Film
Marty Supreme review: ‘Timothée Chalamet is monumental’ ★★★★★
The Jewishness of Chalamet’s Marty is both defining and lightly worn in Josh Safdie’s classic American fable
December 29, 2025 18:27
The Jewishness of Chalamet’s Marty is both defining and lightly worn in Josh Safdie’s classic American fable
December 29, 2025 18:27The many positive reviews and responses to Timothée Chalamet’s latest film mostly agree about its underlying theme. Apparently taking their cue from the film’s strap-line “Dream Big” they see in the careening plot co-written by director Josh Safdie a post-war “American Dream” fable set in the 1950s.
Chalamet’s wiry, bespectacled Marty is working in his Uncle Murray’s shoe shop when we first encounter him. The uncle highly rates his nephew as a salesman and Marty agrees that he “could sell shoes to an amputee.” But what Marty wants is to be known as the best table tennis player in the world. To achieve this he must first win the British Open table tennis championships in London. The plan is a non-starter unless his uncle pays the money owed to Marty in time for him to buy a ticket.
However, neither Uncle Murray nor the rest of the world will inconvenience themselves so that a young man can follow his dream. Every single thing Marty wants for himself must be hustled out of circumstances that want him to fail, including his mother who feigns illness as way of smothering his hopes.
In this sense, placing the film in the American dream genre is perfectly reasonable. A classic American fable, you might say. Except that much like Howard Ratner, the jeweller played by Adam Sandler in Safdie’s heart attack of a movie Uncut Gems (co-directed with his brother Benny) Marty is “a crazy-ass Jew” with a single-minded determination. He is a one-man tornado trailing chaos in his wake. So yes, Marty is American and he does have a dream. But the true underlying subject of this movie is chutzpah.
Chalamet’s Marty is the embodiment of the stuff. Driven by a self-belief of superpower proportions Marty’s chutzpah gets him into and out of more scrapes and collisions than a car chase without brakes. This is also the speed at which the film eats up its two and a half hours.
It is Marty’s chutzpah that seduces former film star Kay Stone, superbly played by Gwyneth Paltrow with serene understatement in her first big screen role since 2019. It is chutzpah that gets Marty the $700 owed to him by his uncle using nothing more than his preternatural powers of persuasion. Well, that and a gun. And it is his chutzpah that attracts married local girl Rachel who in her own way is a chancer just like Marty. She is played with nuance and gallons of Jewish charisma by Odessa A’zion.
Chalamet meanwhile delivers a performance that is as minutely detailed as it is monumental. With a star of David glinting around his neck the Jewishness of his Marty – a character inspired by real-life 1950s table tennis champion Marty Reisman – is both defining and lightly worn.
Take for instance the scene where Marty is interviewed in London by British journalists ahead of his clash with the reigning Hungarian (and Jewish) table tennis champion Béla Kletzki (Son of Saul actor Géza Röhrig). Here Marty shockingly brags ‘I’m going to do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.”
To the dumbstruck British press he adds, “It’s OK. I’m Jewish,” which may or may not make it OK.
It does however allow Safdie to later dwell on Kletzki’s backstory, revealing what post-war Jews were silently carrying after the war by temporarily diverting his movie to Kletzki’s experience in the camp – a flashback to the backstory of a supporting character that is itself a directorial act of astounding chutzpah.
Marty Supreme
Certificate 15
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