What is being celebrated as bold maximalism right now is increasingly a failure of judgment masquerading as ambition. Marty Supreme is not undone by a lack of talent or effort. It is undone by a refusal to distinguish between what builds a believable world and what actively sabotages belief in it. The film wants to feel sprawling, obsessive, and unruly, but what it delivers instead is disorientation of the wrong kind: not confusion rooted in character or circumstance, but confusion born of a filmmaker who no longer seems certain what story he is telling or why.
The most damaging error is the film’s relationship to reality. Marty Supreme is set in the early 1950s, yet it behaves as though historical specificity were optional. The dialogue leans aggressively toward a later vernacular, full of modern profanity and cadences that simply did not exist at the time. This is not a stylistic choice. It is incorrect. People in that era did not speak this way, especially not publicly, especially not across lines of class and race in the manner the film repeatedly presents. Language is behavior. When it is wrong, everything built on top of it begins to wobble.
That disregard for lived reality extends everywhere, most glaringly in the film’s near-total absence of smoking. In 1952, everyone smoked. Men smoked constantly. Women smoked. Doctors smoked while delivering babies. New fathers smoked cigars in waiting rooms. Bowling alleys were fogged with cigarette haze. Ping-pong halls packed with men would have been saturated with smoke. And yet the film presents a world in which cigarettes barely exist. There are precisely two ceremonial cigarettes in the entire movie, both smoked by Gwyneth Paltrow, as though the filmmakers decided that acknowledging the habit once or twice would suffice. It does not. The absence is so conspicuous that it repeatedly pulls you out of the film. You are not watching the 1950s. You are watching a contemporary imagination vaguely gesturing toward them.
This is especially frustrating because realism was once the Safdies’ great strength. When the brothers worked together, their films felt alarming precisely because they felt real. The worlds were hostile, suffocating, and morally unstable, but they were anchored in recognizable behavior and consequence. Uncut Gems worked not because it was loud, but because it understood exactly who its protagonist was. Adam Sandler’s character is a compulsive gambler incapable of stopping himself, and his ending is not tragic but perfect. He finally wins, experiences pure euphoria, and is killed immediately afterward. For a gambling addict, there is no happier death. Give him another week and that money would be gone and the debt worse. That clarity of character and consequence is what made the film devastating.
Marty Supreme has none of that clarity. It substitutes chaos for understanding and symbolism for specificity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the dog storyline, which is among the most baffling misjudgments in recent prestige cinema. The dog belongs to Abel Ferrara’s character, and everything involving it is a narrative dead end. The extended digressions following Ferrara as he threatens, chases, and commits violence over a dog do not deepen theme or illuminate character. They lead nowhere. They are indulgences. Remove every scene involving the dog and the film immediately improves, not because it becomes smaller, but because it becomes legible.
The same problem plagues the film’s endless parade of peripheral characters. People appear briefly and vanish. Sandra Bernhard. Fran Drescher. Others drift in and out as if the film were afraid to let anyone go. The uncle, a character that actually matters, simply disappears. The mother, who should have been emotionally central, is sidelined. Meanwhile, the film devotes an extraordinary amount of time to Ferrara and the dog, as though weirdness alone were a substitute for narrative purpose. This is not world-building. It is clutter.
As is so often the case, the real failure begins before a frame is shot. Most films do not collapse in the edit or in performance; they collapse on the page. A screenplay is meant to be a blueprint that carries a story from point A to point B. Marty Supreme feels like a script that never commits to that journey. Instead, it drifts from A to A-point-six, then A-point-twelve, then all the way to A-twenty-four, mistaking accumulation for movement. The destination keeps receding while the digressions multiply, until the film is no longer traveling anywhere at all. It is circling itself. The joke, intentional or not, is that the script behaves exactly like the studio culture it comes from: elaborate, mannered, hyper-specific, and fundamentally resistant to arrival. When the blueprint never points toward B, no amount of energy, craft, or performance can redirect the structure into meaning.
