The Fatal Flaw with Marty Supreme

Marty Mauser: “I have a purpose.”
Kay Stone: “Okay. … Do you make money at this little table-tennis thing?”
Marty: “Not yet.”
Kay: “Do you have a job?”
Marty: “No.”
Kay: “How do you live?”
Marty: “Well, I live with the confidence that if I believe in myself, the money will follow.”
Kay: “And what do you plan to do if this whole dream of yours doesn’t work out?”
Marty: “That doesn’t even enter my consciousness.”

Those are the opening lines of the trailer for Marty Supreme (2025). Directed by Josh Safdie, the movie stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a young New Yorker in the 1950s who’ll do anything to be the best ping-pong player in the world. Some light spoilers ahead, but I also leave much unsaid.

When I saw the trailer, I got a feeling you don’t often get from movies these days: I felt motivated. Was this a story about a young man’s struggle to achieve greatness? Will we see him overcome his challenges? Will that give us the fuel to overcome our own?

The trailer reminded me of Whiplash, a favorite of mine. And those opening lines struck a personal chord: many doubted me when I dropped out of college to become a software engineer, but the possibility of failure never even entered my consciousness. It was my purpose, my calling. I knew with every fiber of my being that it’s what I wanted to do all day, every day. And the money did follow. So I immediately identified with Mauser.

I put on my winter boots and went to the theater. But about an hour into the movie, I realized that the trailer had written a check the movie failed to cash. The plot is essentially this: Mauser loses a tournament to a Japanese player and must earn enough money to travel to the next opportunity to defeat him and become the best in the world. And to make that money, Mauser gets into all kinds of trouble.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is entertaining. There are some incredibly intense scenes (bathtub!) – it’s not for the faint of heart. But it’s barely about ping pong. If I had to guess, I’d say less than 10% of the runtime is characters actually playing. And the little we do see isn’t exactly world-class – nothing I didn’t see on the playground when I was in middle school. (Contrast this mediocrity with Whiplash, which features truly next-level drumming the likes of which I had never seen.) That said, it’s possible 1950s ping pong just wasn’t that good yet, and that the movie is accurate. In any case, Marty Supreme is mostly about all the people Mauser fucks over on his way to getting his revenge.

On his journey, he seduces an older woman, Kay Stone from the opening quote, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. She represents failure and comfort. In her youth, she wanted to be a great actress; instead, she chose security with her rich husband, whom she now hates. (Kevin O’Leary was surprisingly well-cast to play her husband.) So why does Mauser desire her? Why does he sleep with her? It’s not clear. In this context, Mauser is portrayed as an irresistible womanizer, but in my opinion, Chalamet was miscast for that role. Although I enjoyed his performance overall, I just didn’t buy him as a womanizer. He’s just a scrawny kid. What woman in her 50s would go for him?

Mauser lies, insults people, physically assaults them, steals from them (including from Stone, who… sort of empathizes with him over it?), and swindles them out of money. He’s a sore loser. He laughs at O’Leary’s character for losing his son in World War 2. Mauser impregnates a married woman but does not care enough to even realize she’s pregnant until month eight, then repeatedly puts her in physical danger. She joins him on his little adventures and turns out to be just as deceitful as him by pretending her husband beat her up so she could garner sympathy and prey on people’s kindness. Mauser, who had in turn beaten the innocent husband’s face into a pulp, is shocked initially – but does he take this opportunity to self-reflect? Does he ever apologize? No, he ends up liking her even more, and they… sort of live happily ever after?

When the credits started rolling, I was surprised to find that, despite 2.5 hours of runtime, there were unresolved, open threads. Kevin O’Leary’s character never finds out that Mauser slept with his wife, even though Mauser enters a kind of… business deal with him that turns sour. If Mauser is the kind of guy who likes to get revenge, why not tell the husband? In addition, I fully expected the pregnant woman’s husband to get revenge for the assault, but that didn’t happen either.

As you may have noticed, I don’t remember the names of several characters, and I don’t care to look them up now. ‘But you cared enough to write this article.’ Yeah, but that’s because Marty Supreme is a textbook example of what’s wrong with movies, even art in general, these days:

When characters are irredeemably flawed, we don’t care what happens to them.

I’ll leave it to you to find out whether Mauser ends up beating his Japanese nemesis. But when a character consistently makes stupid choices, and then things go south, I cannot help but wonder: what did he expect to happen? And why should I care? A similar thing happened in the TV Series Your Honor (spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph): the protagonist’s son repeatedly makes mistakes so stupid that he ends up getting killed at the end of season 1. As I recall, he gets involved with a cutthroat gangster’s daughter after he accidentally kills that same gangster’s son in a car accident. I suppose the makers of the show wanted the protagonist’s son’s death to be some kind of tragedy. But his mistakes were so obviously dumb, and they had piled up to such an outrageous degree, that I simply concluded he got what he deserved. So I never bothered to watch season 2.

Marty Supreme isn’t even the only Safdie movie with this flaw. Good Time, directed by Joshua and Benny Safdie, is about two dumb brothers who get into trouble. One of them was born dumb, the other is dumb by choice. They associate with more dumb people. They rob a bank, and then one dumb decision after another leads to chaos. Big surprise! I stopped halfway through. Why should the audience care what happens to deeply flawed characters?

Don’t get me wrong, not every character needs to be the picture of innocence. Flawed characters can be interesting. Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight comes to mind: Gotham’s white knight and star district attorney who is (or seems to be) not only squeaky clean but also uniquely positioned to get rid of corruption in law enforcement. That is, until – another spoiler alert is in order here, I suppose, but what are you even doing if you still haven’t seen The Dark Knight? – the Joker pushes him over the edge and causes an explosion that burns half of Dent’s face off. Dent becomes Two-Face – half good, half evil, a mixture that, objectivists remind us, must eventually turn wholly evil unless it is turned wholly good first. Dent’s character works well because his story is tragic: he failed to be the man he was supposed to be. In this sense, The Dark Knight still shows us what man can and ought to be. But Marty Supreme does none of that. Mauser is just an asshole who happens to be decent at ping pong, but who remains an asshole throughout the movie. Why should we care what happens to assholes?

In the end, a movie is supposed to inspire, not cause anxiety for a whopping 2.5 hours. Mauser’s only redeeming quality, aside from being decent at ping pong, is that he’s not a racist in the 1950s. He’s friends with a black guy and understands racism well enough to use it against racists and… cheat them out of money. (See? Even his good qualities, he ends up using for evil.) Oh, I suppose there’s one more somewhat redeeming quality: Mauser is innovative; he works with his purposeless cousin to invent orange ping-pong balls because they’re easier to see. But he doesn’t miss any opportunity to insult his cousin for being purposeless.

Mauser fights for ping pong to be respected in the US, promising business partners money and prestige when he becomes the face of American table tennis. But we, the audience, know that ping pong never really takes off in the US anyway. I guess we just never cared enough about ping pong. Just like I never cared about Mauser.