The Mesmerizing Chaos of “Uncut Gems”
ntil 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with the hectic electronica of Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, but the mind-bending score could have been replaced by overlays of multiple out-of-synch ticking clocks, to mark the overwhelming intensity of the drama’s chronological pressure.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.
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE PARENT GUIDE
Harry Potter has finally stepped out of “the cupboard under the stairs” and onto the big screen—an event long anticipated by anyone who knows they are a “Muggle” (someone without magical abilities).
The movie faithfully recounts the first novel in J.K. Rowling’s best selling children’s series of an orphaned infant who is left in the care of his neglectful aunt, uncle, and obese cousin. Life changes drastically for the eleven-year-old (Dan Radcliffe) when a letter arrives inviting him to attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Besides revealing his curious genealogy, Harry also learns of his parents’ untimely demise at the hands of the evil Voldemort, a confrontation that left young Harry with his trademark lightning bolt scar.
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The excitement of entering the ancient castle housing the school hardly compares to the magic Harry feels after making friends with Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). Settling into their studies of spell casting and potion making, they soon discover a teacher’s involvement in an evil plan. Their investigations lead them into the arms of a giant club-wielding troll, the jaws of a formidable three-headed dog, and the dark forbidden forest where they must serve a detention.
J.K. Rowling’s books have stirred up a cauldron of debate among parents concerned with the “hocus-pocus” occult themes pervading her works—leaving many as likely to be offended by the portrayals of witchcraft in this movie, as they will be by the fantasy violence. Darkness pervades this film, which offers many scenes brimming with scary music and Halloween like imagery including partially decapitated ghosts, death by magic wand, an evil being who seeks fresh unicorn blood, and a few surprise “boos.” Like the novel, Harry Potter may be too scary for young children.
Yet this softhearted wizard never forgets his love for his parents and the importance of working together to support his friends, allowing him to become a courageous doer of good. If your family has enjoyed the books, chances are your date with Harry at the movies will be just as enchanting.
