Tom Salinsky

Arriving festooned with nominations – and even some awards – making many critics’ top ten lists and practically screaming Oscar buzz, comes Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, loosely based on the real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman, and featuring a typically intense and brilliant performance from Timothée Chalamet in the lead. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, who excels at table tennis (and is a decent shoe salesman) but whose personal and financial life is a disaster.

The film falls somewhat awkwardly into three segments, the first in which Marty competes at the British Open and loses in the final, the second in which he scrambles to raise the money he needs to get to Japan for the World Championships and the third in which he faces his nemesis again in Tokyo. It’s rather as if someone has remade The Hustler or The Color of Money with table tennis instead of pool, but then someone else has spliced a remake of Uncut Gems into the middle.

As a portrait of a manic, entitled, impulsive, selfish sporting genius it’s rather bracing, sometimes thrilling. But structurally it’s awkward and the middle section not only feels disconnected from the sports movie opening and closing, but it’s far too long and risks becoming repetitive. After the third or fourth time Marty lets perfectly good opportunities slip through his fingers, I was beginning to wonder why I was supposed to root for this guy at all, which meant I was far less invested in whether the idiot won his final match or not.

The baggy middle and excessive running time wouldn’t be so bad if Safdie used the extra time to meticulously tie up every loose end, but this is a film which frays as it extends, with the result that numerous seemingly-important plot lines end up going nowhere (the orange ping pong balls, the mystery of Endo’s racket, Marty’s relationship with Wally, the fact that Marty is supported by Rockwell and banging his wife).

Set against this however, is Safdie’s fluid and muscular camerawork, some brilliantly-staged table tennis action and a great many entertaining set pieces with Chalamet lighting up the screen at every turn. There’s also a lovely feeling of time and place, and Safdie’s typically eccentric casting adds to the enjoyment (entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary as entrepreneur Milton Rockwell, director David Mamet as a theatre director, Penn Jillette as a gun-toting farmer, Sandra Bernhard and Fran Drescher as Marty’s neighbour and mother).

Not my film of the year, but I’m very pleased to have seen it and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Chalamet accepting the Best Actor Oscar and stunned if he wasn’t at least nominated.