Uncut Gems

01/11/2024

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Hectic Density

      There are many good films on gambling but few have the frenetic energy of Uncut Gems. It is a film that moves so erratically fast that the plot isn’t so much hard to follow but difficult to keep pace with. When we usually speak of following a story, the verb is rarely associated with the speed of the work even if the term implies it. To follow a film, to keep up with, to keep pace with, all indicate speed, but most of the time films are happy to apply a gentler rhythm no matter the serpentine narrative it is contained by. The difference between The Big Sleep and Uncut Gems can’t be explained in plot terms. The Big Sleep was famously so complex that nobody could explain who was responsible for a particular murder, though watching it the film seems no faster than others of its period. It can seem as sedate as Casablanca or Gaslight.  

            Uncut Gems though within the intricacies of its story insists at the same time on the intensity of its form, and few contemporary films exemplify better David Bordwell’s term intensified continuity than the Safdie Brothers’ work. Bordwell explains the various ways films have become more intense, noticing singles rather than two shots, a variety of lens lengths, a shorter shot time and so on. There is nothing new in his claim but far more attention to detail than usual in his exploration of it. “Most of these techniques have been remarked on before, often by irritated critics, but none have been  considered closely…” (The Way Hollywood Tells It) While a 40s film may offer a conversation uncut for a minute, evident for example in a medium shot of the two leading characters in Gaslight as Charles Boyer tries to persuade Ingrid Bergman to marry him, many a contemporary work would cut into the material far more frequently to generate a tension in the form as readily as in the story. This didn’t mean that classic Hollywood couldn’t up the pace when it felt dramatically necessary, or to create the most violent of effects in the form; the Psycho shower scene is a famous and brilliant example. But Bordwell has more than a point when he says, “the strategies I’ll be discussing have become dominant, even domineering, increasingly filmmakers aren’t encouraged to explore other options.” (The Way Hollywood Tells It) But is Uncut Gems a film that conforms to these newer expectations, just making the work faster still, or do the Safdies manage to convey in the film a technique that is very much allied to the energy of its central character and the frentic pace at which he lives?

      To answer this question we can look first at the film’s third scene, after the first shows us the discovery of an African opal that Howard (Adam Sandler) will buy and a match cut from the caves of the African mine to Howard’s innards during a colonoscopy. In the third, he goes into his jewellery store, only to find waiting for him a couple of heavies looking to hurry up the repayment of a debt. Between Howard’s arrival and one of the debt collectors slapping him less than a minute has passed and around fourteen shots have been used. Throughout the camera is constantly on the move, a subplot is developing over some customers, and his staff are trying to talk to him about pressing concerns. We also have a non-diegetic score trundling through the scene, not exactly drowning out the dialogue but making it no easier for the viewer to hear. There are three potential events in the developing sequence. Next to the sedate plot in a typical forties film like Gaslight, and at the same stage of the narrative, the Safdies have indeed intensified the continuity, with Joshua Safdie talking of the technical difficulties in immense detail when interviewed. “The way we shoot, we try to mix in with the energy of the street as much as possible. On 47th Street in particular, it was difficult… We made it clear when we were interviewing assistant camera operators that we wouldn’t be using marks. ‘You’re going to have to shoot anamorphic lenses, low-angle, two to three inches of lee-way to stay in the right depth of field.’” (Little White Lies) They originally wanted to shoot the scenes in Harold’s store on location but accepted it was logistically impossible and went for a sound stage on Long Island. Locations often matter to the directors, with their earlier work, including The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Heaven Knows What and Good Time all making much use of New York, with Joshua saying “…what you see is a lot of films close down streets and have extras who pretend to be pedestrians. When you start doing things like that, you start sucking the soul out of the city.” (Little White Lies) It is a common remark that a city is a character in a film, but for the Safdies it is more a source of energy. Joshua says, “when you’re making a movie, you’re just trying to capture energy at any moment, so you want your set to be indicative of that energy.” (Moviemaker) Benny Safdie says “…I get so much just by riding the bus or taking the train. You see people, you hear conversations. Just by walking for five minutes, there’s such a density to that experience.” (Film Comment)

