Monthly Archives: January 2020

  • Uncut Gems

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh and Benny Safdie (2019)

    The protagonist of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems is a jeweller called Howard Ratner, who runs a store in Manhattan’s Diamond District.  (British viewers of my generation will likely think of Ratner as the archetypal surname for a jewellery business owner, rivalled only by Samuel.)  That Howard (Adam Sandler) is Jewish isn’t unexpected but it matters in the story.  Passover is coming up; Howard and his wife Dinah (Idina Menzel), along with their three children, will attend the traditional family gathering but the couple intends to divorce the other side of the holiday.   Howard’s ethnicity also links him with the Ethiopian miners who feature in the film’s prologue.  It emerges later these are African Jews, though the revelation doesn’t have much impact beyond instant surprise.

    The Ethiopian sequences that kick off Uncut Gems contrast commotion and quiet.  One of the miners has suffered a serious leg injury.  His angry, yelling colleagues crowd round the Asian-looking mine superintendents.  While this racket is going on, two miners continue working underground, where it’s noiseless.  They hack out a lump of rock containing gems.  The camera zooms in on these then seems to penetrate further and further into them, producing an almost psychedelic light show, before emerging into a different complexity – the insides of a human body.  The camera now pulls out to show images on a hospital screen and confirm that the body belongs to Howard Ratner, who is undergoing a colonoscopy.  On the soundtrack, a doctor summarises the progress and findings of the voyage around Howard’s guts.  The doctor’s words struggle to be heard against Daniel Lopatin’s manic electronic score.  Lopatin’s music will soon be competing with various other voices on the soundtrack, voices that also compete with each other.

    The New York part of Uncut Gems contrasts commotion and quiet too but in different proportions from the Ethiopian prologue:  for every minute’s peace, there’s an hour of mayhem, verbal and/or physical.  The Safdies evidently love the hectic, scratchy dynamism of their home city.  It’s hard to think of any other explanation for why Uncut Gems goes on so long (135 minutes).  Howard’s story, the exclusive focus of the narrative, is a predominantly grim and gruelling one but the Safdies must enjoy describing – repeatedly – the antics of the fast-talking, endlessly argumentative people who make it that.  These young (mid-thirties) directors are, in this sense at least, true inheritors of the Martin Scorsese tradition.  (Scorsese is one of the executive producers of Uncut Gems.)

    The outline of the screenplay, which the Safdies wrote with Ronald Bronstein (as usual), seems to place the film within the tradition of fables centred on a particular, persisting object (as Peter Strickland’s In Fabric also did recently).  In this case, it’s the uncut gem – a rare and valuable black opal – embedded within the chunk of rock from the Ethiopian mine.  Howard has acquired the opal (I didn’t get clear how), primarily with a view to clearing the six-figure debts his gambling addiction has racked up – for which loan sharks, who include his brother-in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian), are menacing him.  Howard submits the opal for sale with a big New York auction house, at an estimated price of one million dollars.

    He takes delivery of the gem at his business premises during a visit there by star basketball player KG (Kevin Garnett, as himself – more or less).  KG is immediately obsessed with the opal; convinced it’s a good-luck charm, he insists on holding on to it for the big game he’s playing in that evening.  Howard reluctantly agrees to part with the gem temporarily, in exchange for KG’s ring, which Howard pawns.  He also puts a hefty bet on the outcome of the basketball game.  This is the start of a chain of events and complications whereby the precious stone that Howard saw as a lifesaver proves to be anything but.  The film ends with a virtual reverse journey for the camera – entering a bullet hole in Howard’s face, moving back through extraordinary vistas of colour, picking up a line in the script about seeing the whole universe in a single gem.

    Uncut Gems is easiest to like in its more obviously farcical moments.  When KG and his assistant (LaKeith Stanfield) eventually return to the store with the opal, Howard and his staff try, and keep failing, to open the security-controlled doors to admit them.  The stone is retrieved but the auction house, at the eleventh hour, massively reduces its estimated value; Howard gets his father-in-law Gooey (Judd Hirsch) to bid against KG to push up the sale price; not unexpectedly, the plans backfires and Gooey makes the winning bid.  The Safdies, once again, have chosen to work with a mix of professional actors and various others, ranging from Kevin Garnett to unknown New York oddballs who’ve taken the brothers’ fancy.  They orchestrate the cast well enough but that’s partly because each member of it, however large or small the role, is doing the same, one thing over and over.  (Tilda Swinton has an unseen cameo as a bossy and irate auction manager on the other end of a phone line.  I didn’t know beforehand she was in the film but Swinton’s voice is now as unmistakable as her appearance.)

    As in their previous film Good Time (2017), the Safdies don’t in the least censure their characters’ behaviour.  You wouldn’t want them to but, as in Good Time, I found the people on the screen depressing rather than (as the Safdies seem to find them – and more so in this new film) invigorating.   This isn’t just a matter of what some of the characters are capable of in terms of physical violence.  For example, the relationship that Howard is in with Julia (Julia Fox), a much younger woman who works at his store, seems like the tip of the iceberg of why, and how much, Dinah loathes her husband.  The Safdies aren’t interested in exploring that so much as in illustrating its verbally aggressive consequences.   Alex Hess in the Guardian praises Uncut Gems as ‘brilliant but watching it is a horrible experience’.  The film, says Hess, ‘is so stressful that it should come with a panic attack warning’.  There’s a difference, though, between inducing anxiety and just getting on your nerves.  For this viewer, the high-energy monotony of Uncut Gems puts it in the latter category.

