Marty Supreme's Megawatt Personality

"Josh Safdie's hectic new film Marty Supreme, set in 1952, mainly in New York, is, essentially, Uncut Gems but with a happy ending. That recklessly exuberant 2019 drama, which Safdie co-directed with his brother, Benny, stars Adam Sandler as a jewelry dealer in Manhattan and a compulsive gambler who takes thrilling risks to pay off his creditors and learns that the house always wins. With Marty SupremeSafdie's first feature directed without Benny since 2008the happy ending follows logically from a happy beginning, so to speak."

"The film's first scene features a tryst, in a back room of a shoe store, between the protagonist, a twenty-three-year-old salesman named Marty Mauser (Timothee Chalamet), and a young married woman named Rachel (Odessa A'zion). But Marty's greater happiness involves another secret, one that he's scheming to spring on the world: that he, a Ping-Pong hustler who plays locally for modest stakes, is about to prove, in an international table-tennis tournament in London, that he's the best in the world."

"For a scuffling guy from the Lower East Side, it's a tall order; nonetheless, with his irrepressible energy and his wiles, he gets out of his low-rent neighborhood and into ever-wilder exploits that, in the story's eight-month span, fling him about and leave him changedperhaps even for the better. Marty's chutzpah is justified by history; the character is loosely based on the table-tennis hustler and champion Marty Reisman, who died in 2012, at the age of eighty-two."

Marty Supreme follows twenty-three-year-old Marty Mauser, a Ping-Pong hustler from the Lower East Side in 1952 New York, who schemes to prove he is the best in the world at an international table-tennis tournament in London. The film tracks his eight-month journey from back-room trysts and low-stakes hustling to wilder exploits that change him. The character draws loosely on real-life champion Marty Reisman. The film preserves a reckless, exuberant energy similar to Uncut Gems but substitutes compulsive gambling with self-belief and culminates in a happier resolution.

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