All of this excess would be survivable if the film trusted its core, but it never does. There is a far better movie trapped inside Marty Supreme, one that might genuinely have competed for Best Picture rather than merely filling a nomination slot in a thin year. That movie is shorter, tighter, and more intimate. It focuses on Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the pregnant girlfriend figure whose emotional position should have anchored everything. Strip away the digressions, lose at least forty-five minutes, and allow scenes to breathe, and something meaningful might have emerged.
The tragedy is that the craft is there. Darius Khondji’s cinematography is spectacular, textured, and precise, lending gravity and visual coherence to material that often does not deserve it. The acting is uniformly strong. Chalamet delivers a performance of total commitment and physical intelligence, the kind of work that carries scenes that should collapse under their own weight. Paltrow is solid and credible, though the role itself is not irreplaceable. The supporting cast, including non-actors, offers flashes of authenticity that recall what once made Safdie films feel dangerous and alive.
But these virtues are smothered by a film that cannot stop escalating. The pacing is relentless to the point of monotony. Everything is pushed louder, faster, further, without modulation or restraint. Intensity becomes background noise. The film is not disorienting in a purposeful way; it is disoriented, uncertain of its priorities and unable to distinguish between texture and substance.
The music seals its fate. The soundtrack is catastrophically misjudged, pulling from every era except the one the film inhabits. Rather than sharpening scenes, it flattens them, overwhelming image and performance alike. It feels like an attempt to force significance where the writing has not earned it, a misunderstanding of how music functions in cinema. Music here does not argue with the film or deepen it. It shouts over it.
It is also worth remembering that cinema has long understood how to portray characters driven by manic forward momentum without surrendering coherence or reality. Films like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver are not comparable in subject matter, but they are instructive in rhythm. They are restless, abrasive, and volatile, yet they move at a pitch that allows desperation to register rather than blur. They understand that kinetic energy does not require constant acceleration, only accumulating pressure. They breathe. They observe. They let behavior repeat just long enough for consequence to take hold. Marty Supreme treats motion as an end in itself, mistaking speed for intensity. What those earlier films demonstrate is that madness is most powerful when it remains legible. That grounding is precisely what is missing here.
There is also the blunt reality that part of the film’s goodwill comes simply from what it is not. Marty Supreme is not a superhero movie. It is not a comic-book property. It is not another IP extraction exercise designed to feed an algorithmic franchise pipeline. In a theatrical landscape dominated by capes, multiverses, and eternal origin stories, the mere fact that this film is about a human being chasing money, status, and momentum in the real world earns it unearned grace. That baseline distinction is doing more work for the film than it should have to. Original adult drama now arrives with an automatic cultural halo, regardless of execution, because the bar has been lowered so dramatically. Marty Supreme benefits from that vacuum. Being better than a comic-book movie is not the same thing as being good.
All of this points back to the Safdie split. When Josh Safdie worked alongside Benny Safdie, chaos was balanced by control. Propulsion was tempered by judgment. Since the separation, that balance appears lost. Creative partnerships often obscure where restraint truly lives. Visibility is often mistaken for authorship.
Marty Supreme suggests that what Benny Safdie contributed may not have been secondary at all. It may have been the anchor. Without it, Josh Safdie’s instincts run unchecked, producing a film full of noise, symbolism, and incident, but almost no lived reality.
In the end, the film’s single saving grace is Timothée Chalamet. His performance is kinetic, relentless, and fully embodied, the kind of work that drags a compromised film forward by sheer force of will. He is not merely good in Marty Supreme; he is doing the impossible, carrying the entire enterprise on his shoulders, moment to moment, scene to scene, making something feel alive that otherwise would not. Without him, the film collapses completely. With him, it survives—barely. If he does not win Best Actor, the performance will feel wasted on a film that never deserved it. His work belongs in a better movie, one with discipline, specificity, and restraint equal to his commitment. What remains is the uncomfortable truth that Marty Supreme is remembered not for what it achieves, but for how much Chalamet had to overcome to make it watchable at all.
*Author’s Note: This piece was written prior to the 2026 Academy Awards.
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