        Many newer filmmakers are interested in the intensification of form without necessarily drawing on the energy of place. Numerous films of the late 60s and early 70s were the opposite: influenced by the documentary movements of the sixties that took advantage of lighter equipment, the directors would shoot on the streets, but without the aspects of cutting and camera movements Bordwell speaks about in the context of recent cinema. Central to what makes Gaslight feel like an old movie is that it has neither location shooting nor shorter takes, nor a constantly moving camera as people talk over each other. It allows us to follow the story, of course, but at a pace that needn’t be cardiographically undulating. This rests it seems on insisting on the faster pace of cinema but also drawing on the faster pace of the city too. Is this merely the Safdie Brothers trying to up the ante, seeing how fast they can make a film just as some filmmakers have tried to offer the longest of single takes, with De Palma, Scorsese, Altman and others all showing how brilliantly they can block a scene for a single shot? Such a claim would be disrespectful to the Safdies as well as Scorsese and co, as there needs to be a purpose beyond the formal, without indicating that the technique used only serves content. If the form is too welded to that content it will be visually predictable; if too removed from it the form can seem arbitrary. Gilberto Perez puts it nicely when saying of the ending to Godard’s Alphaville, the “closure of the form does not pretend to have settled the content.” (The Material Ghost) Or as Antonioni says of Blow-Up, “my problem with Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form.” 

      Central to much that passes for modernist films rests on this: how to separate form from content not because there is a great dichotomy between them or that even the form/content debate is of much use, but to illustrate that the developing forms needn’t always be there to serve the immediacy of what is perceived as content. Perez notes that Godard offers a visual beauty and potential finality as in Alphaville he shows “overexposed points, stars that shine in the underexposed light, the tall, bowing street lights along the highway, extending far into the distance and coming toward us as the camera moves following the car…” But these images of finality aren’t quite matched by the decisiveness of the story. Equally, in Blow-Up, when we see a long shot of the leading character, his sudden disappearance from the shot as if he’s evaporated, and the music and the END credit coming in, we know that while the film has formally ended, the content hasn’t quite left us with the confidence that the experience is over. The viewer is left still to think about what the film has been saying. The form used is deliberate but its meaning cannot be explained by its pertinence to the story the film tells. As Antonioni proposes, he wants to explore reality but with abstraction and out of this combination he may not immediately be sure what he has achieved just after making it: “I am still in the ‘secret’ of the film.” (Architecture of Vision)  

        Films usually reveal their secrets through the stories they tell, and the secret is more often than not a narrative revelation or development so that, when the film concludes, the style used has revealed the content it contains. When a romantic film ends with a high-angle shot as a couple walk down the street, we are unlikely to ask how many children they will have; the story cannot conclude until we know. But when neither member of a couple turns up at the end of Antononi’s The Eclipse the viewer might find themselves baffled by their absence and by the camera’s presence. The gap between the story and the form seems enormous, but at the same time, the film’s secret remains. Why have the couple both refused to show up? There is a lot more to Antonioni’s cinema of course than such ellipses and the speculation that can come out of them, but what we wish to make clear is that questions of form unaligned to the clear designation of character and situation needn’t be seen as meretricious or obscurantist.  

       Few would probably say Uncut Gems is obscure, but they might wonder whether the story could have been told in a simpler, clearer way and to understand why it hasn’t been wouldn’t only reside in saying the film reflects the tension of Howard’s predicament. It also reflects the intensified continuity Bordwell shows as a common feature of contemporary film, just as the modernist approaches were a significant development in sixties works by Antonioni and Godard. A cynic might say this is filmmakers reflecting fashion, but a better approach is to see them reflecting what is possible at a given moment. Blow-Up and Alphaville would have been unlikely to have been made twenty years earlier than they were: they came when film had established a vocabulary and they wished to see how this could be both developed and its conventions undermined. Uncut Gems is less ambitious than Blow-Up certainly, and much of Godard too, but while Adrian Martin reckons, comparing the Safdie brothers film to The Gambler and The Bad Lieutenant, that Uncut Gems “…clearly owes a lot (without much benefit resulting) to both these predecessors”, we are still left asking what it does add to these and other gambling films. These would include The Cincinnati Kid, California Split, The Bay of Angels, The Sting, Hard Eight, Molly’s Game, The Croupier, Casino, The Card Counter, The Hustler, The Colour of Money. But before asking what it adds, it is useful to differentiate between three different aspects to gambling in cinema: the gambling addiction in The Gambler, Bad Lieutenant and Uncut Gems, the skill of the gambler in The Cincinnati Kid, The Hustler and The Colour of Money, and the presence of gambling in Molly’s Game, Casino and The Croupier. 

