Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme”
In sports, what you want is to see a great athlete become one of the elites. You want to see him have more than a few clutch performances or make a respectable run in a tournament. You want to see him reach the sort of level at which teammates and opponents alike can’t quite believe what they’re seeing, what they’re being defeated by. The same holds for actors. Timothée Chalamet had been circling “great” for a decade now. And as of “Marty Supreme,” he’s become one of the elites. With acting, you need a great part for a breakthrough like that, something that can reveal what it is an actor can do, what’s been in him this whole time, the sort of part that makes a Hoffman, Nicholson or Pacino. This is the movie, this nervy barrel of adrenaline and scuzz, that frees him to create somebody new: Marty Mauser, a table-tennis wiz in the 1950s who’s also a con man. This guy is dangerously, thrillingly angular — cutthroat, selfish, in over his skis, cocky, horny, naïve, prickly, kinda nuts, with freckles, face pocks, this mossy unibrow and a motor mouth. Nothing is safe around this man — marriages, friendships, tournaments, bathtubs, dogs, Holocaust decorum. The scariest part of the whole thing is that Chalamet also drags with him all of his movie-star side effect: I didn’t like this Marty guy. He’s an asshole, but I want him to win anyway.