    14 January 2020

  • Nothing Sacred

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William A Wellman (1937)

    Wally Cook, a reporter on the New York Morning Star, blots his copybook when the blue-blooded African philanthropist he’s discovered is revealed to be a Harlem bootblack.  Wally wasn’t party to the deception but his irate editor, Oliver Stone [sic(!)], demotes him to writing obituaries.  Wally pleads successfully to be given another chance.  In the fictional small town of Warsaw, Vermont, he comes across a young woman called Hazel Flagg, who is terminally ill with radium poisoning.  Wally interviews Hazel.  She weeps as she tells her story.  Unbeknown to him, the reason for Hazel’s tears is that her doctor has told her she isn’t dying after all.  That means she could be stuck in Warsaw for a long time.

    Oliver Stone seizes on Hazel’s potential to increase sales of the Morning Star.  The campaign turns her quickly into a national celebrity and courageous inspiration.  Hazel and Wally fall in love, and he asks her to marry him, even though he believes she’s not long for this world.  He’s enlightened when independent doctors examine her and pronounce Hazel in good health.   Wally’s angry but not disenchanted.  To avoid catastrophic fallout, Stone decides it would be better to peddle a story that Hazel has suddenly disappeared from the limelight in order to die quietly.  She marries Wally and they set sail for faraway places.

    Ben Hecht wrote the draft script for Nothing Sacred.  Producer David Selznick thought it went too far in skewering the ‘ethics’ of journalism.  After they fell out and Hecht left the project, the screenplay was handed over to a host of others – although, surprisingly in the circumstances, Hecht retained the sole writing credit on the finished picture.  The uncredited contributors were all, or would become, big names too – Robert Carson, Moss Hart, Sidney Howard, George S Kaufman, Ring Lardner Jr, Dorothy Parker, Budd Schulberg.  It goes without saying that William Wellman’s famous screwball comedy has sharp, smart dialogue, and plenty of it.

    Reading a plot synopsis of Nothing Sacred made me smile but I watched the film with a straight face nearly throughout.  For two main, and connected, reasons, I think.  The satire – of unscrupulous yellow-press salesmanship, the public appetite for maudlin tragedy and the synergy between them – now seems heavy-handed.  That could be because Ben Hecht had had too much target practice.  He’d had fun with an outrageous tabloid editor in The Front Page, co-written by Charles MacArthur.  Originally produced on the Broadway stage in 1928, the play became a Hollywood movie for the first time in 1931.  Hecht worked on the screenplay for that film, as he did nine years later on His Girl Friday, which reworked the Front Page material, though he didn’t receive a credit on either of them.

    What kills the humour, though, is a style of performance that compounds the problem of the overly forceful satirical writing.  This is particularly the case in the main supporting roles – Walter Connolly as Stone, Charles Winninger (whose broad playing I’d enjoyed in Show Boat just a few weeks previously) as the non-doomed heroine’s doctor.  When a comedy plot has so many twists and turns that the momentum is giddying, it can vindicate exaggerated acting and make it funny (as in much of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You, made a year after Nothing Sacred).   When the performers work themselves up into a lather without this kind of propulsion, it’s tiresome.  As directed by William Wellman, most of the cast of Nothing Sacred repeatedly calm down for just a couple of lines before whizzing back into hyperactivity.

    The leads are easier to take.  Carole Lombard is Hazel.  As in My Man Godfrey, I found a little of her ditzy abandon went a long way but her cheerfully empathetic playing makes her character more challenging.  Lombard is so far from condemning Hazel’s self-seeking duplicity that she gets you rooting for her.  Thank goodness, though, for Fredric March.  He can do comedy but even here he doesn’t go in for a comedy turn.  He’s splendidly depressed during Wally’s brief languishing on the obits desk and makes his gullibility rather touching.  The moment when Wally sees no alternative to socking Hazel on the jaw and she reciprocates is certainly the physical comedy highlight.  (Selznick International and United Artists, who distributed the picture, evidently saw this:  the Wikipedia article shows a theatrical release poster for Nothing Sacred done as a mock boxing promotion – ‘See the Big Fight! Lombard vs March’.)  One odd feature of the film is that it’s in Technicolor – an early use of the process and extraordinary for the genre.  You struggle to adjust to it.  A 1930s screwball comedy that isn’t black-and-white seems denatured.

    There’s a subsidiary difficulty, for 2020 viewers anyway, in the presentation of ethnic minorities and non-American characters.  In these respects, Nothing Sacred is a film of its time rather than especially offensive but it does depend quite a lot on assumptions that, for example, a Scandinavian-American fireman (John Qualen) and the trio of eminent European medics who reveal Hazel’s true state of health (Sig Ruman, Alex Novinsky and Alexander Schoenberg) are bound to be hilarious whenever they open their mouths and speak English in their silly foreign accents.   The idea that an African American might be a man of noble birth has to be a joke too.  In the opening scene, when the African grandee is unmasked as menial Ernest Walker (Troy Brown), it’s all too apt that his wife, who does the unmasking at a grand public event, is Hattie McDaniel – in a cameo comprising all of five words, delivered with great aplomb (‘That’s him … that’s my husband!’).  This is amusing but I rarely found myself suppressing inappropriate laughter:  the possibility of any kind of laughter didn’t arise.  At seventy-five minutes, Nothing Sacred is an unusually short feature but I was relieved when it was over.

    Enjoying My Man Godfrey less than I felt I should and this film hardly at all left me worried I’d a blind spot for classic screwball.  I thought I’d better check what the canon comprises.  I consulted the BFI website.  Their list of ’10 great screwball comedy films’ includes, as well as My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and The Awful Truth, two favourites of mine – Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story – and other films I like (It Happened One Night and, to a lesser extent, Bringing Up Baby).  Wikipedia’s longer list features Twentieth Century, also derived from a Hecht-MacArthur stage play.  Fingers crossed for that one, which is next up for me in BFI’s Carole Lombard season.

    10 January 2020

Posts navigation