     In the films offering the skill of the gambler, the figure takes risks involving their own talent, while in the presence of gambling the film is often set in a casino environment without the central characters especially involved in the thrill of the win. In the films most resembling Uncut Gems, the gambler places bets with the high of hoping that luck will go their way. Reviewing  the film, Sheila Malley says, Howard is “useless without panic” (RogerEbert), while Glenn Heath Jnr sees the film is “exhilaratingly stressful.” (Cineaste) It creates probably the best possible cardiacal angle available in the gambling film. If our leading character were Garnett, the basketball player who ends up buying the opal that is central to the story, then this would be closer to The Hustler or The Cincinnati Kid, someone who could gamble on his own ability, and if it had been Howard’s girlfriend, who works for him and places the big bet near the end, she could still walk away if the bet weren’t to come off. But though it occasionally crosscuts to other characters — Julia in the toilet at a club with another guy taking drugs; Julia placing that big bet — the Safdies want to stay close to that exhilarating stress. If it spent time with his wife, that would be diluted by her feelings (anger, contempt and frustration), or with the debtors (ever escalating rage), or with Garnett: the initial empowerment when he borrows the opal, bewilderment when he gives it back, bewilderment when it looks as if it has been sold to someone else, and empowerment again when he purchases it and wins a game. What it takes from both The Gambler and The Bad Lieutenant is finding a place between potential distance (a casino worker, girlfriend etc.) and the intensity of the practitioner (eg, a card player, a pool shooter). Howard is a character hyperactively involved and incapable of changing the outcome. Near the end, cursing and cussing, hoping and praying during the game where he has placed a three-way bet on Garnett’s team winning, all he can do is look on, while Garnett is involved in the specifics of the game. Even if Garnett knows that Howard will be betting huge amounts of money on the outcome, his purpose is to play the game well. Howard may insist that he is not an athlete, that gambling is how he wins, but the difference between a player involved using their ability and their body, and a gambler relying on prediction and chance, is enormous. The film knows the best place to focalise the tension is by staying as close to Howard as possible. 

         Critic Richard Brody reckons Howard is “…a lot like a director behind a camera” and this is a halfway useful analogy. Depending how open the filmmaker is to improvisation, the more chance will be involved, but even the most preconceived of directors will be reliant on chemistry between the actors, hoping that the crew will work well together and that the film will cut well in the edit suite. But the filmmaker has the advantage of controlling far more of the variables when making a film than a person placing a bet.  (Unless the result is fixed, of course.) Howard reckons that such is the faith Garnett has in the opal that he won’t believe he will lose and in turn Howard is sure he will win as well. But this is closer to superstition than to creativity, with Howard hoping that this talismanic object can galvanise Garnett into playing brilliantly and will thus make Howard a fortune. Uncut Gems might appear to be all about money but this is partly what is the central paradox of a certain type of gambler: that they aren’t so interested in accumulating wealth but in dispersing it — the moment they have any, they often have to risk losing it on a bet. As Jacob Avery says in Ethnography, “to be sure, most players will attest that winning is better than losing, but experientially, I submit that there is only the slightest difference between them.” (‘Taking Chances: The Experience of Gambling Loss’). The figure obsessed with money isn’t the gambler but the miser, which might explain why often the miserly character (from It’s a Wonderful Life to the various adaptations of A Christmas Carol) is presented less sympathetically than the gambler. Howard might be cheating on his spouse — though the marriage seems well over — buying an uncut gem at an exploitative price from African miners — though the details remain vague — and refusing to play fair with his various debtors — who are generally scuzzy themselves — but as with most gamblers, the viewer still wants him to win the bet and are horribly shocked when he is killed. Were many a scrooge to die of a heart attack and leave a fortune to those more worthy, few would be unhappy, though films, plays and novels sometimes give the miser the chance to redeem themselves and show generosity — never better exemplified than in Scrooge’s conversion in A Christmas Carol. 

