Gwyneth Paltrow | The Media Tourist

Timothée Chalamet gets his game on as a 1950s ping-pong whiz with a dream and a scheme (or two)

Marty Supreme
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin O’Leary & Odessa A’zion
Directed by Josh Sadfie
Rated R

In theaters Thursday, Dec. 25

He’s played Willy Wonka, Bob Dylan, a cannibal boyfriend and King Henry. Now Timothée Chalamet is playing ping-pong, starring in this feisty drama loosely based on the flamboyant real-life table-tennis hustler Marty Reisman, who rose to fame wowing audiences in the 1950s.

Chalamet’s character—with the slightly tweaked name of Marty Mouser—is a wisecracking, motor-mouthed wheeler-dealer, a table-tennis prodigy who fervently wants to become a world champion, the supreme player of the sport, more than anything else. But to get there, he first must run a gauntlet of mishaps, misunderstandings and mayhem—and somehow score enough cash to fund his travel to international tournaments in London, Japan and the Middle East.

Director Josh Sadfie (whose other flicks include the fabulously frantic Uncut Gems and Good Time) keeps the snappy breathless pace zipping and zinging, flying almost as fast—and as unpredictable—as the ping-pong balls Marty slams, smacks and smashes with his paddle. Sadie makes table tennis so exciting, this movie might just spark a new craze.

It takes us along for the wild, gritty ride and the breathless whir of all the schemes and hustles as Marty engages with a wide range of colorful characters. There’s his pregnant longtime friend (Odessa A’zion). Marty has a steamy tryst or two with a glamorous actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s married to an ink-pen magnate (Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary) who may be the ticket to Marty’s hopes for table-tennis supremacy. Fran Drescher plays his mom, Sandra Bernhard is a neighbor, Isaac Mizrahi has a couple of scenes as an over-enthusiastic publicist.

Real-life moviemaker and award-winning playwright David Mamet pops in as the director of an off-Broadway play, and Marty gives some handy advice to its actor (Frederick Hechinger, who played a weaselly Roman emperor in Gladiator II). A shady character portrayed by filmmaker Abel Ferrara sets off a chain reaction that weaves throughout the film when a flophouse bathtub falls on him. The rapper Tyler the Creator gets screen time as Marty’s friend Wally, a taxi driver who steers him through one particularly crazy night.

But the revved-up engine that drives everything is clearly Chalamet, demonstrating yet again what crackling, confident versatility he can summon onscreen. It’s no surprise his character is in every scene. The camera clearly loves him (and females will swoon during a scene when he, ahem, drops trou.)

Throughout the movie, Marty ponders his next move. Should he risk his life trying to recover a kidnapped dog to get what he thinks will be a sizeable reward? Should he take a gig playing exhibition pong, hamming it up for pay like the Harlem Globetrotters, playing with pots and pans instead of paddles, across from a trained seal as an opponent? Why is he running from the cops, or driving through a cornfield? And what’s World War II and a bunch of cheering GIs got to do with it all?

Will Marty realize his dream, finally, when he faces off with his international nemesis, the Japanese champ (real-life ping-pong master Koto Kawaguchi)? Or will he find another dream to make him happy and fulfilled? (Cue Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”)

It’s all fast, fun and friskily a-swirl with surprises. Like a game of pong, you never know just how, or where, the balls are going to bounce. At one point, a whole bushel basket of them spills out a window, bouncing all over the sidewalk. Marty’s adventure bounces him all over the place too, but Chalamet is always in control with charm, charisma and ping-pongy pizzazz. “It’s only a matter of time before I’m staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box,” Marty boasts at one point.

It’s a late runner entering the field, but Marty Supreme is already being lauded as one of the best movies of the year. And best of all, you don’t have to wait for a Wheaties box to see Timothée Chalamet in an impressive, balls-n-all display of what he can do up on the big screen.

—Neil Pond

Odd ‘n’ Mod

Johnny Depp’s time-warped, Brit-flavored box office bomb

Mortdecai

Starring Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow & Ewan McGregor

Directed by David Koepp

Well, at least Johnny Depp’s latest movie has something in common with The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and It’s a Wonderful Life: All three of those films, like his new flop, were initially box-office bombs.

Those flicks much later found respect and beloved places in cinematic history. Perhaps some new appreciation may also be heaped, decades down the road, on Mortdecai. But so far Depp’s dud has been savaged by most critics and has only attracted a trickle of audience turnout. Not many people have wanted to see him, apparently, in yet another nutty role, with a fake accent and goofball mannerisms—and particularly not in this movie, which is a bit of an oddity itself.

Paul Bettany plays the loyal manservant of kooky art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp).

Based on a series of musty 1970s British comedic cloak-and-dagger novels, Mortdecai stars Depp as the eccentric art wheeler-dealer of the title, Gwyneth Paltrow as his wife, and Ewan McGregor as a MI5 agent on the trail of a missing art masterpiece that may contain a long-hidden code leading to squirreled-away Nazi gold. Eventually everybody gets in on the action, including Mortdecai’s loyal manservant (Paul Bettany), a competing American art collector (Jeff Goldblum), his nymphomaniac daughter (Olivia Munn), and some nasty Russian thugs.

The whole story seems kookily out of time, a far-out, swingin’-’70s romp plunked down clumsily in the present. Or is it a mod, mapcap comedy run backward through the gears of a time-machine blender? Or a weird parcel from a distant era yet to come, when Depp’s off-kilter-characters are worshipped as idols by a future civilization?

The humor, the jokes, the mannerisms, everything about it is so pseudo-sophisticated British, so Pink Panther-meets-Austin Powers-meets-Mr. Bean, so camp-ily, willfully, woozily derivative of practically every English sleuth saga and spoofy bungle caper that’s ever been done, it begs the question: Why did anyone bother to make this curious, out-of-time artifact of a movie at all, and why now?

Depp, who has fashioned quite a career out of quirk, adds yet another peculiar personality to his collection. Charlie Mortdecai, a wacky conglomeration of grunts, bleats, facial tics and a moustache that becomes one of the movie’s subplots by itself, is a hoot, but dimensionally hollow, and highly unlikely to join Capt. Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood or Willy Wonka in his hall of fame.

Ewan McGregor

It’s all a tad randy, but only a tad, just barely enough for its R rating. That means anyone expecting a “raunchy” grown-up comedy, like a lot of R-rated comedies these days, will likely be disappointed at its relative tameness—and that any of Depp’s younger fans, from his Pirates of the Caribbean Disney movies, won’t be able to see it at all.

There are some funny bits, like a rather novel car chase, some clever dialogue and banter, and what seems like a total commitment from the cast, who appear to be having a cheerio, cheeky old time. But the plot is a bit of a runaround slog, and some of the gags require a good deal of stick-with-it—one involves whether a character will take a bite from a slab of stinky old cheese, or not.

Mortdecai may not be Johnny Depp’s finest moment, or even one of them. It’s not looking like it right now, anyway. But hey, let’s give this slab of stinky cheese another 30 or 40 years and see what happens, shall we?

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Movie Review: “Marty Supreme”

Odd ‘n’ Mod

Johnny Depp’s time-warped, Brit-flavored box office bomb