Uncut Gems
Two weeks ago, I saw Uncut Gems, the new movie directed by brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, with my whole family. I’d advised them against coming. I knew the Safdies’ work: I’d seen Good Time (2017) — the brothers’ stressful, sly parable on fraternal devotion and lost innocence — just a few months before. I appreciated that movie, but it was not my cup of tea; myopic and violent antihero neo-noirs aren’t usually where I get my kicks. I was seeing the new one purely as an intellectual exercise.
I hardly looked forward to Uncut Gems as a source of wholesome fun, let alone a viable family outing. But my parents and brother, along with the audience we saw it with, turned out to be troopers: only two people in the whole theater left before the movie was over. When it had ended, and we were walking to our car, my brother turned to me and asked, “That was bad, right?”
It was a simple remark, but it struck me as wonderfully pertinent. When we talk about movies being “bad,” we usually mean that they weren’t made well or that we found them unappealing. But I think the question can have another connotation — unintended, perhaps, but loaded with meaning. Because “badness” isn’t a word associated solely with quality: it relates to morality, too.
I happen to think that Uncut Gems is extremely well-made — but I also agree with my brother. I think it’s a bad movie.
Despite its prevalence in the early twentieth century, the subject of morality hasn’t really been a focus of recent conversations about movies. And for a valid reason: in the early 1930s, the Legion of Decency used religious dogma to protest Hollywood’s depiction of, among other things, violence, miscegenation and “white slavery.” In response, studios implemented the Hays Code — a self-imposed censorship that severely restricted what could be shown in American movies; the replacement of the Code with the letter-ratings we know today occurred in the 1960s.
The battle to, in effect, win back free speech in movies took a long time — but that doesn’t mean the question of morality ended with a ratings system. The debate still flares up every now and then (e.g., the release of Joker last year), but it’s largely glossed over — both by distributors who aim to draw large audiences, and by critics who resort to soapboxing as opposed to careful evaluation.
As we’ve seen from the culture that fostered Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, media plays a significant role in shaping audiences’ perspectives, both political and moral. Sometimes movies and TV shows employ exploitive tactics in order to make the strongest impression, or to secure the highest ratings. A director may utilize bloodshed, crass language or sexual objectification to further the impact of their work — and while censorship is the worse of these two evils, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the evil of these more indulgent measures also has a damaging effect on the integrity of public speech.
Movies can be irresponsible; movies can be immoral. So is it possible for a movie be considered “bad” in the way that a person may be? No movie, like no person, is wrong for existing — but isn’t it possible for a movie to do bad, just as a person might?
Uncut Gems begins at the start of the last decade. A worker at an African jewel mine suffers a horrific leg injury, and in the commotion that follows, two miners sneak underground and steal a small rock embedded with a lustrous black opal. Two years later, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jewelry dealer in New York City’s Diamond District, has acquired the stone and plans to sell it at auction for, he hopes, upwards of a million dollars. The scene where he first gets the opal — tearing it from its packaging, cradling it like a newborn babe — is reminiscent of the moment when Caspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) first beholds the eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941): both men are fervent treasure-seekers, addicted to the thrill of pursuit… at last united with their ultimate object of desire.
In both cases, too, the glory cannot last, for a man who runs cannot run forever. What follows in Uncut Gems is a series of fortuitous yet self-manufactured events, as Howard scrambles to keep up with an endless mess of his own half-promises, gambles and cop-outs. He faces ultimatums from a murderous loan shark (Eric Bogosian), his estranged wife (Idina Menzel), a fair-weather mistress (Julia Fox) and even basketball star Kevin Garnett (played by himself). Each crisis is of his own making; each festers with unforeseen consequences. Things will not turn out well for Howard. A good thing, like good luck, can’t last long for him — he’s already on to the next bet.
Such a hectic and, yes, violent ethos is what ultimately distinguishes Uncut Gems, both stylistically and as an immoral work. Of course, narrative cinema has a long history of being tied to violence: in The Great Train Robbery (1903 — what some scholars consider to be the first narrative film), the action ends with a gunshot directed toward the audience, and a flash of red. Uncut Gems also ends with a sanguine tableau, though not from splatter: instead of taking the bullet, the camera ventures into its victim’s wound and kaleidoscopes through a fantastic tunnel of capillaries, tissue and neon lights. The “shot” ends not with a wall of bone marrow but, rather, an extraterrestrial view of the cosmos.
It’s a showboat moment, radiant and absurd, and a fanciful finish to the film’s overall sleazy mise-en-scène. (There’s a shot to mirror it at the beginning of the movie — one that probes not through a bullet hole but through a substantially more, shall we say, organic orifice.) But the shot also literally embodies Uncut Gems’ peculiar sensibility: through violent disposition, human waste becomes a vessel for spectacle. The body through which, at the end of the movie, the camera reaches toward heaven is shown to be as material as the object it — or its former spiritual occupant — hustled after; all that sustained it in life was the adrenaline of risk.
Violence isn’t simply a drastic measure one may or may not take: violence is the essence of life.
The ethics of this sensibility — never spelled out for the audience, yet implicit in every choice made by the brothers Safdie — are suspect. But the Safdies have been lauded for their depictions of violent people, and their directorial philosophy affirms the provocative focus of their work. In a recent New Yorker profile, Josh Safdie argued that movies “are against nature. It’s the most perverse art form. You’re trying to imitate life.” For one thing, this sentiment speaks to his lack of knowledge of other artistic media; it also assumes that art is a process of replication — similar to cloning or comic impressions. (It’s a cloying point of view — weirdly old-fashioned. He’s saying that movies are both for and against life in the same breath.)
