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with the hectic electronica of Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, but the mind-bending score could have been replaced by overlays of multiple out-of-synch ticking clocks, to mark the overwhelming intensity of the drama’s chronological pressure.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.