      Perhaps this is possible, and plausible, because the miser’s relationship with money isn’t physiologically about the heart but about the anus, with the miser the archetypal instance of what Freud would call the anally retentive. Armand White might insist that “Uncut Gems brazenly presents a son of Shylock” but only if we insist he hasn’t been cut from the same cloth. Whatever we may think of the anti-semitism involved and how Shylock has become associated with money lending and greed, this is what he represents in the text. If there is a Shylock to be found in Uncut Gems it would be his brother-in-law by marriage, Arno (Eric Bogosian), who has lent him money. (Though there is little suggestion he is miserly; more desperate to get his money back.) The miser can eventually give away his money because it isn’t so centrally part of his existence and its hoarding a reflection of his inability to live. The gambler often cannot give up because it has become the very basis of his nervous system and of course thus an addiction. The filmmaker can sometimes be closer to the gambler, sometimes the miser. Director Francis Ford Coppola “mortgaged everything he owned, including his house in the Napa Valley and his automobile, to make the $31.5 million [Apocalypse Now].” (New York Times) Eric Rohmer, in contrast, “had a mania for economy, for cutting costs, borrowing equipment and props, volunteer cast and crew members. He got “…money in small amounts raised by a network of small production companies, cutting staff down to only a few, doing a lot of the work himself, Rohmer, until just before the end of his career, managed on a pittance.” (BestQuest) Better to say perhaps, keeping in mind Brody's claim, that Howard is a little like a certain type of director.

      Equally to film a miser’s life would be to focus more on solitude and monotonous tranquillity; to film a gambler’s is usually going to involve a convivial rush, and this is precisely what is at play in Uncut Gems. Howard is almost never alone (except when locked in the boot of the car by Arno’s goons) and even then he is on his mobile, telling his wife that he needs her to exit a school play, go into the car park, and release him from his darkened incarceration. Howard is an irrepressible jack-in-the box, released back into the world not with an added awareness of his stupidity, but all the more determined to continue living like a fool. The film could probably have only offered a happy ending by pausing the action rather than concluding it. When a cowboy rides into the sunset or a couple walk off into the horizon holding hands, these are conclusions rather than pauses. The viewer doesn’t expect the bandits to return to the town the following morning or for the couple’s relationship to fall apart over the next month. The cowboy has done his duty and protected a village, and the couple will go off and marry, probably have children. It doesn’t much matter as long as we believe the film has ended conclusively. But to have ended with Howard and Julia making a fortune would have seemed inconclusive: the film isn’t about making money but taking a risk, and Howard would keep taking those risks. It makes sense The Gambler ends with its hero carved up, The Bad Lieutenant shot dead, and in Uncut Gems Howard dead too. The only conclusion they can offer it seems is a negative one; anything positive would lack that finality. Films can of course offer finality within the optimistic (and no genre more than the romantic one) but the difficulty with many a gambling film is that we would have to believe that not only has a fortune been made but that a compulsion has been contained. Nothing suggests this possibility in the Safdies’ film.    

    However, perhaps more than any other gambling movie, Uncut Gems creates the formal properties to match the gambling fever. When looking at an earlier  work like The Cincinnati Kid, even though each closely identifies with Jeanne Moreau and Steve McQueen, the form wouldn’t indicate this. The image might: sweat on a brow, a tightening of the lips etc, and the editing and the camera movements may well too. But this wouldn’t be about pace but emphasis. In th film, McQueen loses a card game as Edward G Robinson turns over a Jack to produce a five-card flush. The camera zooms in on the card, cuts back to a close-up of McQueen’s eyes, and rapidly cuts back and forth between McQueen’s eyes and the Jack’s eyes, then other characters’ eyes are shown in close up too, before showing us Robinson’s eyes before the camera zooms back out. All the while the Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy, orchestral score insistently underscores the action. But the camera remains still and the zoom isn’t used so differently from its deployment around the same time in many a spaghetti western. The form captures well McQueen’s loss but while it conveys the drama of the situation, it doesn’t transfer the frenetic inner tension. There is no reason to condemn the film for this. The Gambler and California Split made a decade later don’t do so either. They are all great works in a different way, and one might insist they are better ones, more capable of creating a perspective on gambling without getting lost in the addiction itself. However, the Safdies take full advantage of the technological developments and formal expectations that Bordwell analyses in The Way Hollywood Tells It. They manage to make us more than identify with Howard’s predicament. They put the viewer in it. 

