I have not been this bored by a movie moving this fast in a long time.
That is the strange misery of Marty Supreme. It never sits still. Josh Safdie keeps the picture in a permanent state of extreme close-up acceleration: deals, flights, debts, sex, schemes, humiliation, shouting, ping-pong, more shouting, more schemes. The movie is never idle. Somehow, I kept waiting for it to start.
I know I am far afield from the consensus on this one. Critics have largely embraced it as a propulsive portrait of toxic ambition, American hustle, and a man who believes so violently in his own greatness that belief becomes its own kind of talent. I can see that movie from here. I can describe the argument. I can understand why people responded to the speed and the grime and the sheer nerve of Chalamet throwing himself into Marty Mauser without apology. But understanding the movie’s intention did not make sitting through it feel any less like being trapped in the sidecar of a guy who should not be allowed to drive.
Chalamet is well cast. That is part of the problem. He is electric, technically committed, physically restless, and almost never false to the idea of Marty. But Marty never became a human being to me. He remained a performance engine: ambition with elbows, need with bad skin, a walking argument for why some people should be gently escorted away from opportunity. The film knows he is awful. It is not asking me to approve of him. Fine. But critique is not the same thing as company, and two and a half hours is a long time to spend with a character whose only available future is more of himself.
The final image, Marty seeing his newborn, did not move that needle for me. I understand what it wants me to read in his face: recognition, tenderness, the possibility that fatherhood has interrupted the Marty machine. I did not believe it. Nothing in him had been prepared for that kind of change. He has simply arrived at another object in the world and, for a second, looked at it. That is not transformation. That is a pause between hustles.
Table tennis should have fixed the movie, or at least clarified Marty’s obsession. It does neither. The film treats the sport seriously enough at the level of staging, and I appreciate that in theory. The matches have speed and physicality. The rooms, paddles, rules, and travel have shape. But I never believed Marty belonged to table tennis in any meaningful way. He could have been chasing poker, boxing, skiing, knitting, anything with a scoreboard and an audience. The activity is less vocation than container. Marty does not love the game. He loves needing to win at any available contest. That is the lesson I took from my experience with him.
That may be the point. In fact, I think it is the point. Marty failed table tennis. Table tennis did not fail Marty. He is ambitious for ambition’s sake, a little furnace of self-invention and resentment, burning through every person who gets too close. Ideologically, I can see exactly what the film is doing. I just hated being near him. Not in the productive way. Not in the Howard Ratner way, where the anxiety becomes a terrible kind of intimacy. Marty gave me no intimacy. He gave me volume.
Odessa A’zion gives the film a life Marty never does. Tyler, the Creator walks in with a charge the movie badly needs. The supporting characters kept me from dropping lower because they suggest a world beyond Marty’s appetite, one with different rhythms and faces and reasons for existing. Whenever the movie stepped away from Marty long enough to let another person breathe, I felt my attention return. Then Marty came back, and … oof.
This is the fastest slow movie I can remember. Or the slowest fast one. Either way, halfway through, I had to stop it and come back the next day because my brain wanted to spend time with anything else. That is not normal behavior for me. I finish things. I sit with difficult movies. I like abrasive cinema when the abrasion reveals character, consequence, damage. Here, the abrasion mostly revealed more abrasion.
Not every movie is for every viewer, and this one left me mystified by the distance between my experience and the critical embrace. The craft is there. The performance is there. The critique of blind ambition is written in letters big enough to read from orbit. But so is the exhausting slog, built around a man who mistakes motion for meaning and a film so committed to his relentlessness that it ends up making the same mistake.