Post Oscars, “Uncut Gems” Still a Diamond in the Rough

New York of the Safdies is not the Big Apple of the picturesque postcard skyline imagined by anyone not from the city; rather, theirs is the city block right in front of you – making it down this sidewalk, through this crowd, across that street, through that door, into this backroom to pay the piper; knowing, or not, when enough is enough. The brothers’ “Uncut Gems” with Adam Sandler, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, and Julia Fox is fierce and flawless, exhilarating and real, the Oscars’ most egregious oversight this year.

Most directors break down the visual structure of a scene into basic building blocks familiar to anyone who has gone to film school, or frankly, to anyone who’s seen movies: wide shot establishing the location or set, maybe a two shot of Person 1 with Person 2, then deconstructed into a series of back-and-forth reverse over-the-shoulders from one of them to the other, back and forth, cut to next scene.

Paul Thomas Anderson is an immediate example of a director who instead often opts to frame tableaux, providing several emerging options to which an audience may give its attention within an uncut, precisely-moving frame: wide shot of the protagonist looking over a map at a table while several others move from the corners of the frame, or out of background shadow, toward the center foreground where they figure out a course of action based on the map (“There Will Be Blood”).

Even better, are amalgams of both visual strategies: wide shot of a woman in her slip standing before a man in tuxedo, inserts of the tape measure at the man’s fingertips pressed against the angles and curves of her body, close up of exhilaration breaking through the timidity on her face, back to wide shot of what’s going on, enter the man’s spun-like-a-spinster sister who looks down the vulnerable woman who’s left to figure out what’s up with this picture. Close up on the man who thinks this will all be a fine job indeed (“Phantom Thread”).

There’s an unfolding of experience within Anderson’s frame, which, like most motion pictures, is helped by the virtue of being in a dark theater from which you’re not going anywhere and have nothing else to look at, allowing for a surrender to the movie’s grip on time; both yours and its own. In the aforementioned scenes of Anderson’s, as is often the case with Tarantino and Kubrick, it’s like sinking into a hot bath with the circumstances onscreen (an affect Tarantino often doesn’t get enough credit for).

Benny and Josh Safdie do neither pedestrianism nor tableaux. They create a hell of a visceral sensation between you and the motion of their picture whose structural relationship with the shot, from one shot to the next, incarnates a perpetual spawning of tight situations stemming from boilerplate narratives: money owed someone by Sandler’s jewelry store proprietor Howard Ratner, the quest to get his own nest egg back from Garnett who plays himself, all while trying to be present for both his estranged family and his sidepiece played by Playboy playmate and former dominatrix Julia Fox who may or may not be cheating on Howard with crooner The Weeknd. Howard’s reactions to the rock-and-a-hard-place circumstances of his relations, both business and personal, suck you down a rabbit hole with someone who might just be a brother of Sisyphus or Job.

The tension constructed within his store amidst the crowded comings and goings of prime clientele arranged by his fugazi-pushing employee Demany, played by Stanfield, percolates from the quotidian, to the opportune, to the mesmerizing and nail biting, with Garnett taking a shine to a particular piece of not-for-sale merchandise through which he believes to have seen nothing less than his very soul. The Safdies’ screenplay is a brilliant interweaving of fact and fantasy, using two actual playoff games played by the former NBA MVP and champion Garnett as, respectively, the instigation and climax of the movie’s thriller plot. When Garnett later returns to the store at a crossroads with Howard over the fate of the merchandise, the destinies of both men – for Garnett his legacy as a champion, and for Howard, his very life – are subservient to the need of compensation for extraordinary risk.

Sandler lives the role of Howard with the un-mannered realism a director would hope to get from a documentary subject. He extended his four-picture deal with Netflix this year, which has thus far resulted in a slate of motion pictures that reside somewhere in his usual thematic and tonal wheelhouse, ranging from near-slapstick to romantic comedy, culminating in what Indiewire claimed was Netflix’s most popular title last year, “Murder Mystery”. Much is made of Sandler taking on what many might call straight-up drama. Much has been made of it every time he has done so at least since 2002 when he was the lead in Anderson’s “Punch Drunk Love”, then again in James L. Broooks’ “Spanglish” in ’04, in Mike Binders’ “Reign Over Me” in ’07, Jud Apatow’s “Funny People” two years after that, Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women & Children” in ’14, and “The Meyerowitz Stories” by Noah Baumbach – selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in ’17, as was “Punch Drunk Love” seventeen years ago.

Baumbach’s tumultuous, hurtful, and healing “Marriage Story” is nominated for a Best Picture Oscar this year, and, as with the likewise Oscar-worthy work of its male lead Adam Driver, it’s something I could see Sandler doing. Why not? His bona fides speaks for itself, and the notion of nominating him for best actor this year for “Uncut Gems” should have been as taken for granted as Bill Murray’s in 2004 for Sofia Coppola’s “Lost In Translation”; though it pains me to suggest the merit of Sandler’s work for the Safdies, and in other non-comedies, through a prism as outlier to his comic body of work, or in comparison to anyone else’s.

All the performances in “Uncut Gems”, by both seasoned and first-time actors, are woven into the time bomb of Howard’s life so that they themselves are part of the rubber hitting the road. For sports fans, Garnett’s work is a pleasure to see, but Fox comes out of nowhere to shine as both an embodied presence of character and plot point as the only person Howard ultimately feels he can trust amid the carnage. “I feel like on the page you didn’t root for her as much,” Fox recently told NOIAFT founder Taylor Taglianetti, “…I didn’t want her to be the quintessential gold digger, mistress…”

Stanfield is no surprise to anyone. In the space between the hidden jewel of Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Short Term 12”, to Boots Riley’s boundry-pushing “Sorry to Bother You”, and Donald Glover’s Golden Globe winning “Atlanta”, you’d be hard-pressed to find a male actor who has accumulated as impressive and diverse a body of work in the last half-decade as him. His work as the connect on Howard’s payroll puts him in the purview of both professional sports and music as an outsider with a day pass; a connection which, like the one he has to his wife and kids, seems to be right in front of Howard, while being forever elusive.

I’m critical of the modern tendency to employ fast editing to turn a picture’s flow into baby food easily digestible to the masses who may very well want to know what happened, but are unwilling to surrender to a happening. The Safdies’ cross-cutting instead exemplifies the single virtuosity purely inherent to cinema; that is, editing’s infiltration of time and space, which they have done with the authenticity of character equaling destiny in a page-turner of a script, gripping you within the cinematic ride of 2019; an immediately felt experience of a motion picture with the portraiture to make the increasingly tight noose around its main character’s neck hit home every step of the way, as does the final epiphany of salvation at his fingertips.