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
