Uncut Gems: “Taking It to the Rack”

Written and directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, as a vehicle for two icons, funnyman Adam Sandler and basketball great Kevin Garnett, Uncut Gems (2019) is breathtakingly profane, alarming, and comic. Most simply described, the movie is one long existential crisis, centered on a character who, from first to last, is dangling on the edge of oblivion and jerking everyone’s chain, his own included. Sandler fully inhabits the role of Howard Ratner, a manic middle-aged jewelry dealer and obsessive sports gambler, seriously in debt and banking on a big score. Not the least of the movie’s accomplishments is making this garrulous operator as appealing as he is appalling.

As in the Safdies’ earlier films—generally set in New York City and more than willing to walk on the less glamorous precincts of the wild side—there’s a strong documentary flavor here. Not only does Garnett play himself but, shot largely in Midtown Manhattan and seasoned with other nonactors, the movie is steeped in—almost dedicated to—local color, in this case, that of the Forty-Seventh Street Diamond District. Like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, the Safdie brothers are native New Yorkers. They grew up partially on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with their mother and stepfather and partially with their father in Forest Hills, the same Queens neighborhood that spawned the Ramones.

The brothers have a shared worldview and a quintessential protagonist. Homo safdiens is a desperate character—single-minded yet scattered, temperamentally outrageous and increasingly frantic, monumentally lucky but also cursed—a guy who, not unlike a certain kind of filmmaker careening from one crisis to another, connives, blunders, and improvises his way to the metaphoric end of the night.

To see a Safdie film is to recall the reentry into the city described by the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, “the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying . . .” It’s also to be reminded that the example set by John Cassavetes (whose Shadows is the foundational Manhattan indie) has inspired work that surpasses his own. Uncut Gems is a trip to be set beside such urban-crime odysseys as Cassavetes’s Los Angeles–set The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Elaine May’s downtown-Philadelphia “Cassavetes film” Mikey and Nicky, not to mention Scorsese’s Mean Streets and even the maddest of New York chase films, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant.

The Safdies, however, bring their own meshuggaas to the table. I can’t think of a match cut in any of the above films more audacious than the one in Uncut Gems that goes from the bowels of the earth—that is, an Ethiopian mine, or, more precisely, the depths of a newly excavated black opal—to the depths of Howard Ratner’s bowels as he receives a colonoscopy. Take it as a gut check. There’s an ontological uneasiness—perhaps a sense of post–Great Recession economic anxiety—and an underlying materialism to the Safdie worldview. Money is not an abstract value.

Howard may be the ultimate example of Homo safdiens, but he’s not the first. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the Safdie boys grew up in a Homo safdien world. Alberto Safdie, a Syrian Jew and the nephew of the distinguished Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, was both an avid movie buff and an amateur video maker, and as he turned his camera on his boys, so, after they graduated from film school, did the sons take their father, at least partially, as a subject and perhaps a source of inspiration.

Lenny, the antihero of Daddy Longlegs (2009), the first feature that the brothers made together, is a movie projectionist and a divorced dad (played by longtime Safdie collaborator Ronald Bronstein) who, in the course of caring for his two grade-school-age sons, commits crimes that range from drugging to kidnapping to spray-painting graffiti. He’s nailed only for the last one although periodically punished by phone calls from his ex-wife. (The boys, meanwhile, accept his overbearing personality and supremely irresponsible childcare skills with remarkable equability, mirrored by the filmmakers’ own evident affection.)

Totally unmodulated, Daddy Longlegs is a complete, grueling immersion in Lenny’s chaotic world—a kid’s-eye view of what it’s like to live in a constant state of emergency. Uncut Gems, partially inspired by Alberto Safdie’s sometime work as a salesman in the Diamond District, was intended as a follow-up to Daddy Longlegs. It was offered to Adam Sandler in 2012 but had to wait until Sandler saw their fourth feature, Good Time, a vehicle for Robert Pattinson, shown in competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. (The brothers’ second feature was the 2013 sports documentary Lenny Cooke, a portrait of a high-school basketball star whose professional career tanked; it was followed by the grim if richly textured addiction romance Heaven Knows What, inspired by lead actor Arielle Holmes’s life, released in 2014.)

Another sort of family movie, Good Time is a demented ode to fraternal love, starring Pattinson as Connie, a fearless hustler, utterly sociopathic and totally devoted to his developmentally disabled younger brother, Nick—played by Benny Safdie. The pair somehow manage to rob a bank; Nick is caught; Connie escapes with only a limited amount of time to raise bail. That proves unnecessary, however, as injured Nick has been transferred to the police ward of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Connie boldly engineers an escape, albeit for the wrong person, who, drafted as an alternative accomplice, leads him on a lengthy excursion to Adventureland (an actual amusement park in East Farmingdale, New York, that one suspects the Safdie boys visited with their father).

