Uncut Gems (2019)
Directed by Josh Safdie
A charismatic New York City jeweler always on the lookout for the next big score makes a series of high-stakes bets that could lead to the windfall of a lifetime. Howard must perform a precarious high-wire act, balancing business, family, and encroaching adversaries on all sides in his relentless pursuit of the ultimate win.
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Ratner is every bit as secular as the gambling duo Elliott Gould and George Segal in Robert Altman’s California Split (1974)—a movie to which Uncut Gems seems somewhat indebted, not least in the Safdies’ Altman-esque love for the sound of all-American clatter and chatter.
Two 1974 classics: “California Split” and “The Gambler.”
Y en Diamantes en bruto , de nuevo con Martin Scorsese, esta vez con el de Malas calles y su cine de rabia desbocada, a borbotones, con desequilibrios de guion pero con inusitada fuerza visual y sonora; y también con el Robert Altman de la insólita y ludópata California Split, y esas secuencias con cuatro o cinco personajes hablando a la vez, sin apenas profundidad de campo, turbadoras y conmovedoras.
The Safdies clearly idolize Robert Altman (and have openly cited his gambling romp “California Split” as inspiration here), but they’re more precisely operating within the grimy New York milieu that Martin Scorsese made famous in the ‘70s (Scorsese serves as an executive producer).
Like the late director Robert Altman’s movies (see 1974’s “California Split”), the audio track contains an earthy mix of constant background noise and chatter.
“Uncut Gems” plays like Scorsese’s “After Hours” on acid, with Howard getting sucked into a spiralling vortex of his own impulsive making.
Uncut Gems follows a similar formula, but it’s even slicker and more propulsive, evoking such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and After Hours in its ability to wring maximum ‘what now?’ tension from its milieu.
Howard lets him borrow it, and then everything turns all After Hours on him when he can't quite ever seem to get the opal back again.
Based on their father’s experiences in Manhattan’s Diamond District years earlier, Uncut Gems lacks the deliberate focus of something like Good Time , which spun out of a wild single night in the life of New York’s most self-assured con-man, but it’s more Casino than After Hours (the Scorsese comparison being more apt given that ol’ Marty is a producer on this one).
The film is also more of a deft, passionately dynamic homage to the 1970s, early ‘80s works of Martin Scorsese than Todd Phillips Joker even slightly was, Uncut Gems capturing the same urgent agency of films like Mean Streets , Taxi Driver and After Hours with viscerally audacious ease.
A good reference point might have been Scorsese’s underrated and arguably more commercial work from the ’80s – After Hours, in particular.
To wit, the smarmily charming, chronically self-sabotaging Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) in Uncut Gems is an updated, older and paunchier version of Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and if you know that 1973 film, you know to a large extent where Uncut Gems is going, and how it feels to get there.
It has the urgent look and jagged style of early Martin Scorsese films such as “Mean Streets.”
And as was the case with “Good Time,” there are traces of noir classics and New York thrillers, too, with “ Mean Streets ” being among the most fitting comparison points.
The film is also more of a deft, passionately dynamic homage to the 1970s, early ‘80s works of Martin Scorsese than Todd Phillips Joker even slightly was, Uncut Gems capturing the same urgent agency of films like Mean Streets , Taxi Driver and After Hours with viscerally audacious ease.
Held together by a hilarious, manic, tour-de-force performance by Adam Sandler—one of his very best which now ranks among “Punch Drunk Love” and those all-time touchstones (update your rankings asap)—the Safdies somehow outdo their last, similarly chaotic picture “Good Time,” and create a new “Mean Streets” for their own generation.
That quest suggests “Mean Streets” by way of Preston Sturges, with a touch of “Death of a Salesman” to boot — a mesmerizing chronicle of desperate schemes, and it’s hard to imagine anyone but Sandler at the center of it.
If you like your movies over-the-top like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Inglorious Basterds,” then has A24 a movie for you!
Uncut Gems had echoes of other stressful movies like A Serious Man and The Wolf of Wall Street , though neither film achieves the same level of adrenaline.
There are echoes of The Wolf of Wall Street ‘s Jordan Belfort here, minus the endlessly luxurious lifestyle.
Of course, I had to sit through the entire film as that's my job, and I have to say it was an arduous watch, not just due to its aggressive and sensory assaultive nature, but also because it nearly made it to "The Wolf of Wall Street" numbers in terms of F-bombs dropped.
Quizá —ojalá me perdonen el fanatismo— el productor ejecutivo de su última película, Martin Scorsese, pero su Lobo de Wall Street ( The Wolf of Wall Street , 2013) fue una sátira, motivada tal vez por un fraude financiero que sufrió en 2010.
Fox charms audiences in a way that feels manipulative but largely isn’t and her presence on screen is reminiscent of the dynamic energy Margot Robbie brought to her first major role in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
The film is also more of a deft, passionately dynamic homage to the 1970s, early ‘80s works of Martin Scorsese than Todd Phillips Joker even slightly was, Uncut Gems capturing the same urgent agency of films like Mean Streets , Taxi Driver and After Hours with viscerally audacious ease.
If Jerry Lewis had played Taxi Driver ’s Travis Bickle, he might have gotten the same misguided praise that Sandler has for going against his strengths and misrepresenting his anxieties.
With “Uncut Gems,” the directors have definitely hit the big time, making a divisive but undeniably rowdy character study that rivals such heavyweights as “Taxi Driver” and “Pi” in its single-minded commitment to a certifiable head case.
