Film reviews: Marty Supreme | Sentimental Value | The Housemaid
Starring Timothée Chalamet as an amoral table tennis player on the make, Marty Supreme is a feel-bad movie for feel-bad times, writes Alistair Harkness
Marty Supreme (15) ★★★★
Sentimental Value (15) ★★★
The Housemaid (15) ★★★★
Marty Supreme sees co-writer/director Josh Safdie follow brother and frequent collaborator Bennie Safdie’s recent film The Smashing Machine with a sports movie of his own — only this erratic tale of an American ping pong prodigy trying to bring table tennis to prominence in the 1950s is only nominally about the sport. Really it’s a chaotic character study of a narcissistic young hustler whose pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps dynamism exposes the ruthlessness of American individualism.
Played by Timothée Chalamet, the film’s protagonist, Marty Mauser, is like an evil twin of Walter Mitty, a dreamer whose scams and delusions in pursuit of greatness leave a trail of emotional and physical devastation in their wake, something Safdie — echoing the panic-attack anxiety of his last film Uncut Gems — orchestrates with the furious pace of a table tennis match.
READ MORE: Avatar: Fire and Ash review: 'tedious'
No sooner are we introduced to Marty working in his uncle’s shoe store then we see him impregnate — and abandon — his oldest friend (the excellent Odessa A’Zion), rob his co-worker, fly to London, inveigle his way into a room in the Ritz, seduce a faded movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow), scandalise the press, and participate in an international table tennis competition, where he loses the final in disgraceful fashion to the Japanese champion. The rest of the film is devoted to his determination to travel to Japan for a spectacular rematch, but his refusal to do anything on anyone’s terms but his own starts bringing his tenuously constructed world down around him — literally in the case of one set-piece featuring Bad Lieutenant’s gonzo director Abel Ferrara.
It’s a dizzying piece of filmmaking and Chalamet’s whiplash-inducing performance is one of the best things he’s done. Like the novelty orange ping-pong balls Marty prematurely manufactures with his titular nickname emblazoned across them, the character is made in the USA and full of air, a hollow advertisement for himself, and Chalamet nails his sociopathic drive for success, right down to the crocodile tears that flow in the film’s faux redemptive ending, which feels as deliberately disconnected from what we’ve just watched as its anachronistic 1980s pop soundtrack is from the film’s grotty 1950s period design. It’s a feel-bad movie for feel-bad times.
As with their previous collaboration on 2022’s Oscar-nominated arthouse smash Worst Person in the World, writer/director Joachim Trier and star Renate Reinsve’s new film Sentimental Value feels pretty conventional on the surface. Sadly, unlike that previous collaboration, what you see is what you get in this film-industry-set family saga about clashing egos and intergenerational resentment.
Reinsve plays Nora, an anxiety riddled stage actress who, along with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is in the process of sorting through her recently deceased mother’s estate when her egotistical filmmaker father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), shows up wanting to use their family home to shoot a self-serving biopic about his own traumatic childhood. He also wants Nora for the lead, but when she wants no part of it, he turns instead to a guileless young Hollywood star (Elle Fanning), even though she’s all wrong for the part.
What follows is enjoyable enough thanks to the collective efforts of the cast and a few self-lacerating jokes about the changed state of the film industry. But its navel-gazing inquiries into the blurred lines between art and life is nothing that Woody Allen wasn’t doing 30 or 40 years ago, and, in fact, Trier nicks a whole gag about eavesdropping on a psychiatrist’s office from Allen’s Another Woman and Everyone Says I Love You.
Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried are on gloriously trashy form in The Housemaid, a 1990s-style psychological thriller (think Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female) updated with a post-Gone Girl twist and directed with campy menace by Paul Feig. Unlike his comedic spins on this genre with the Simple Favour movies, this isn’t played for laughs, but it’s still pure entertainment as Sweeney’s desperate ex-con accepts a job as a housemaid for Seyfried’s trad wife, only to discover nothing is quite what it seems in this idyllic-on-the-surface suburban fantasy. The plot twists may be wild but the cast — which includes Brandon Sklenar (It Ends With Us) as Seyfried’s hunky husband — fully commit to the go-big-or-go-home performance styles required to make it all work.
All films in cinemas from 26 December
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.