COMIC DRAMA; 2hr 30min
STARRING: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary
On point: Chalamet
New York hustler Marty Mauser (Chalamet ) is not an actual person, although the man who gave rise to him, 1950s table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, absolutely was. It’s impossible to guess what the late Mr Reisman, who died in 2012, would make of the acquired taste of his fictionalised legacy, for Marty Mauser is a human Gatling gun — a fast-talking, big-noting, ravenously ambitious study in perpetual motion and a showman to his bones.
Marty’s passion happens to be table tennis, which he plays with the balletic excellence and concentrated ferocity of a deep-dyed obsessive. But you sense right away that whatever this eager beaver had in his sights, no obstacles known to man could stop him. Win or lose, down and/or out, Marty is juiced by director Josh Safdie with the same lunatic DNA that he and his film-maker brother, Benny, pumped into the adrenaline rush of 2019’s Uncut Gems.
While the Supreme hullabaloo never lets up, its plot line is fundamental: Lower East Side shoe salesman Marty has his sights set on excellence in a sport that most people trivialise and he will do anything — at all — to realise his dream. Marty’s plotting and wheedling are a boom-crash opera, propelling him to edge-of-seat matches in London and Tokyo. His romances are likewise all over the map: Paltrow’s Kay Stone and A’zion’s Rachel Mizler bring hauteur and heart, respectively, as the two very different women in his haywire life, while O’Leary adds a splash of oiled menace as rich backer (and Kay’s husband) Milton Rockwell, who cops a serve of more and less than he bargained for. Everybody in the mix brings their A-game to a can-do show that Chalamet gives everything he’s got. Marty is an impossible ask in oh-so-many ways. But his bulldog spirit is a master class in self-belief.