    In this sense, when Brody says, “anyone with the misfortune to get involved with him [Howard] is also inevitably going to get burned”, this could include the viewer, their own heartbeat pounding a little faster than usual in the cinema. But Brody might be a little wrong when it comes to anyone who gets involved with him is unfortunate: Julia may well walk away with a fortune now that Howard is dead, Arno dead too, and the two henchmen likely soon to be arrested. It is an unhappy ending if she loves Howard more than the money but her affection towards him has always been moot, no matter the butt tattoo she gets with Howard’s name after he tries to break up with her for what he sees as her cheating. But of course a happy ending for her isn’t the same as one for the film, just as in Body Heat or The Vanishing, getting away with murder might be all very well for the femme fatale and the serial killer but is pessimistic in the first film and terrifying in the second. Not all films with villains invoke this possibility, but the more potential sympathy or at least consideration we have for the characters, the more chance the viewer will at least accept this is a happy ending from their perspective. In Body Heat, Kathleen Turner has set up William Hurt and disappears to a distant resort with the cash, while in The Vanishing, the serial killer proves himself clever even when it looks like he has been found out. The films respect the characters’ intelligence and we are left to admire their impressive manipulations while horrified by their deeds.  

   Uncut Gems offers us no coda, no idea how Julia will feel about gaining a fortune and losing a boyfriend, and some might speculate who might go after her if aware that she now has large sums of cash. They may after all even go after Howard’s family — since there is the suggestion that the goon who shoots Howard was earlier on the phone to others with the idea of targeting the family. What can be said with some confidence is that Arno has been very unfortunate in his dealings with Howard, suffering the stress of trying to get back his loan, and then getting taken out by his own henchman. He might be the most sympathetic character in the film, the one who isn’t high either on the possibility of a huge win (Howard and Julia), taken by an opal with magical powers, (Garnett), excited by the chance to beat up Howard (the henchmen) or ferociously angry with Howard’s uselessness (his wife, Dinah). He looks more disappointed by Howard than anything else, and seems as much to regret marrying into the family as he is annoyed at loaning Howard cash, evident when he says “…you think I am stupid Howard, you think I am stupid — you and your whole family.” He isn’t looking for revenge; he is looking for credence, a man determined to save face over putting a bullet into someone else’s. When he gets murdered a minute after Howard, it is almost as shocking and potentially more tragic — taken out by his own hired hand who doesn’t know how to control his temper. 

        Yet to speak of sympathetic figures here might be foolhardy: the characters resemble more than a little a line from Two Jakes: Gittes regards himself in an unpalatable town as the leper with the most fingers, the most honourable figure in a dishonourable environment. There is always a risk in creating characters whose values the viewer doesn’t share, but rather than saying film is obliged to create positive characterisation, it is much more useful to think of how films generate interest in people one would likely find unpalatable. Cinema is full of vigilantes, robbers, hitmen, gamblers, philanderers and the power-crazed but not many will reject a film based on the unpalatability of people’s professions. There may be plenty teachers, nurses, doctors and engineers in film (all regarded as amongst the most respected of jobs) but this is no guarantee of lovability or even a modicum of the agreeable: as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Annie in Misery make clear. A character can be in the scuzziest of professions, make the most terrible decisions, but there we are, hoping they pull off that last heist, the big gamble, or dodgy financial transaction. Both passion and purpose can go a long way and if the film visually and acoustically aligns itself with these qualities then a character that might have few admirable traits becomes someone the viewer nevertheless finds companionable. Howard is a man who has left his wife, ignores his kids, takes up with a mistress, screws over his brother-in-law, takes advantage of African miners, compels his father-in-law to risk large sums of money at an auction, and swears his way through the film. The Safdies say, “the goal for us it to make sure you see what makes them [their characters] special, and what makes you love them” (Dazed). Howard it seems is good company partly because he goes with his impulses without actively seeking to harm others. There probably isn’t a mean bone in Howard’s body, and the accumulated misery he inflicts on those around him comes from misguided optimism meeting a foolhardy addiction. This is so in most Safdie Brothers films, whether it is the central character in Daddy Longlegs drugging his kids so he can do a shift at work, the drug-addicted couple in Heaven Knows What unable to sort their lives out, or Connie in Good Time, making a hash of an escape from prison. They aren’t people you’d wish a close friend or relative to marry, but you could dine out comfortably on the anecdotes they would offer.

