Marty Supreme

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It's practically an upgraded version of *Uncut Gems*, but in *Uncut Gems*, I couldn't understand why the character just wanted to stop the farce as soon as possible, while in this film, I genuinely enjoyed watching him try to turn things around. The main difference is that Howard, the protagonist of *Uncut Gems*, has a pure gambling mentality, deliberately putting himself in trouble just to pursue the ultimate profit, even though he already has assets, a family, and a mistress. His "meaningless" self-destruction made me unable to like the film, even though I admit *Uncut Gems* was very well-made. Marty, on the other hand, is all about playing ping-pong. He has limited resources, connections, and background, so he can only seize every possible opportunity and try everything. (Of course, he's also a complete jerk.) Although he constantly makes mistakes, gains opportunities and then loses them, you know he absolutely has to play this match, and you can follow his frenzied emotions while watching. Reflecting on it, this film perfectly interprets the idea that "a person only lives for a few moments," and Marty lives for those few moments of winning matches (to avoid spoilers). His life outside of matches is almost like the recently popular "cutting line"—life is full of lemons, requiring constant running around and trying every means possible. The aforementioned inherent limitations forced him to constantly "bump into walls," a situation aptly described by the Chinese translation of his name, "Rushing Headlong." T. Chalamet's performance exceeded expectations. Before watching the film, I thought A24's Oscar hopes were just typical boasting, but after a year (or even several) of decline, they finally turned things around this year. His performance in several scenes was incredibly accurate; it's hard to imagine he's the frivolous and superficial person he is in real life. Actors ultimately rely on their work. The film (150 minutes) is relentlessly fast-paced, with many scenes reminiscent of the chaotic and hectic pace of "Good Times with Diamonds," but it also offers moments of respite, making it one of Safdie's best-paced films. Most of the plot deviates from expectations, allowing you to confidently anticipate how the characters will mess things up again. It must be said that Safdie's protagonists are legendary figures of resilience; ordinary people crumble under pressure, but these extraordinary individuals overcome one challenge after another, living each day as if it were 48 hours in a day. Furthermore, the table tennis segment was surprisingly well-shot (and even had a bit of a patriotic theme), especially the most important match. The almost suffocating external factors made the rhythm and emotions of the match particularly exciting. Shouldn't Chen Sicheng think of a way to copy a Chinese table tennis video? (Who are Deng Chao and Yu Baimei?)

New York underdog/npd hustling for American dream story. For the record I've seen all the marketing promo bts this and that, but I still did not see this coming. Whether you relate to any of them or not, you certainly not theoretically root for the characters. They are all so fractured, flawed, morally gray, careless to harm. “You gave him money but I gave purpose!” All the dirty tricks for the beautiful sainty word “purpose” he claims to give and hold, turned out to also be easily smashed. If you think about it you can somehow see this as One Battle After Another meets Challengers.

Anyways Timothée and Tyler I dare to say you both act a bit of yourselves in your characters. Ty for the crazy line deliveries. And ty for the opening credits sequence (hilarious and playful to a level that blows my mind lmfao; now that I think about it it ties back to the ending, woah.) and the orange marty supreme balls falling from the second story all scattered on the ground shot. That's what we really called Schwep for.

The opening of *Marty the Great* shows Marty (Timothée Chalamet), burdened with a destiny of great responsibility, toiling away in a dimly lit shoe store in New York's Lower East Side in 1952. He's tasked with brainwashing an elderly customer, drugging her and exaggerating the power of a pair of ordinary shoes into a voyage to success. This scene perfectly captures the core driving force of Josh Safdie's cinematic universe: a near-pathological "rush" driven by delirium, lies, and desperate ambition. This first feature film by Josh after the Safdie brothers' split is far from a typical sports biopic; it's a radical exploration of the inner workings of the "American Dream"—a driving force not fueled by idealism, but by a mixture of anxiety, deception, and insatiable self-promotion. With its heart-stopping pacing and Charlama's raw, soul-searching performance, the film reveals Josh Smith as the undisputed "architect" of the Safdie brothers' auteur style. He utterly dismantles the framework of the genre—sports and inspirational films—filling it with his signature, hummingbird-like existential anxiety, forging a reverse ingot of "success": a story about how to relentlessly pursue self-destruction with astonishing talent, only to be bizarrely redeemed at the last moment.

The Safdie brothers' cinematic repertoire is never short of madmen dancing on the edge of a precipice. From *Heaven Knows* to *Good Time*, and then to *Uncut Gems*, they are obsessed with portraying anti-heroes driven by both their own desires and terrible decisions. Marty is undoubtedly the most flamboyant and heart-wrenching of these madmen. Beyond his adrenaline-pumping action and street-smart antics, Marty's stage is more peculiar, and his ambition more absurd: in the almost invisible subculture of ping-pong in postwar America, he aspires to become a world champion and firmly believes his portrait will be printed on Wheaties cereal boxes. This premise creates a sharp contradiction; Marty's tragedy lies in the fact that he possesses genuine talent matching his delusions, yet he throws himself into a field with no commercial value. His "rush" thus transcends a mere struggle for survival, sublimating into an existential performance: he must constantly convince the world, and also himself, that this performance deserves an audience.

Charlama is the perfect embodiment of this existentialist performance. His ambition to "pursue greatness" in this role rivals that of Marty, and is almost the very core of the film's existence. Charlama completely sheds the solitary melancholy and alienation of his roles in *Call Me by Your Name* and *Dune*. He awakens the animalistic spirit within him, his speech rapid-fire, his limbs twitching and spasming as if overcharged, his eyes alternately burning with the insight of a genius and the ghostly fire of a conman. It is precisely this raw charm and audacity that makes it difficult for the audience to completely reject this selfish, willful, cunning, and constantly betraying character. We are as if handcuffed to his wrists, forced to experience every impromptu lie he concocts, every perilous escape. When he launches a relentless pursuit of the washed-up actress Kay Stone, the shameless yet naive mix of electricity is mesmerizing, absurd yet strangely persuasive. This is not a monochrome story about a "nice guy" or an "anti-hero," but a brilliant performance about how "charm" works, how it corrupts, and how it shines with a thieving light.

"Marty the Great" is a sports film that exposes the nervous system. One crisis barely subsides before another, even more absurd, looms ahead. From a New York shoe store to a London luxury hotel, and then to a competition venue in Tokyo, Marty's journey is filled with chance encounters, impromptu scams, and sudden violence. Safdie's camera follows relentlessly, leaving no room to breathe. Even the ping-pong match itself loses the rhythm and cadence typical of sports films, becoming a psychological battle and a struggle of physical exhaustion. The jarring 80s synth-pop music booming against the 50s visuals is not an auditory "error," but an aesthetic deliberate choice. It shatters the nostalgia filter, brutally implanting Marty's inner turmoil and his premature yearning for the future into the narrative with a rhythm and cadence incompatible with that era, thus reinforcing the protagonist's incongruity with his surroundings.

The most striking breakthrough of *Marty the Great* lies in its ending's subversion of the Safdie Brothers' authorial formula. Looking back at their previous works, the glamorous gamblers and outlaws mostly ultimately fall into the abyss of self-inflicted suffering; even if "redemption" exists, it comes at a heavy price. But Marty takes a different path. In his final showdown with Japanese deaf champion Endo, the film suddenly tones down all the gimmicks and anxieties, gazing with an almost classical silence at the most essential core of competitive sports: skill, respect, and the possibility of transcending oneself. Marty doesn't win everything; he may not even have truly changed his opportunistic nature, but in that moment, he briefly sheds the identity of "performer" and becomes a pure "participant." His reconciliation with his girlfriend Rachel is not simply sentimentalism, but an acknowledgment after exhaustion—acknowledging the weight of others' existence and the need to clean up the mess he created.

This ultimately points to the film's deeper allegorical nature; Marty's struggle can be interpreted as "the nightmare that accompanies the struggle for victory outside the mainstream." His Jewish identity, his anxiety in postwar America to break free from class constraints, and his frantic efforts to build his personal brand all transform the story of this ping-pong cheat into a sharp expression of cultural assimilation, American individualism, and its inherent emptiness. Like a satellite mislaunched, he harbors the dandy ambitions of the 1980s, trapped in the conservative shell of the 1950s. His "struggle" thus becomes a generation's arduous attempt to invent their own value out of thin air, to carve out a path for survival in the cracks of history.

Josh Safdie's *Marty the Great*, in its Safdie-esque, violent and chaotic style, puts us through two and a half hours of intense audiovisual pressure, allowing us to experience anxiety, disgust, absurdity, and inexplicable exhilaration. Finally, in a weary tranquility, we glimpse a glimmer of humanity—not in moral self-improvement, but in the willingness, amidst a ruin built of self-aggrandizement and lies, to finally bend down and pick up the ball for someone or something outside of ourselves. This may not be traditional growth, but it is the only scarred maturity that can be recognized in this noisy, distorted era. With this work, Josh Safdie proves that even with the brothers gone, he remains the filmmaker most capable of accurately diagnosing our collective neurosis and providing it with the most discordant yet unforgettable rhapsody.

