Marty Supreme
Verdict: Plenty of top spin
There are echoes in the crazily entertaining and entertainingly crazy Marty Supreme of Steven Spielberg’s wonderful 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, in which Leonardo DiCaprio played irrepressible 1960s conman Frank Abagnale Jr.
That counts as high praise; in Weekend magazine last month I listed my 25 greatest movies of the 21st century and really should have made room for Catch Me If You Can. If I were to do it again, I might also have to find a place for Marty Supreme.
Set in 1952, it is much more anarchic than Spielberg’s film but every bit as compelling, taking us on the wildest of rides through an eventful few months in the life of fast-talking Jewish New Yorker Marty Mauser (the superb Timothee Chalamet).
Skinny, bespectacled Marty, whose fizzing energy powers the story like a jet engine, wears a thin Ronald Colman moustache presumably to appear older than he is, although a smattering of acne gives the game away. Just like DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale, he has barely reached adulthood, yet can schmooze his way in or out of almost any situation.
At the start of the film he works in his uncle’s shoe shop, so slick with his sales patter that ‘I can sell shoes to an amputee’. But he is also a table tennis whizz, trying to market an eponymous orange ball, the ‘Marty Supreme’ of the title.
Marty has oodles of charisma but is a proper rascal, a hustler who will try any ruse to get what he wants. And what he craves even more than success with his daring-coloured ball is to be crowned the world’s greatest ping-pong player.
Throughout, there are some spectacular table tennis scenes, which look like they might be enhanced by CGI, but aren’t, so we are told. Reportedly, Chalamet worked as hard with his paddle as he did with his plectrum in preparation for playing the young Bob Dylan in the wonderful biopic A Complete Unknown.
Yet director and co-writer Josh Safdie’s film is less a sports movie than a character study,a study not just of Marty’s dubious character but also that of the period, when post-war New York City heaved with opportunity for anyone on the make.
Soon, though, Marty heads to stiffer, greyer London in a bid to win a major table tennis tournament at Wembley. He sweet-talks his way into staying at the Ritz, and there pursues a faded movie star, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, excellent), with such brash self-confidence that she gives in, despite the sizeable age difference and the fact that she is married to a bumptious tycoon, Milton Rockwell (reality TV star Kevin O’Leary, making an assured big-screen debut). If anyone in this story knows what makes Marty tick, it is Kay.
Back in New York, Marty has a girlfriend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), but she is married too. His morals and principles, just like that table tennis ball, are for batting back and forth according to the circumstances. An they lead him into all kinds of extraordinary scrapes, one including a mobster’s abducted dog that whisks us off on yet another mad tangent to the main narrative – which, broadly, is that Marty needs to find his way to Japan to play in the World Table Tennis Championships and claim his crown.
The only man who can help him get there, it turns out, is Milton, the man he’s casually cuckolded. There’s an unforgettable scene in which Marty submits to humiliating corporal punishment as the price he must pay for a seat on Milton’s private plane to Tokyo.
While touching on dark themes such as antisemitism and even the Holocaust, Safdie has an almost indecent amount of fun with all this, just as he and his brother Benny did with 2019’s Uncut Gems, another frenzied tale, based on their father’s stories of working in New York’s diamond district.
This one is loosely inspired by real-life 1950s table tennis champion Marty Reisman, but Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein apply so much spin and swerve to his story that you can hardly believe the directions it flies in.
The Housemaid
Verdict: Cheesy thriller
In contrast, The Housemaid is entirely predictable. Indeed, if you’ve already had your fill of Boxing Day Stilton and biscuits, then you might not be ready for a thriller quite this cheesy and quite this crackers.
Like the 2024 film It Ends With Us, which in many ways it resembles, The Housemaid is based on a best-selling book – Freida McFadden’s novel of the same title. The suddenly ubiquitous Sydney Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman with a secret past that she cannot reveal if she’s to land a job with a wealthy family on Long Island, taking care of their fabulous mansion and babysitting their charmless young daughter.
Her new employers are volatile, highly-strung Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) and husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), a dishy millionaire who manages Nina’s frequent mood swings with preternatural calm. Inevitably, Millie falls for him. Just as inevitably, all is not as it seems in the Winchester household.
Timothee Chalamet pictured in a scene from ‘Marty Supreme’
The director is Paul Feig, whose background in comedy (Bridesmaids, Spy) suggests we shouldn’t take any of this too seriously, least of all the bitchy Long Island wives and Andrew’s own creepy mother (Elizabeth Perkins), caricatures to a woman.
On that basis The Housemaid is worth seeing for anyone who likes their thrillers high in saturated fat.
All films reviewed here are in cinemas now.