Throughout, the action is crowded by a violently handheld camera. (Sean Price Williams, another longtime collaborator, was the cinematographer.) Daddy Longlegs has few transitions and many close-ups; Good Time has fewer of the former and more of the latter. Each misadventure slamming the next, the movie’s long trip to nowhere is a riff that, however giddy, is also somewhat excruciating. Connie variously browbeats, bamboozles, and brazenly manipulates everyone with whom he comes into contact, particularly people of color—a trope of racialized aggression that Uncut Gems addresses directly and with heightened self-awareness.

Although introduced insides-first, Howard soon demonstrates the loudest mouth in a very loud movie. (The sound design is extraordinary. Overlapping dialogue is a constant, while the techno-symphonic score by Daniel Lopatin, who also worked on Good Time, is simultaneously obtrusive and ambient.)

Cell-yakking on the street, holding forth in his tiny showroom, Howard juggles multiple crises, dealing with a temperamental buzzer on the security door as well as the dim pair of Russian shtarkers sent by his Armenian loan-shark brother-in-law, Arno (Eric Bogosian), to collect a hundred-thousand-dollar debt, even while trying to impress the stellar new customer, Garnett, whom Demany has steered to his store.

Howard tries to interest Garnett in some ridiculous bling. His specialties include gem-encrusted Furbys with moving eyes. Unexpectedly, the opal excavated in the movie’s prologue arrives. Almost biblically, it has been transported from Ethiopia to Forty-Seventh Street in the belly of a fish. Having learned about the Black Jews of Ethiopia and their proximity to the Welo mines from the History Channel, Howard has spent months maneuvering for the gem and cannot resist showing Garnett his million-dollar treasure.

This origin story is crucial to the movie’s Black-Jewish synthesis. Significantly, the Safdies originally wanted the Knicks star player Amar’e Stoudemire, a Black Jewish man, for the Garnett role. And while Howard makes no attempt to pass himself off as a white soul brother, it’s striking that his sense of style—sports-style black leather jacket, manicured Vandyke, and ear studs—suggests fashion cues taken from the most dapper of Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver. (It’s possible that Howard would have subscribed to Cleaver’s analysis of capitalism as well, albeit from the viewpoint of one attempting to beat the house rather than overthrow the system.)

Hyping the opal’s qualities (“old-school Middle-earth shit”), Howard inadvertently sells Garnett on the gem’s powers. (Hilariously, the opal looks like a prop from a 1950s science-fiction film, or a chunk of concrete extracted from a pizza parlor with Blue Grotto–themed decor.) Garnett, who has been less than enthusiastic about Howard’s other wares, perceives the gem as a lucky talisman and insists on keeping it overnight, to give him luck in his playoff game in Philadelphia, leaving Howard his championship ring as security. With that transaction, we’re off to the races.

Howard instantly pawns Garnett’s ring for money to bet on Garnett’s opal-enhanced performance against the 76ers and, presumably, pay off Arno. Subsequent pit stops will include Philadelphia’s basketball arena, a middle-school play, the Manhattan high-rise love nest Howard rents—with whose money?—for his mistress and employee Julia (Julia Fox), a downtown club hosting the Canadian Ethiopian singer known as The Weeknd, and a family seder with his soon-to-be-ex-in-laws. In a drolly understated bit of business, Howard’s participation there consists of reciting the ten plagues while Arno, who may be his personal eleventh, fixes him with the evil eye.

The seder is actually a respite. By this time, Howard has already been roughed up by The Weeknd’s bodyguards and stuffed naked by Arno’s shtarkers into his own car trunk, not to mention being dressed down by his wife, Dinah (fiercely played by Idina Menzel), who rebuffs his strategic attempt at a rapprochement by coolly observing, “I think you are the most annoying person I have ever met.” Truly, Howard could talk a hole in your head.

Possibly the most problematic Jewish protagonist in American movies since Lenny Cantrow, the sporting-goods salesman who dumps his bride on their honeymoon to pursue the golden shiksa played by Cybill Shepherd in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Howard is an equal-opportunity exploiter who, while never quite crossing the line into criminal behavior, cheats, stiffs, and hustles just about everyone in the movie.

Harvey Keitel, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Jonah Hill were at one time or another considered as possible iterations, but Howard and Uncut Gems would be inconceivable without Sandler. Not only was the part written for him but Sandler played a crucial role in the Safdies’ psychosocial development. Typically, they credit their father.

Uncut Gems: “Taking It to the Rack”

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