Until now, I thought that the best metaphor for filmmaking that I’d ever seen in a movie was found in Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low”: throwing bags of money out of a speeding train. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film, “Uncut Gems,” offers a better, if more elaborate, one, when its protagonist, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Diamond District jewelry dealer who’s also a compulsive gambler, places a bet on a basketball game. Howard isn’t merely risking money on the outcome; he’s crafting a story that, for the bet to pay off, has to come out right—who wins the opening tip-off, how many points a particular player will score, whether or not the winning team covers the spread. Howard’s story has to correspond to reality, or, rather, vice versa. With his grandiose vision of winning, he’s the ultimate fantasist and, in his mortal dependence on what actually happens, the ultimate realist. He’s a lot like a director behind a camera.
The soundtrack of “Uncut Gems” is jittery with the hectic electronica of Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, but the mind-bending score could have been replaced by overlays of multiple out-of-synch ticking clocks, to mark the overwhelming intensity of the drama’s chronological pressure. The Safdie brothers’ movie is desperately timed; the forty-eight-year-old Howard measures out his days and nights not in coffee spoons but in the arc of a three-pointer, the slam of a car door, the paired buzzes of his showroom’s double-safe, electrically controlled bulletproof-glass barriers. Howard’s very survival is a matter of precise timing and of his urgent, off-balance storytelling. (The movie’s editing, by Benny Safdie and Ronald Bronstein—who co-wrote the script with the brothers—evokes the visual clamor of its clashing urgencies.) Howard tries to sidestep his creditors and their violent enforcers with instantaneously improvised lies that have to be timed with a comedian’s precision to elude their grasp. He plans to pay one with money owed to another and winnings that haven’t yet come in, and, if his borrowings and his scams, his debts and his dodges, don’t fit together in exactly the right sequence, the entire house of cards that is his life will come tumbling down.
It’s also a movie of a cruel physicality, of the clash of textures, of the hard and the soft, the viscous and the solid and even the ethereal—a tale of blood and fluids that starts in Ethiopia, in 2010, where a miner is carried from his worksite with a horrifically bloody wound, and continues to a video screen in New York, in 2012, where Howard is having a colonoscopy and a doctor is narrating his camera’s enteral journey. It’s only the first of the movie’s bloody byways, only the earliest of the movie’s visions of bodily mortification. Howard is, from the time he’s in motion, in danger, confronting in his showroom a pair of toughs sent by a loan shark named Arno (Eric Bogosian) to whom he owes a hundred thousand dollars. The numbers may be an abstraction, but the goods—gemstones, fancy watches (whether hot or legit), and cash—are physical, as are the threats by which they’re extracted from debtor to creditor.
From the start, Howard—wearing an ostentatious leather jacket, a two-tone shirt with the tag still dangling out of its collar, ever so slightly too decorative glasses, an overly trimmed goatee, and a watch that could build biceps—strides through the Diamond District talking at top speed into his cell phone. He’s plotting the score of a lifetime: importing—or, rather, smuggling—a rare, uncut, large black opal from Ethiopia, which he’s expecting to sell, through an upscale auction house, for a million dollars. But, when the opal finally reaches his showroom, other business gets in the way: Howard’s employee, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who’s his liaison to athletes and hip-hop artists, brings the pro-basketball star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) to the showroom. There, Garnett sees the opal, feels its power (which Howard has been hyping), and decides that he must have it as an aid to his game. (Garnett was playing, in 2012, for the Boston Celtics, and the action is set during that year’s playoffs.) Howard is loath to part with the opal, but he senses that the transaction gives him a betting advantage.
Meanwhile, another clock is ticking: Howard’s marriage, to Dinah, pronounced “Deenah” (Idina Menzel), is over; it’s in its zombie-like afterlife. The family (including their teen-age daughter, a near-adolescent son, and a young boy) lives in a house in the suburbs, but Howard is there only symbolically: Dinah is ending the marriage, but the couple have agreed to stay together through Passover to maintain a temporary illusion of family unity. Howard comes home after work to see the children and then, on pretext of more work, leaves—for an apartment in midtown, where he lives with Julia (Julia Fox), a young woman who works for him in the showroom. Julia is a salesperson who trawls the night life for potential customers; she may or may not also be cheating on Howard, but, in any case, she parties hard and allays Howard’s constant suspicions with sexual enticements.
The Safdies have long specialized in drama kings and queens, in protagonists who knock their lives out of joint and into action with breathless, reckless, perpetual cycles of frenzied, self-imposed challenges and daily dangers. Howard is the first whose drama seems essentially creative—he is, in effect, playing a dangerous series of shell games for high stakes in order to lend his life high dramatic moment, and his elaborate invention of lies to shimmy out of his creditors’ menacing clutches comes off as a performance in which he himself delights. His gem-and-jewelry business is already stressful and risky enough, but it’s his gambling—and the intricate flow chart of debts and cadges—that fills his life with stories and turns every moment into a life-or-death crisis. The highs of success (rare though they may be) aren’t the sole point, and the money itself isn’t the key payoff: it’s the creation and experience of a dramatic life, the daily tensions and thrills and dangers, the off-balance improvisational theatre into which he has converted his humdrum suburban existence—to which, nonetheless, for sentimental reasons, he clings fiercely and desperately. Even the punishment, the fear, and the humiliation seem to be part of the terrible pleasure.