Also, Passover is coming up, and there’s a kids’ play he can’t get out of; Howard is like a Jewish Henry Hill during the climax of Goodfellas .
Their latest, which has been on their back burner since their first, may be unlike anything you’ve experienced, as if the helicopter sequence in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” were extended to feature film length.
In their portrayal of family loyalties and suppurating rivalries, there are echoes of what Martin Scorsese did for Italian-American gangsters in Goodfellas and The Irishman.
The idea of a feature-length panic attack, essentially the cocaine-chopper-and-cooking freak-out scene from GoodFellas stretched out to two hours, might not sound appealing.
The film imitates movie badassery (specifically Scorsese’s nerd nightmares The King of Comedy and After Hours ), but its scenes of blatant mischief don’t work out the existential, psychological dilemmas that Mailer explored with audacity and frankness.
The prologue recalls William Friedkin’s The Exorcist , a movie that similarly (and ominously) opens in a foreign land before transporting the viewer to America.
The siblings, who have experience turning mainstream icons into earring-clad scumbags thanks to 2017′s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, start big and fast and grimy – after an opening that pays homage to the underground horrors of The Exorcist, the directors dive deep into the under-the-skin horrors of the human body, tracing the inside of Howard’s colon – and do not stop to take a breath for one single vulgar moment.
More specifically, the dusty, enigmatic opener in “Uncut Gems” drolly echoes the start of “The Exorcist” (1973), where a priest at an archaeological dig in Iraq unearths the demonic relic that sets off the ensuing horror, the possession and spewing vomit.
The ancient power awakens in the film’s opening moments, the camera swooping like a locust across an Ethiopian mine to find a bunch of workers, overseen by their multinational bosses, in an opal-struck frenzy that recalls nothing so much as the discovery of the demon idol in The Exorcist .
The Safdies are a little too enamored with the unvarnished New York cinema of the 1970s, and Uncut Gems often feels self-consciously retro; it’s a tourist in the world of movies like Mean Streets and The French Connection, hoping it’s packed the right clothes to blend in.
The Safdies have been making films together since childhood, and Uncut Gems resonates with the sort of shared feverish shorthand and nonsensical inside jokes that tend to arise when two people are fully synchronized creatively– think of the claustrophobic psychedelia of early Ween, or perhaps what would happen if Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd’s characters in Bug focused their energy into making movies.
Two 1974 classics: “California Split” and “The Gambler.”
It's essentially a twisted, over/under gambling story, not unlike Karel Reisz's The Gambler (1974), wherein our protagonist rushes around borrowing things, hocking things, betting on things, and hoping everything evens out, or else he's going to meet an unpleasant fate.
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In making the results of a playoff series a life-and-death matter for an in-too-deep gambler, Uncut Gems owes not a little to 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, a film by another New York moviemaker distinguished by his commitment to capturing the tonality of the city—Abel Ferrara, who turned in a cameo in the Safdies’ 2009 Daddy Longlegs.
So, with a mix of guts and resourcefulness, the film rips a page out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love playbook and leans into certain Sandlerisms—primarily the idea of a loud, abrasive man-child without a behavioral filter—while placing them in a discombobulating new dramatic and artistic context, like Billy Madison remade as Abel Ferrara’s neo-exploitation classic Bad Lieutenant.
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
Uncut Gems follows a similar formula, but it’s even slicker and more propulsive, evoking such classics as Dog Day Afternoon and After Hours in its ability to wring maximum ‘what now?’ tension from its milieu.
But as he gets deeper into trouble with an ever-widening group of enemies, the movie’s tone darkens, ending in a hostage situation at the jewelry store that recalls the gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight standoff of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon .
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
It all plays out like a hyperactive cross between a hard-boiled John Cassavetes melodrama like Gloria or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and a character-driven Sidney Lumet thriller like Q&A or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead .
Like Robert Bresson’s similarly themed L’Argent, the endless cycle of greed can be traced back to a single piece of currency.
In this case, he adds a wistful, flute-infused motif that alternates with a gentle, whistled reverie, recalling the smeary character pieces of the 1970s--The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow--that clearly served as an influence.
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The jettisoning between the highest of highs and lowest of lows is familiar if you’ve seen any addiction movie, like Mississippi Grind or Requiem for a Dream, but it’s surprising how well Sandler pulls this off, how much hope and desperation he imbues into a character who could have easily been a caricature.
Instead, the Safdies’ faux realism and boastful trashiness recall Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream , an approach that trivializes the Jewish Prince predicament rather than tacke it — as in the buoyant yet weighty Vampire Weekend song “Harmony Hall,” in which Ezra Koenig confesses, “A nervous heart that beats like a young pretender’s / beneath these velvet gloves I hide the shameful crooked hands of the moneylender / cuz I still remember.”
Like The Wrestler , Darren Aronofsky's descent into the grubby world of provincial grappling matches, Uncut Gems takes us into a rarely examined social arena—the Diamond District of Midtown Manhattan, here portrayed as a place of frenzy and menace.
You might have to go back to 2008 when Mickey Rourke played Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler to find a lead character as demonstrably pathetic.
They also manage to weave their love of basketball into the drama (the film is set in the spring of 2012, drawing on an actual series of matches featuring Garnett’s Celtics team), which seems to embody their entire approach: Everything they do comes from a passion for their characters, their stories and their settings – a welcome throwback to the ’70s, when other Jewish New Yorkers like Alan J. Pakula, Jerry Schatzberg and Peter Bogdanovich were making character-driven dramas like “Klute,” “The Panic in Needle Park” and “The Last Picture Show.”