I went and watched Marty Supreme in the theatre.
Firstly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Timothée Chalamet act this brilliantly or this casually. This is probably the first film where he isn’t playing the chocolate boy - someone teenage girls pin up on bedroom walls. There’s a roughness to Marty. A confidence that isn’t charming or aspirational. It is just there.
He plays an asshole. Curt. Obnoxious. A super-achiever who assumes the world will bend according to him. The kind of confidence 23-year-olds have, where they genuinely believe they’ll fuck the world no matter what.
The last film of his I watched was A Complete Unknown, where he plays a young Bob Dylan. There’s something common between the two characters. In both films, Chalamet is unapologetic about ambition. And in both, that ambition is toxic. In one, he gets there by swimming against the current. In Marty Supreme, he thinks he can control the current!
What’s interesting is how deliberately the film stays away from politics of the time. It’s a period film that refuses to behave like one. The story sits around 1952–54 post-World War II America, the Cold War just beginning. The film knows this and stays away from it.
Historical references exist only as dank jokes.
There’s a moment where Kevin O’Leary says, “Oh, how are the Japanese travelling now? Japan has a team?” And Marty Mauser jokes about his Holocaust-surviving competitor Béla Kletzy, saying he’s going to do to him what Auschwitz couldn’t. And then defends what he said by saying, Jew are ex officio allowed to tell Jewish jokes.
I could not stop laughing while listening to that.
That line does a lot of work. Marty doesn’t live in history. He lives inside competition. World War, Holocaust, trauma - they exist only as reference points, as metaphors, as fuel. That flattening is not accidental. It’s the psychological cost of ambition when winning becomes the only language you speak.
Chalamet’s Marty looks the part. He looks waspy. Like the product of post–World War II America. Probably born during the Great Depression. Removed from whatever happened to Jews in Europe during the war. Even the literature around the Holocaust was still new then.
Marty is aware of his Jewish roots(wears star of david), but he is not shaped by Jewish trauma. He is deeply American in that sense - insulated from history, confident that it will not touch him directly. He’s world-class at what he does, and still ostracised by the country he lives in because table tennis isn’t even considered a sport in the United States.
That insulation matters.
A film like The Brutalist deals with characters from the same period, but from the opposite direction - uprooted Jews arriving in America from Europe, carrying the weight of displacement and loss. Marty Supreme flips that lens. This is a Jew born in America. Not displaced. Not traumatised in the same way. And because of that, ambition takes on a different texture. It’s cleaner. Sharper. And far more ruthless.
The thing about toxic ambition is that it doesn’t destroy you all at once. It eats you unevenly. There are lacerations elsewhere. Bruises you don’t notice until much later. Even if you get to the place you wanted to be, you’re not the same person anymore. This isn’t unique to Marty. It’s true of most people who get somewhere in life.
Marty Supreme can be mistaken for a coming-of-age film. It isn’t. If anything, it feels like the final step. By the end of the film, Marty has kind of exhausted his future in table tennis. There’s nowhere left to go.
The final scene - Marty seeing his son/daughter for the first time - can be read in two ways. Either he’s growing up and moving towards a more selfless idea of greatness or the mess is just getting started. The film refuses to choose for you.
Marty Supreme isn’t interested in redemption arcs or moral accounting. It’s interested in ambition - raw, unchecked, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing - and in what remains when ambition has already done its work.
That’s why the film stays with you. It stays with me.
Not because it explains itself - but because it doesn’t.
The unsettling part isn’t Marty - it’s how easily the film convinces you that this is a perfectly acceptable way to become great.
Draft of this articlle were read by , & .