#153: Uncut Gems
Release Date: December 13th, 2019
Format: DVD
Written by: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie, and Josh Safdie
Directed by: The Safdie Brothers
4 Stars
Uncut Gems really, really works. If you were to qualify movies based on their sheer visceral impact on an audience, it’s a tremendous movie. I had to break my viewing up into two parts because I was getting so anxious watching it.
The story is simple enough, familiar in some ways and uniquely exotic in others. It’s about a man named Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a middle-aged jeweler in New York City’s Diamond District. He’s trying to score big by auctioning Ethiopian opals to Kevin Garnett (yes, the real Kevin Garnett), that he sourced directly from two desperately poor, thieving miners in Africa. In Howard’s rat trap mind, this big score will allow him to run off with his side chick, Julia (Julia Fox), and leave enough in the bank for the alimony and child support he’ll need for the family he’s leaving behind.
Besides his expertise in custom jewelry, he’s a hustler, a habitual liar, a gambling addict, a disorganized narcissist, and, importantly, a Jew.
In the same way Martin Scorsese can simultaneously glorify and demonize Catholic Italian-Americans in Goodfellas, the Safdie Brothers paint Howard Ratner in colors that range an entire spectrum of ethnic characterizations, both humanistic and stereotypical. It’s incredible, but true, that I think a nice Jewish man (a real mensch), and an anti-semetic asshole could probably sit down in a theater and watch Uncut Gems and love the movie together (although the mensch self-consciously so).
The Safdies speak fluently and deeply through Howard Ratner, to the point where the goyim is caught a bit off guard. Isn’t this all a bit problematic? the educated non-Jews might ask themselves while watching the movie. The Safdies seem to lean into these Jewish stereotypes rather than sensitively contextualize them. Howard’s obsession with money, his anxiety, his spoiled kids, his avoidance of his strong-willed Jewish wife, his preoccupation with scoring and getting an advantage, are overt themes of the movie, not subtexts.
But the Safdies love Howard Ratner. That’s the key. They present him as, yes, an at-times crude depiction of a New York Jew, but also as a man who is trying to survive this cold world the best he can. He cannot escape his instincts, the very core of his being, anymore than Kevin Garnett can escape being a 7-foot black man who can run fast and jump high. Both men were formed in the cosmos over millennium and delivered to earth, with spectacular colors and strengths and flaws, just like those Ethiopian opals (mined by African Jews nonetheless, Howard passionately mentions to Garnett).
The Safdies’ energy and ethnic themes share much in common with Scorsese - Uncut Gems works tonally like a two-hour version of Henry getting chased by helicopters in Goodfellas - but it is also worth mentioning that I saw a huge influence of Spike Lee on the Safdies’ style. The visuals and score are lush and deep, and their New York is filmed in a way that only a native New Yorker could.
It’s a beautiful heart-attack of a movie.
