Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2019)

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems

Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirsch, Keith Williams Richards, Jonathan Aranbayev, Noa Fisher, The Weeknd, Mike Francesca, Jacob Igielski, Wayne Diamond. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Hyperactive, motormouthed Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is trying to make it big in the bling trade, purveying jewelry, watches, and expensive geegaws to musicians, athletes, and the nouveau riche. But he keeps getting sidetracked by his own gambling and speculative ventures, the central one in Uncut Gems being an Ethiopian uncut black opal. The film begins in fact with a severely wounded Ethiopian miner at the site of the discovery of the opal. We then peer into the depths of the large uncut gemstone, a mysterious cosmic vision that eventually segues into the interior of Howard himself as he undergoes a colonoscopy. It's a striking journey, to be sure, and one that sets the tone for a movie that teeters between comedy and social consciousness, never quite resolving itself. The movie is held together by Sandler's performance, which seems to have taken many critics by surprise, even though he's done good work before for directors like James L. Brooks (Spanglish, 2004) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002). Spiraling into a chaos of his own making, taking his family and his mistress with him, Howard lives on the brink -- and dies there. The chief problem with the film is ending it: Howard can't be allowed to triumph, although he sort of does, or any hope of satisfying the demand for even poetic justice goes out the window. But the abruptness of his anticlimactic comeuppance seems just as arbitrary as a "happy ending" would have been. Better, I think, to have let Howard hustle his way onward into an ever more chaotic future. Worth watching for yet another dark safari conducted by the Safdie brothers, and for a career redefining performance by Sandler. 

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Buddy Duress, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Necro, Peter Verby, Erik Paykert. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Connie Nikas is a hoodlum with no redeeming qualities other than that dogs like him and that, in his criminal way, he's devoted to his mentally challenged brother, Nick. And that he's played by Robert Pattinson, which goes a long way in the raucous, often appalling, frequently hilarious Good Time. Pattinson's performance in the movie, like the later performances of Kristen Stewart, almost makes me want to check out the Twilight movies that brought them to fame -- a fame they've been trying to unburden themselves from ever since by working with highly independent directors like, in Pattinson's case, the Safdie brothers. This is the first film by the brothers that I've seen, and I was driven to check it out by a profile in the New Yorker occasioned by their latest release, Uncut Gems. At the film's start, Nick (played by Benny Safdie) is in a psychiatrist's office, reacting with paranoia and incomprehension to the therapist's questions and his note-taking, until Connie breaks into the session to take him away. The next thing we see, the brothers are robbing a bank. The theft and its aftermath are staged like a caper thriller, but with an overlay of pain because we're aware of how Connie is exploiting his brother for his own ends. And that mixture of pain and comedy persists throughout the film as Connie keeps screwing up and improvising more ingenious ways to get out of what he's screwed up. We can't really like Connie -- he's too much of a hoodlum for that, and he gets too many innocent people swept up in his manipulations -- but we have to have a kind of perverse admiration for his ingenuity. And that's where Pattinson's skill as an actor, reinforced by his good looks, works to keep us off balance. It helps, too, that an even worse hoodlum, Ray (Buddy Duress), gets caught up in Connie's misadventures, serving as a despicable foil. The Safdies and cinematographer Sean Price Williams ground the film's knockabout story in some very real Queens locations.