In the closing years of the last millennium, Harmony Korine was one of the most agitative forces in independent cinema. Admired and admonished in equal measure, Korine placed front-and-centre the stories and faces that cinema widely ignored. Like his New Hollywood forebears (John Waters immediately springs to mind), Korine filmed at the fringes of society; addicts, outcasts, weirdos. There was no pandering, manufactured nobility in Korine’s depiction of working-class America—instead, a candid street-level actuality.
The Safdie brothers have made a career of fusing this realism with entropic character arcs that come off like fables. Korine was nihilistic and detached. The Safdies present a moralistic world in decline; one corrupted by its inhabitants’ self-interest.
Their breakout piece, 2017’s Good Time, followed a psychopathic opportunist (Robert Pattinson) as he ran out of opportunities. Uncut Gems—their latest—employs the same structure. Adam Sandler portrays Howard, a sleazy jeweller; one we tellingly first meet through a full-screen endoscopy, who spends his days juggling dysfunctional work and home lives. One of the film’s iconic images, a jewel-encrusted Furby, subtly underlines in its tackiness that these elements of Howard’s life are fundamentally incompatible.
Sandler’s performance is what holds the threads of Howard’s life together. A duck in water, the oozy, schmoozy bullshit merchant he’s played for his whole career is as present as ever—it’s the world around him that’s changed. The Safdies are careful to limit sympathy towards Howard. But he is a compelling pair of eyes to be stuck behind; a camera carving flues through chaotic, neon-splattered Diamond District streets.
And what streets they are: shot in beautiful 35mm, soaked through with colour, alive with headache-inducing pandemonium and verbal sparring. In an offbeat and self-parodying cameo, there’s even time for a performance from The Weeknd. The film’s scattered and anxious energy is provided a scaffold by Daniel Lopatin’s score (one of the film’s many criminal Oscar snubs), a suite whose dizzyingly wide range includes both buoyant, Vangelis style synth-prog and thundering gamelan jegog. It’s another technical tour-de-force from the Safdies, whose canny directorial decisions have amalgamated into a film of impossibly high quality.
The panic, idiosyncrasy, style and dark humour of Uncut Gems merit comparison to Scorcese’s Mean Streets. But there’s something more contemporary at play here. The decline of protagonists’ lives in New Hollywood are almost always the fault of a system which excludes them—of a world unprepared for their radicalism.
The Safdies’ protagonists, by contrast, chauffeur millenial concerns; too deep into these systems to escape; driven by quick fixes, moment-to-moment pragmatism and unsustainable decision-making. Howard’s life is one we’ve all lived at some point—with no means of escape, no option to stop, suspended between unattainable success and inevitable failure. Uncut Gems lets you see it all from the passenger seat.
Uncut Gems is available to stream on Netflix now.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe