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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE UNLOVABLE PING-PONG WIZARD OF MARTY SUPREME  
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Eileen Jones
January 1, 2026
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet as an
obnoxious, nerdy young 1950s ping-pong hustler who somehow cons
everyone around him. It’s flashy, fast, and made with so much talent
it’s a shame they forgot to make much of a case _

You’d never guess from watching the end of Marty Supreme that the
real Marty Mauser pulled it off, and pulled it off big-time. (A24),
(A24)

 

Josh Safdie’s _Marty Supreme_ is doing excellent business
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and inspiring great reviews. It looks like it’s going to be a
triumph for A24, which gambled $70 million on this oddball
comedy-drama about a working-class ping-pong prodigy named Marty
Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) hustling to finance his trip to big
overseas tournaments by any means necessary.

It was no doubt helped along by a surge of holiday moviegoing that
also boosted an eclectic range of new releases including _Avatar: Fire
and Ash_,_ Song Sung Blue_, and _Anaconda_. But _Marty Supreme_ is
arguably the hardest sell of all of them, and enthusiastic word of
mouth is really helping it along. The film boasts a colorful script by
Safdie and favorite cowriter Ronald Bronstein. They also edited the
film together, setting a rapid-fire, nerve-jangling pace. It’s got
exciting ping-pong competitions along with edgy performances by
Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler
Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator), Abel Ferrara, and Fran Drescher,
superbly grubby cinematography by Darius Khondji (_Eddington_,_ Mickey
17_,_ Uncut Gems_), a wildly eclectic and anachronistic score by
Daniel Lopatin, and a wonderfully low-down production design,
especially in its representation of 1950s New York City, by Jack Fisk,
whose collaborations with Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Brian De
Palma, and Martin Scorsese have made him an eighty-year-old legend in
his field.

Everyone agrees the movie’s an end-of-the-year must-see. I disliked
it intensely, but there’s no denying that it’s a must-see.

Why did I dislike _Marty Supreme_, this film I ought to like so much,
made by people of tremendous talent? This film that’s all about
lower-class struggle against impossible odds in a world designed to
thwart working people at every turn, which is practically my biggest
obsession? I’ve been wrestling with this very question for days.

But first, let me tell you more about the film.

_Marty Supreme_ is loosely based on the eccentric life of Marty
Reisman, who really was an American ping-pong champ in a country that
cared almost nothing about ping-pong. He had to go to Asia, Europe,
and the UK, where the sport was growing fast right after World War II,
in order to play in major tournaments. Financing his participation in
this sport required considerable ingenuity on his part. One of many
ways he raised money — which we see in the film — was hustling
people in ping-pong parlors in NYC, pretty much the only city that had
them at the time. Ping-pong in America — or table tennis, if you
want to use its more dignified name — was relegated to patios,
garages, and basement rec rooms.

In the film, Marty starts off as a reluctant shoe salesman whose uncle
Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) runs the store and is trying
everything, fair means or foul, to hang on to Marty, his best mover of
merchandise, including withholding the $700 Marty needs to make it to
London for the British Open. But Marty only took the shoe store job
temporarily to raise the money necessary to play in overseas
tournaments. In this endeavor, he’s also frustrated by his clingy
mother (Fran Drescher); his married girlfriend, Rachel (Odessa
A’zion), who says she’s pregnant with his child; and the various
monied people he hits up who won’t fund him except on the most
punitive terms.

As a result of all the obstacles put in his way, Marty resorts to ever
more desperate gambits such as “robbing” the shoe store safe. Once
at the British Open, his ping-pong skills are so tremendous he seems
on the cusp of fulfilling all his dreams: he defeats the defending
champion, Béla Kletski (Géza Röhrig), he beds the aging and aloof
movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), he makes the potentially
lucrative acquaintance of her rich businessman husband, Milton
Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), and he does it all while staying at the
upscale Royal Suites, an outrageous luxury he tries to charge to the
management running the British Open.

Then things go badly awry when Marty faces up against the Japanese
ping-pong champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), who plays a devastating
game with a sponge paddle that stymies Marty’s usual brilliance.

Why doesn’t Marty stick around the UK or go to Europe or Asia where
he could make money as one of the hottest new contenders on the scene?
It’s how the real-life Marty Reisman financed his career, which
endured from the 1950s all the way to 1997, when, at age 67, he became
the oldest player to win a national championship in a racket sport.
But in this film, you just have to accept a number of developments
that defy logic. Apparently only the first-prize winner could possibly
benefit financially from the British Open, so Marty goes home in
abject defeat.

Returning home broke, owing $1,500 to pay for the room at the Royal
Suites, facing criminal charges brought by his Uncle Murray for
stealing his own $700 out of the store safe, and pressured by Rachel
to save her from what she says is an abusive marriage, Marty goes on
the run in a NYC odyssey of desperate scams, bad scrapes, and
dangerous encounters. Marty’s laser focus on fulfilling his own
talent and making enough money to go to Tokyo for the World
Championship and a rematch with Koto Endo begins to dissipate under
crazy-making pressure from all sides.

None of the critics who love _Marty Supreme_ seem to have anything to
say about its confounding framing around procreation, good or bad.

Sounds good, right? _Marty Supreme _is one of those wild American tall
tales that aren’t even that tall, given how hard it is for anyone
but the rich to pursue their dreams here.

But somehow, from the very beginning, I couldn’t get into it.

For starters, the whole film hangs on the performance and charisma of
Timothée Chalamet. He’s a gifted actor, certainly, and he trained
for years to become a ping-pong ace so he could play the role. His own
look of intense self-love and general attitude of superiority are so
irritating, he has no trouble playing skinny egomaniacs like young Bob
Dylan and Marty Mauser — he’s practically typecast as the abrasive
Marty.

What’s harder to accept is the way so many others in the film are
also taken in by Marty, in love with Marty, scammed by Marty, seduced
by Marty, readily coerced by Marty. Marty’s a bespectacled, nerdy,
rail-thin, acne-scarred, fast-talking, self-obsessed opportunist who
looks and acts just like what he is. He takes nasty advantage of
family and friends and everyone who helps him because he’s convinced
he has some higher purpose in life, which is becoming a ping-pong
champ.

Somehow the thinly drawn female characters are all strangely
enthralled by him. Fran Drescher, playing his mother, barely has any
dialogue after her initial scene feeding lines to a friend who’s
trying to persuade Marty over the phone to come home because his
mother’s supposedly ill. We’re given to understand, by what Marty
says, that her smothering scams in trying to get his attention
contribute to his own scamming ways as well as making him hate the
domestic trap he thinks Rachel is laying for him — but we just
don’t see it. From that early scene on, if we see her at all, his
mother is a silent figure who occasionally makes a pleading or
reproving face at him.

Marty treats Rachel, his childhood friend who’s carrying his child,
with tremendous cruelty, and she remains dedicated to him through many
dangerous misadventures. The only apparent reason is that her other
options are even worse.

And still glamorous movie star Kay Stone succumbs repeatedly to
Marty’s dubious charms. Why? God only knows. She’s very unhappily
married, but she must be able to do better than Marty any day of the
week. There’s a _What Makes Sammy Run?_ sensibility vaguely
operating here. In that famous novel, an impoverished working-class
Jewish outsider ruthlessly climbs to the top of the Hollywood tree,
scamming and betraying all the way, bedding beautiful women as he
goes, because his chaotic energy and status as a forbidden Other is
what makes him perversely attractive to WASP insiders. Which is an
interesting plotline, but it’s not fleshed out in this film.

Marty deploys his Jewishness in shocking, scattershot statements to
the press, such as when he declares that he’ll beat the reigning
ping-pong champ, a concentration camp survivor, by saying, “I’m
going to finish what the Holocaust started. I’m allowed to say that,
I’m Jewish.” He also announces, “I’m Hitler’s worst
nightmare, because I’m here.”

The fallout from WWII is also evident in Marty’s matchups with Koto
Endo, whose apparently unbeatable skills in ping-pong have made him
the first Japanese champion in _any_ sport since the war began. Thus
he’s a national hero, with the burden of his country’s hopes
pinned on him as he goes up against Marty.

He has no dialogue whatsoever. It’s noted by another character that
he’s deaf, and presumably there’s a language barrier, but why
he’s given almost no hint of interiority in stoically facing Marty
across the table in two crucial matches, I have no idea. I was rooting
for him throughout.

There’s an ain’t-it-cool tone to _Marty Supreme_ that gets harder
to take as it builds in relentlessly paced, increasingly bloody
encounters. _Is_ it cool, though? Soundtrack songs like Tears for
Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Peter Gabriel’s
“I Have the Touch,” and New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss” are
there to tell us it is. Yet I had some inchoate sense throughout the
film that this was an upper-class view of the lower classes, a lurid
fascination with the scabrous lower depths — so insidious, so
scammy, yet ultimately so sentimental and comically inept, they
can’t pull off their uppity attempts to crash the gates of the
elite. You’d never guess from watching the end of this movie that
the real Marty Reisman pulled it off, and pulled it off big-time —
becoming a millionaire several times over, though he gambled his money
away almost as fast as he earned it.

But _Marty Supreme_ is so filled with distractions, it’s hard to
keep one’s focus on its handling of class. This is the kind of film,
for example, that’s loaded with cameo performances by famous people,
some professional actors, some not, for reasons that are not clear.
Tugging pointlessly at you for attention are magician-entertainer Penn
Jillette, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, playwright David Mamet,
basketball player George Gervin, and actor-comedian Sandra Bernhard.

The most inexplicable and distracting element of the film is its
sentimental framing dealing with procreation. None of the critics who
love this film seem to have anything to say about this confounding
frame, good or bad.

I suppose now it’s time to issue a SPOILER ALERT: _Marty Supreme_
opens with sperm penetrating egg as, presumably, Rachel’s pregnancy
commences. It ends with Marty, battered by his many ping-pong-related
trials, seeing his newborn baby, bursting into tears, and regarding
the child with the awe of someone having a spiritual epiphany. It’s
completely baffling. Why bracket this unlikely, hardscrabble,
mean-edged, black-comic narrative with the miracle of birth?

At no point in the narrative has Marty evinced the least interest in
the baby that Rachel’s carrying — quite the contrary, he’s
actively hostile. And there’s virtually no indication that he’s
capable of great gusts of feeling for anyone as he channels everything
into his own angsty, hard-driven progress through the world. Yet the
film ends on a gushy note, a totally unearned epiphany, that would be
a bit much in a Lifetime TV-movie about an eagerly expectant dad.

Still, _Marty Supreme_ is doing the job for viewers in undeniable
ways. It’s already appeared on many critics’ best of 2025 lists
and is sure to do well the upcoming awards season. I just have to
chalk up my own antipathy to an unexpected clash that sometimes
happens when class-conscious sensibilities collide.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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