“Uncut Gems” jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone: Menzel’s swing between the steadfast and the derisive, Bogosian’s terrifying calm, Stanfield’s good-humored acuity, Garnett’s elevated poise, Fox’s survivalist ferocity, and the vivid contributions of a wide range of other performers, including such notables as Judd Hirsch and, in voice-over roles, Tilda Swinton and Natasha Lyonne, plus real-life celebrities (the Weeknd, playing himself, and Mike Francesa, playing a bookie)—along with a host of newcomers, such as Keith Williams Richards and Tommy Kominik, as enforcers, and Roman Persits, as a jeweller—swirl and clash and rumble, in a symphonic tangle of overlapping and intertwining high-volume voices.
The Safdie brothers have always been artists of chaos, whose daring methods of filming (including working on location without permits and blending their scripted action with whatever comes up in the street) have been reflected in their films’ frenetic action and reckless characters. But in “Uncut Gems” their system and their cinema, the story of the production and the story that they tell, converge all the more violently, and in risky new ways. This is, by far, the Safdies’ biggest-budget movie to date. The figure hasn’t been disclosed, but the movie was co-executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and, as Kelefa Sanneh reports in his profile of the Safdies in The New Yorker, it’s the first time that the filmmakers had to deal with trucks and trailers on location, and they had to tailor their practices to fit. After making movies on ultra-low budgets for more than a decade, and with an only slightly elevated one for “Good Time” (which stars Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Jason Leigh), it’s clear that they know what to do with the money: in a very literal sense, the money is on the screen, and, for that matter, the money suffuses the action and provides the movie with its very tone.
First, the money brings the movie a sense of scale, with crowd scenes and complicated street scenes—a wide scope of action. Second, it buys a cinematic entrée into a milieu of money, and the accoutrements and settings to match (a helicopter, for instance), and enables the brothers to film high rollers’ real-life places and activities. Third, and perhaps even more decisively, the money lets the Safdies fill the film with people of money and power: actors (starting with Sandler, a prosperous producer as well as a star) whose status and worldliness, their habit and adeptness in dealings with power, are reflected in the expansive, determined, forceful swing of their performances, of their very presences, which fill an enormous amount of space and clash loudly at high speed in the confines of their high-pressure confrontations. (The cinematography, by Darius Khondji, catches the ferocity of these clashes—yet it also emphasizes the actors’ presences, personalities, and appearances somewhat more conventionally than do the radically fragmented images of Sean Price Williams in the Safdies’ last two movies.)
The casting renders “Uncut Gems” a virtual documentary of outsized personalities, their real-world authority, and their essentially creative (and potentially destructive) passions. Yet there’s another documentary element that arises both from the casting and from the setting in the Diamond District milieu: “Uncut Gems” is a very Jewish movie, filled with anecdotal elements of Jewish life—the scene of the Passover Seder, when the many children in the Ratners’ extended family search for the afikomen, the hidden matzo, or when Howard, reading from the Haggadah, recites the litany of the ten plagues and makes a joke about the last, the killing of the first-born, have the ring of authenticity. Demany puts his finger on the long-standing connection of New York Jews to the game of basketball; there’s a moment when Dinah, with the women of her family in the family home, tries on her decades-old bat-mitzvah dress. But the practical details of Jewish life are far less substantial, and far less crucial to the movie, than the way that the movie is tonally Jewish.
The hustle knows no nationality, but the Forty-seventh Street trade in precious stones reminds me of the old joke about why there are so many great Jewish violinists: because when you’re being chased out of town by the Cossacks, it’s harder to carry a piano. Portable wealth defined by no one currency corresponds to the longtime demands of rushed migration, as well as the inner state of exile and outsiderhood that’s part of the Jewish heritage (indeed, in the Passover story). The panic and the paranoia that drive Howard have an underlying historical undercurrent, a weird sense of belonging that he finds in the uncertainty, the instability, the terror, the exclusion that he endures—even if he largely brought it on himself. The very pavement seems hot under Howard’s feet, and even if much of that heat is of his own making, he can’t stand still long enough to put out the fires—and anyone with the misfortune to get involved with him is also inevitably going to get burned.
The Safdies offer another brilliant masterstroke that also renders the movie a dazzling blend of fiction and documentary: they boldly and intricately integrate the scripted drama with historical events from the time period in which the film is set. The result is a set of amazing moments, ranging from the loopy to the tragic, from the overtly confrontational to the brazenly passive-aggressive, from the grand scale of hot pursuit to swoonily celestial musings, that suggest with a mighty wink that there’s something essentially comedic in this story of constant dangers and relentless terrors. This method does more than suggest the Safdies’ taste for elaborate antics, it suggests a sense of life that underpins it: it reflects their awareness that what takes place in the world is often absurd, incredible, filled with the sort of astonishing twists that people say they would never believe if they saw them in a movie—and much of that absurdity is painful, sad, and monstrous. It’s comedy as wonder and as critique: it’s amazing that the world is like that, and incomprehensibly ridiculous that it should be so, too. “Uncut Gems” looks frankly at a fucked-up world as the filmmakers shake their heads in bewilderment.
