Marty Supreme: Timothée Chalamet is ‘captivating’ as ‘ping-pong prodigy’

“Marty Supreme” is the “best film of the year, and exactly the jolt the coming Oscars season needed”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a “ping-pong prodigy” who “bounces frenetically around 1950s New York, as if being thwacked back and forth” by a pair of invisible bats. Working in his uncle’s shoe shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he has “impregnated” his married girlfriend (a “superb” Odessa A’zion), and dreams of becoming a world-class table tennis star.

Loosely based on the life of US table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s “whip-crack comedy” follows Mauser as he saves up and travels to London for a competition at Wembley, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After talking his way into a free room at the Ritz, he develops an “erotic obsession” with fellow guest and retired film star Kay Stone, “for which role Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement”.

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“‘Marty Supreme’ doesn’t behave like a sports movie.” You won’t find any lengthy training montage sequences here and Mauser is “always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts”. But the film thrums with the “fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping-pong rally” and the “rhythm and spirit of table tennis” course through every scene. “The pure craziness is a marvel.”

Powered by a “shimmering, surging electro score by Daniel Lopatin” and “energetically shot on grainy, desaturated 35mm by expert cinematographer Darius Khondji”, this is “not your usual handsomely staid period drama”, said Jamie Graham in Empire. “There’s a giddy messiness and electrifying volatility to the crazed plotting”, and the film whizzes by in a thrilling blur of “overlapping dialogue, serrated cutting and sweaty close-ups”.

The movie is packed with “unexpected turns”, said the BBC’s Caryn James. Mauser is “not some clichéd, lovable scamp” but an “arrogant” and “scrawny young man with a pencil moustache”. Chalamet’s “on-screen charm” and his character’s “bravado” are “captivating”, even when Mauser’s behaviour “is at its worst”.

The film’s two-and-a-half hour running time is a “flaw”: while many of the sequences are entertaining, some feel like “indulgent detours”. And it deserved an ending that is “much more inventive”. Still, it’s a “bracing and original” film, and has such “scope, ambition and humour” that these issues are “easy to overlook”.

“What a film this is,” said Collin in The Telegraph. From start to finish, Safdie’s movie had me “vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.”