I went to see the film Marty Supreme at the cinema partly because of the noise around it, partly because Timothée Chalamet has become such a cultural lightning rod, and partly because I am interested in films that claim to be about excellence, ambition, and winning. This film wears its obsession with winning very openly. It is loud about it. It is not ironic about it. And that, in the end, is where it becomes most interesting.
Here are five things I learnt about winning from Marty Supreme.
1. Winning at all costs is still losing
Marty is a man who wants to win everything. Ping pong, sex, money, status, attention, escape. Ping pong is treated with utter seriousness in the film, which is both funny and revealing. The rituals, the intensity, the myth-making around a niche sport are played straight. There is no wink to camera. Winning matters.
But look at the cost. Marty sleeps with his sponsor’s wife. He turns down a genuinely good offer out of arrogance. He abandons his pregnant girlfriend, who is also the wife of a man he shares a building with. He treats his mother with contempt. He despises his shoe shop job, even though it anchors him in a real world of labour and people. He endangers others recklessly. He is, by any ethical measure, obnoxious.
The film does not punish him in a melodramatic way. Instead, it lets us sit with the emptiness of his victories. He wins, again and again, and becomes smaller each time.
2. Seriousness can tip into the ridiculous without us noticing
One of the cleverest things Marty Supreme does is refuse to tell us when to laugh. Ping pong is filmed like boxing, or war, or religion. The mise en scène insists on its importance.
And yet there is something inherently ridiculous about this level of intensity being poured into a game. That tension never resolves. It mirrors Marty himself. He takes himself so seriously that he becomes absurd, and he cannot see it.
This feels painfully contemporary. We live in a culture that elevates narrow forms of success while losing perspective on what matters. The film does not mock that tendency. It simply stages it and lets it speak for itself.
3. The film knows retribution is coming, but cannot quite face it
Late in the film, Marty is finally humiliated. He is beaten. Exposed. Reduced. It is clearly meant to be a reckoning. A moment where winning culture is shown its limits.
But the film hesitates. It gestures towards moral consequence without fully committing to it. Compare this to a classic British M. R. James ghost story, the Mezzotint, where the defeated always get their own back and the moral universe snaps shut with icy clarity. I watched Rory Kinnear carry one of these preposterous but profound stories recently, and he made it work because the punishment was earned and unavoidable.
Marty Supreme is more American in this sense. It wants consequences, but it also wants to keep loving its antihero. The result is a slightly muddled ending that nonetheless leaves a residue of unease.
4. Mise en scène does the real work
The best thing about the film is its look. Manhattan in the 1950s is rendered with extraordinary care. The shoe shop is a triumph. Stacks of boxes. Worn floors. Clothes that carry weight and history. Light falling in ways that feel lived rather than styled.
These spaces tell a story Marty refuses to hear. They are grounded, communal, human. He moves through them as if they are beneath him, which is precisely why they matter. The film understands this visually even when its narrative wobbles.
5. Penetrability matters, and Chalamet does not quite have it
Timothée Chalamet is a beautiful presence on screen. But beauty is not the same as penetrability. An actor friend of mine, Robin Weigert from Deadwood and Big Little Lies, once taught me that penetrability is the quality that lets an audience into an actor’s vulnerability without effort.
Leonardo DiCaprio has it. Rory Kinnear has it. Very few actors do.
Chalamet remains, here, a surface. We watch Marty. We rarely enter him. A young DiCaprio would have made this character dangerous and heartbreaking rather than merely charismatic and hollow. That difference matters in a film that wants us to reflect on ambition, cruelty, and loss.
In the end, Marty Supreme is a film about winning that accidentally becomes a film about what winning strips away. It shows us a man who gains everything his culture tells him to want and loses the capacity to treat others with kindness, care, or even basic attention.
That feels like a lesson worth sitting with.