Author Joyce Carol Oates has shared her brutally honest thoughts on Josh Safdie’s Oscar-tipped Marty Supreme.
Starring Timothée Chalamet as wannabe table-tennis champion Marty Mauser, the sports drama is expected to receive several Oscar nominations later this month. The cast also features Gwyneth Paltrow, rapper Tyler the Creator, Odessa A’zion, Fran Drescher and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary.
While a majority of critics have hailed the film as another Safdie masterpiece, in the vein of his 2019 Adam Sandler-led crime thriller Uncut Gems, Oates, 87, couldn’t disagree more.
“Understandably, many people love Marty Supreme & I don’t want to provoke them,” she wrote Saturday on X, clarifying that while she was in “total agreement that Chalamat’s performance is virtuoso,” she felt the movie itself was “very repetitive.”
“We see Marty shouting, quarreling, interrupting, hyperventilating in exactly the same way through the entire movie without the sense that, as in A Complete Unknown, there is emotional growth in the character,” Oates continued, “until the very end, with the sort of abrupt transformation that would be disdained in women’s romances.”
Arguing that the film’s ending is unrealistic, she said: “The notion that manic 23-year-old Marty Mauser is going to settle down with his immature young wife & raise a child together feels totally absurd but Chalamat can almost make us believe this might be so.”
In another post, she addressed the early rave response to Marty Supreme, admitting that she found it “puzzling” and “annoying.”
“Early reviews made it seem as if the film is Uncut Gems ‘with a happy ending.’ Nothing could be further from the emotional experience of the two films,” she said. “Uncut Gems is brutal, raw, intransigent, with a most head-hammering percussive beat, & careens to a perfect ending; Marty Supreme glides to the softest of soft landings, & the tone throughout is affably comic.”
Differentiating Marty Supreme from Uncut Gems, Oates declared the former was “just noise, stage business, slapstick farce,” that left the audience with “little emotional investment” and had them “waiting patiently for the silliness to end & the more engaging storyline to resume.”
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“Viewers with whom I saw the film found it overlong & exhausting, & much of the madcap comedy repetitive,” she added in a separate post. “Such a long subplot involving a lost dog — this goes on forever; we are asked to believe that Marty Mauser’s love interest is a con-woman with ridiculous notions of cheating people of their money along with being perpetually nine months pregnant.”
Labeling it a “totally far-fetched screwball comedy subplot careening to a rom-com/feel-good ending featuring a wailing infant that stops wailing to smile at his father,” Oates opined: “Here is the ‘soft’ ending that Uncut Gems bravely avoids in the interest of unflinching realism.”
Oates is best known for her 1999 novel Blonde, which reimagines the life of Marilyn Monroe. It was adapted into a movie in 2022, starring Ana de Armas.