs his uncle’s shoe store to fund his trip to London. In London he checks into a suite at the Ritz he can’t afford. Loses the championship. Returns to New York flat broke. Teams up with Wally to hustle gamblers at second-rate tournaments. An accident connects him with a mobster. He loses the mobster’s dog. One thing leads to another and another, with the cumulative, catastrophic logic of a snowball rolling downhill.
What Safdie captures with that structure is something conventional sports narratives miss: that the life of a hustler isn’t a dramatic arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a permanent condition. Marty doesn’t solve his problems. He stacks them. And keeps moving. Always keeps moving, with a resilience that is either admirable or sociopathic depending on where you stand, and the film will not tell you where to stand.
That refusal is political. It’s a statement about America, about the way the American system, capitalism, meritocracy, the cult of the self-made man, actually operates once you strip away the rhetoric. The American Dream says: if you have talent and will, you can make it. What it doesn’t say is what you have to do to make it, or what happens to the people in your path while you’re making it. Marty has talent and will. And he makes it. But the road behind him is littered with people he used, lied to, abandoned, or broke, and the film simply shows you that road without posting warning signs.
Rachel and the Cost
Rachel is the character who makes visible what Marty cannot see. She’s his childhood friend, his lover, the mother of his child, and the person who most clearly pays the price of Marty’s ambition.
Odessa A’zion does something remarkable with the role. Rachel is not a passive victim. She’s sharp, has her own cunning, has known Marty forever and knows exactly who he is. But knowing doesn’t protect her. Marty tells her he has a purpose and she doesn’t, and the cruelty of that line lies not just in what it says but in the fact that Marty doesn’t register it as cruelty. To him it’s a data point. He has a purpose. She doesn’t. Data points aren’t cruel. They’re data points.
It’s the same logic at work in any high-competition system, corporate, political, athletic: the people who don’t serve the objective are disposable, and the disposal isn’t registered as moral damage but as efficiency. Marty isn’t cruel on purpose. He’s cruel by omission, because his field of vision has room for exactly one thing, and that thing is winning, and everything that doesn’t contribute to winning is invisible.
The film shows this without underlining it. Rachel turns up with a black eye because her husband hit her. Marty responds with immediate violence against the husband, which could be read as protection but works more like an act of ownership: nobody touches what’s mine. The distinction is subtle and Safdie doesn’t spell it out. He leaves it there for the viewer to sit with.
The Ending
The ending of Marty Supreme is what finally separates it from Uncut Gems. Howard Ratner ended with a bullet in his head. Marty ends crying in front of the nursery window at a hospital, looking at his newborn son.
It is the first moment in the film where Marty goes quiet. Two and a half hours of nonstop talk, of first-person declarations, of perpetual motion, and then silence. Chalamet doing something he hasn’t done once in the entire picture: standing still. Weeping. Looking at something without calculating what he can get from it.
There are two ways to read that ending. The generous reading is that Marty, for the first time, sees something larger than himself. That the child, the new life, breaks him out of ambition’s closed circuit and connects him to something human his obsession wouldn’t let him see. It’s the redemptive reading, and there’s evidence in the film to support it.
The less generous reading is that Marty cries because he’s run out of game. He’s lost everything he had in motion, he’s back to zero, and the tears aren’t redemption but exhaustion. The machine stopped not because it found something better but because it ran out of fuel. And tomorrow, once it recharges, it will do the exact same thing all over again.
Safdie doesn’t choose between the two readings. He lets them coexist. And that ambiguity is the difference between a good film and an important one.
The Question
Marty Supreme doesn’t ask whether Marty is good or bad. It asks something more uncomfortable: whether there is any form of excellence that doesn’t destroy something. Whether you can be the best in the world at anything, ping pong, business, art, politics, without the cost being borne by the people closest to you.
The film’s implicit answer is no. That real excellence, the kind that demands total dedication, is incompatible with ordinary decency. Not because the excellent are bad people, though sometimes they are, but because excellence requires a concentration so absolute that everything else turns blurry, peripheral, expendable. Geniuses are geniuses partly because they see one thing with a clarity the rest of us lack, and that clarity has a price: everything that isn’t that one thing becomes invisible.
Scorsese showed this with gangsters. Safdie shows it with a ping pong player, and by showing it with a ping pong player he proves the point isn’t about organised crime or the margins of society. It’s about ambition itself. About the very structure of the American Dream, which promises everything and never mentions the price.
The more ridiculous the sport, the more visible the machinery. That is the genius of the film. And that is why Marty Supreme, a movie about table tennis starring an unbearable man you cannot look away from, is the best film about the American Dream since Goodfellas.