When I first watched *Marty Supreme*, I was genuinely drawn in. Technically speaking, the film is highly polished, almost flawless. Marty moves swiftly between different spaces, decisive and agile, speaking little, simply moving forward. The camera remains close to his body, following him through corridors, rooms, backstage, and the arena, seamlessly stitching these spaces together with a pace so tight it leaves the audience almost no room to breathe. The visuals are filled with bright lights, polished surfaces, and sharp lines, a pervasive sense of "winning," but this brilliance never lingers, quickly replaced by the next scene. Like the director's previous works, the film almost never truly slows down, and emotions are never deliberately pushed to the forefront; everything is constantly advancing. At a certain point, the details begin to blur, leaving only a bodily sensation of being swept along, as if a second's delay would leave you out of the frame. Leaving the theater, my first impression was largely based on technical appreciativeness. But in the days that followed, every time I thought about this film, my fondness for it diminished. In this director's previous works, characters often pushed themselves step by step into their own worlds, either into dire straits or onto the stage. Their anxieties, loss of control, and escapes all stemmed from a self-consistent world logic, with a constant, genuine tension between the characters and their environment. Howard in *Uncut Gems*, Travis in *Taxi Driver*, and Jordan Belfort in *The Wolf of Wall Street*—these characters are all unsettling and highly controversial, but the narratives they inhabit never cease to reveal the cost, absurdity, and corrosiveness of their actions; the world is always retaliating against them. The issue is never whether the audience can accept complex, even repulsive, characters. Film history has long proven that the greatest works are precisely built upon such characters. Take Kubrick's *Barry Lyndon*, for example. Barry embodies opportunism, vanity, selfishness, and moral emptiness, yet the film maintains a cool and cruel distance throughout. Each of his rises is accompanied by the exposure of his inner poverty; his success does not lead to meaning but is continuously consumed by time and structure. The characters don't need moral judgment or salvation, but they are constantly being watched, dissected, and worn down. It is this highly self-aware structure that allows complex characters to emerge. In *Marty Supreme*, however, this tension gradually disappears. The film presents an almost obsessive attitude towards the protagonist, piecing together his life with a series of fragments lacking internal causality, attempting to create a sense that "real life is happening," but unknowingly sliding into a continuous worship of the protagonist. Marty's confrontation with the capitalists, his maneuvering among multiple women, and his avoidance of responsibility are repeatedly translated as "extreme focus on success," rather than being placed within a structure that can be questioned. In the final seconds of the film, Marty suddenly identifies with his identity as a father and shows emotional resonance with the new life, a shift that made me feel strongly uncomfortable. This is not because the character cannot have complex or contradictory emotions, but because the film almost never establishes any necessary logical pathway for this moment. Here, it's hard not to think of Jauss's "reception aesthetics": the meaning of art is not limited to the moment the work is completed, but is generated in the process of being watched, understood, and accepted. How the audience is guided to understand an ending is itself part of the creative process. This film, however, fails to achieve internal justification on a narrative level, yet directly delivers a presupposedly acceptable value outlet on an emotional level. This approach is even more pronounced outside the theater. When I left the theater and noticed many people with similar temperaments cheering for Marty, my discomfort was amplified. This didn't seem like a misinterpretation; rather, it felt like the film reserved space for this kind of identification. Later, I learned that the director's initial vision was for Marty to be a wealthy but empty millionaire shop owner, which only intensified my aversion. If the film had truly veered towards this emptiness, instead of emotionally softening or weakening the character at the end, my evaluation would have been even lower. At least that ending acknowledged the emptiness itself, rather than attempting to cover up all the accumulated problems with "meaning," "inheritance," or "dreams." Timothée Chalamet's performance was indeed highly engaged, but that engagement wasn't enough to make the character more three-dimensional; it felt more like a continuous reinforcement of a posture. The promotional context outside the film further deepened my sense of rejection. When I saw him climb onto the giant screen in Las Vegas to promote the film, it was the most tacky and kitschy movie promotion I'd seen in recent years. The characters' aggression and ambition were directly extended into the real world, as if becoming a posture worth admiring. The line "I have a purpose and you don't" almost chilled me; it wasn't just an accidental line, but an expression of posture tacitly approved by the overall structure. The two female characters in the film lacked genuine subjectivity; their choices served the protagonist's advancement more than stemming from their own logic. This treatment made me feel a clear regression after seeing female characters become more three-dimensional and more "real" in the last decade. What I was wary of wasn't the didacticism itself, but a didactic film packaged as "anti-didactic." Visually, the 1950s replica is impeccable; the cinematography and mise-en-scène are highly accomplished. But the discomfort this film gave me didn't transform into a more complex understanding over time; instead, it gradually settled into rejection. The initial technical appreciation ultimately turned into rejection and disappointment.

Compared to *The Crusher*, it's clear that Joshua, the older brother, was the driving force behind *Uncut Gems* and *Good Time*. This film is a more fitting "Safdie brothers" movie for audiences, filled with the capricious twists of fate, unexpected violence, and the narcissism and bitterness of an underdog. To exaggerate a bit, it has a touch of the new generation of Scorsese's New York style. The Safdie brothers haven't changed their talent for casting. Stripping away Timothée Chalamet's youthful charm and upright demeanor, they imbued him with the laughable and tragic aspects of an ordinary person, and suddenly it seems they've hit the nail on the head. I admire Timothée Chalamet for taking over from Leonardo DiCaprio.