         It is perhaps the best way to see the Safdies’ work and Uncut Gems most of all. Many films are good stories but they aren’t always anecdotally vivid: one can’t imagine discussing the story in a pub with a few friends. Their work has this quality but they also increasingly have a form that can give to the breathless tale an intensity that critics have consistently invoked: “Wild injection of pure cocaine” (The Playlist), “the cinematic equivalent to mixing cocaine with acid” (LA Weekly) critics offer. It would be a terrible diminution of film if the best a work can hope for is to resemble a drug someone has taken, but there is a place for cinema as a hit. While intensified continuity perhaps should be used more sparingly than it presently is, a drug used in moderation, Uncut Gems couldn’t quite have been made without it.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Uncut Gems

Hectic Density

There are many good films on gambling but few have the frenetic energy of Uncut Gems. It is a film that moves so erratically fast that the plot isn't so much hard to follow but difficult to keep pace with. When we usually speak of following a story, the verb is rarely associated with the speed of the work even if the term implies it. To follow a film, to keep up with, to keep pace with, all indicate speed, but most of the time films are happy to apply a gentler rhythm no matter the serpentine narrative it is contained by. The difference between The Big Sleep and Uncut Gems can't be explained in plot terms. The Big Sleep was famously so complex that nobody could explain who was responsible for a particular murder, though watching it the film seems no faster than others of its period. It can seem as sedate as Casablanca or Gaslight.

Uncut Gems though within the intricacies of its story insists at the same time on the intensity of its form, and few contemporary films exemplify better David Bordwell's term intensified continuity than the Safdie Brothers' work. Bordwell explains the various ways films have become more intense, noticing singles rather than two shots, a variety of lens lengths, a shorter shot time and so on. There is nothing new in his claim but far more attention to detail than usual in his exploration of it. "Most of these techniques have been remarked on before, often by irritated critics, but none have been considered closely..." (The Way Hollywood Tells It) While a 40s film may offer a conversation uncut for a minute, evident for example in a medium shot of the two leading characters in Gaslight as Charles Boyer tries to persuade Ingrid Bergman to marry him, many a contemporary work would cut into the material far more frequently to generate a tension in the form as readily as in the story. This didn't mean that classic Hollywood couldn't up the pace when it felt dramatically necessary, or to create the most violent of effects in the form; the Psycho shower scene is a famous and brilliant example. But Bordwell has more than a point when he says, "the strategies I'll be discussing have become dominant, even domineering, increasingly filmmakers aren't encouraged to explore other options." (The Way Hollywood Tells It) But is Uncut Gems a film that conforms to these newer expectations, just making the work faster still, or do the Safdies manage to convey in the film a technique that is very much allied to the energy of its central character and the frentic pace at which he lives?

To answer this question we can look first at the film's third scene, after the first shows us the discovery of an African opal that Howard (Adam Sandler) will buy and a match cut from the caves of the African mine to Howard's innards during a colonoscopy. In the third, he goes into his jewellery store, only to find waiting for him a couple of heavies looking to hurry up the repayment of a debt. Between Howard's arrival and one of the debt collectors slapping him less than a minute has passed and around fourteen shots have been used. Throughout the camera is constantly on the move, a subplot is developing over some customers, and his staff are trying to talk to him about pressing concerns. We also have a non-diegetic score trundling through the scene, not exactly drowning out the dialogue but making it no easier for the viewer to hear. There are three potential events in the developing sequence. Next to the sedate plot in a typical forties film like Gaslight, and at the same stage of the narrative, the Safdies have indeed intensified the continuity, with Joshua Safdie talking of the technical difficulties in immense detail when interviewed. "The way we shoot, we try to mix in with the energy of the street as much as possible. On 47th Street in particular, it was difficult... We made it clear when we were interviewing assistant camera operators that we wouldn't be using marks. 'You're going to have to shoot anamorphic lenses, low-angle, two to three inches of lee-way to stay in the right depth of field.'" (Little White Lies) They originally wanted to shoot the scenes in Harold's store on location but accepted it was logistically impossible and went for a sound stage on Long Island. Locations often matter to the directors, with their earlier work, including The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Heaven Knows What and Good Time all making much use of New York, with Joshua saying "...what you see is a lot of films close down streets and have extras who pretend to be pedestrians. When you start doing things like that, you start sucking the soul out of the city." (Little White Lies) It is a common remark that a city is a character in a film, but for the Safdies it is more a source of energy. Joshua says, "when you're making a movie, you're just trying to capture energy at any moment, so you want your set to be indicative of that energy." (Moviemaker) Benny Safdie says "...I get so much just by riding the bus or taking the train. You see people, you hear conversations. Just by walking for five minutes, there's such a density to that experience." (Film Comment)