More importantly, Safdie’s comment reveals a lot about his psyche, and the psyche of his films. Uncut Gems is full of people, expendable to each other, who snap and falter before their audience like tigers trapped in a cage. They growl and pounce. This is meant to amuse us — but several of the movie’s scenes take place on real New York City street corners (the brothers filmed without permits), including fight sequences, and you can spot oblivious pedestrians watching from afar, shocked by what they assume is a real assault in progress.
Such tactics come across as exploitative and sadistic. The Safdies don’t care about other people so much as they watch them with care — they study and then highlight nuances of social behavior in a manner that comes across as at once glorious and profoundly distancing. Howard Ratner may be the protagonist of Uncut Gems, but he’s never granted authority alongside the camera; we never share in his conscious experience. That right is reserved for his directors, who marvel at the roughhewn charisma of their prized objects: that is to say, of their people.
In Uncut Gems, everyone exploits one another as means to an end. The same is true of its directors: the Safdies harness perversity if for no other reason than to harness it. They’re research scientists who make a vague hypothesis and then mess with the test subjects; that’s their particular perversion.
Speaking of perversity, I’d like to know when independent filmmakers are going to stop thinking that Adam Sandler ought to be taken seriously. Despite roles in films like Punch Drunk Love (2002), Funny People (2009) and The Meyerwitz Stories: New and Selected (2017), Sandler has made a name for himself playing to the lowest common denominator. From Billy Madison (1995) to Jack and Jill (2011), he has never initiated a project of any depth; he’s never proven that he has anything to offer beyond an elbow fart. It’s not that he’s a bad actor (though there are plenty of unpaid actors who are at least as capable as he is) — it’s that, like the Safdies, Adam Sandler has exploited human fault to further his own station in life.
I consider it immoral to depict human failure without also striving to recognize human dignity. When he played the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin may have been incompetent, but he was also scrupulous and proud. Buster Keaton was spacey, yet he redeemed his idiocy with majestic athleticism. Sandler is a comic performer with no redeeming features: he just makes a scene, and then giggles at himself.
There’s a moment in Uncut Gems when Howard — recently rejected by his girlfriend — sheepishly turns to his wife, Dinah, and suggests that they try to make amends. She stares at him, and struggles not to laugh. “Your face is stupid,” Dinah says. “You’re the most annoying person I’ve ever met.” In a way, the line could be a commentary on Sandler: he brings a stupid aura to everything he does — an aura of oafishness, incompetence… a desire to be approved of and a lack of imagination as to how to solicit that attention outside of buffoonery. Later in the movie, when Howard breaks down, slobbering and blubbering, in the arms of his prodigal mistress, he whines: “Nothing works out for me!” I couldn’t help rolling my eyes — not only at Howard, but at the man playing him, too.
The disconcertingly prevalent sentiment that the Sandman was “snubbed” in this year’s Oscar nominations — that he “deserves his due” — is nonsense. Adam Sandler is one of the most successful men in Hollywood, and he built that success off exploiting audiences’ expectations, promoting stupidity as a heroic trait. He invites us to feel sorry for him; that’s how he compensates for his inadequacy.
All of this is to say that Uncut Gems has a lot more going on than I think even it is aware of. The plot is packed, wired with platinum barbs and gold-studded sucker punches. The Safdies are terribly good at what they do; even as they repulse, their movies manage to impress. It’s not any artist who would even think to indulge so relentlessly in the uglier side of life; their great virtue is in recognizing how inherently attractive tasteless people are. Most of us, if passing him in the street, would try to avoid looking at Howard Ratner — even if, secretly, a part of us wanted to. It’s to the Safdies’ credit that they do look. The fact that they hit “record” is what constitutes the fine line between benevolence and abuse.
Sometimes, though, their unorthodox methods pay off without any moral hindrances. The biggest surprise in Uncut Gems is Kevin Garnett; who could’ve suspected that this former basketball star would prove to have as much naturalism and ease in front of a movie camera as he did on the court? A revelation to watch, Garnett is also the most interesting character in the movie: after Howard shows him the black opal, Garnett becomes obsessed with it and “borrows” the gem from Howard as a good luck charm. Much of the movie consists of Howard’s efforts to get the stone back — but following a cascade of events Garnett ends up in Howard’s office, near the end of the movie, prepared to buy the prized opal.
At this point in the story, Howard believes he’s nearly in the clear: his plan is to bet the money Garnett pays him on the Celtics’ game that night. If Garnett’s team wins, Howard will cash in on over a million dollars. He basks in his premature victory, going on about what the money will mean for him… but as he rambles, Garnett watches: the athlete’s initially wild-eyed cockiness gives way to a more skeptical, measured gaze. He’s witnessing Howard, now, taking him in. He sees Howard’s failure; he pities him. It’s a moment of tragic reflection: a figure of superiority recognizing his disgusting and necessary foil.
At the end of the day, Garnett will walk away a champion — secure in his wealth, feverish in his devotion to his own athleticism, his pride. People treat him like he’s a grail himself, but in fact he’s simply a man who knows what he wants. In a movie obsessed with materiality, Garnett is the one person sensible enough to know when to push, and when to step away.