Many newer filmmakers are interested in the intensification of form without necessarily drawing on the energy of place. Numerous films of the late 60s and early 70s were the opposite: influenced by the documentary movements of the sixties that took advantage of lighter equipment, the directors would shoot on the streets, but without the aspects of cutting and camera movements Bordwell speaks about in the context of recent cinema. Central to what makes Gaslight feel like an old movie is that it has neither location shooting nor shorter takes, nor a constantly moving camera as people talk over each other. It allows us to follow the story, of course, but at a pace that needn't be cardiographically undulating. This rests it seems on insisting on the faster pace of cinema but also drawing on the faster pace of the city too. Is this merely the Safdie Brothers trying to up the ante, seeing how fast they can make a film just as some filmmakers have tried to offer the longest of single takes, with De Palma, Scorsese, Altman and others all showing how brilliantly they can block a scene for a single shot? Such a claim would be disrespectful to the Safdies as well as Scorsese and co, as there needs to be a purpose beyond the formal, without indicating that the technique used only serves content. If the form is too welded to that content it will be visually predictable; if too removed from it the form can seem arbitrary. Gilberto Perez puts it nicely when saying of the ending to Godard's Alphaville, the "closure of the form does not pretend to have settled the content." (The Material Ghost) Or as Antonioni says of Blow-Up, "my problem with Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form."

Central to much that passes for modernist films rests on this: how to separate form from content not because there is a great dichotomy between them or that even the form/content debate is of much use, but to illustrate that the developing forms needn't always be there to serve the immediacy of what is perceived as content. Perez notes that Godard offers a visual beauty and potential finality as in Alphaville he shows "overexposed points, stars that shine in the underexposed light, the tall, bowing street lights along the highway, extending far into the distance and coming toward us as the camera moves following the car..." But these images of finality aren't quite matched by the decisiveness of the story. Equally, in Blow-Up, when we see a long shot of the leading character, his sudden disappearance from the shot as if he's evaporated, and the music and the END credit coming in, we know that while the film has formally ended, the content hasn't quite left us with the confidence that the experience is over. The viewer is left still to think about what the film has been saying. The form used is deliberate but its meaning cannot be explained by its pertinence to the story the film tells. As Antonioni proposes, he wants to explore reality but with abstraction and out of this combination he may not immediately be sure what he has achieved just after making it: "I am still in the 'secret' of the film." (Architecture of Vision)

Films usually reveal their secrets through the stories they tell, and the secret is more often than not a narrative revelation or development so that, when the film concludes, the style used has revealed the content it contains. When a romantic film ends with a high-angle shot as a couple walk down the street, we are unlikely to ask how many children they will have; the story cannot conclude until we know. But when neither member of a couple turns up at the end of Antononi's The Eclipse the viewer might find themselves baffled by their absence and by the camera's presence. The gap between the story and the form seems enormous, but at the same time, the film's secret remains. Why have the couple both refused to show up? There is a lot more to Antonioni's cinema of course than such ellipses and the speculation that can come out of them, but what we wish to make clear is that questions of form unaligned to the clear designation of character and situation needn't be seen as meretricious or obscurantist.

Few would probably say Uncut Gems is obscure, but they might wonder whether the story could have been told in a simpler, clearer way and to understand why it hasn't been wouldn't only reside in saying the film reflects the tension of Howard's predicament. It also reflects the intensified continuity Bordwell shows as a common feature of contemporary film, just as the modernist approaches were a significant development in sixties works by Antonioni and Godard. A cynic might say this is filmmakers reflecting fashion, but a better approach is to see them reflecting what is possible at a given moment. Blow-Up and Alphaville would have been unlikely to have been made twenty years earlier than they were: they came when film had established a vocabulary and they wished to see how this could be both developed and its conventions undermined. Uncut Gems is less ambitious than Blow-Up certainly, and much of Godard too, but while Adrian Martin reckons, comparing the Safdie brothers film to The Gambler and The Bad Lieutenant, that Uncut Gems "...clearly owes a lot (without much benefit resulting) to both these predecessors", we are still left asking what it does add to these and other gambling films. These would include The Cincinnati Kid, California Split, The Bay of Angels, The Sting, Hard Eight, Molly's Game, The Croupier, Casino, The Card Counter, The Hustler, The Colour of Money. But before asking what it adds, it is useful to differentiate between three different aspects to gambling in cinema: the gambling addiction in The Gambler, Bad Lieutenant and Uncut Gems, the skill of the gambler in The Cincinnati Kid, The Hustler and The Colour of Money, and the presence of gambling in Molly's Game, Casino and The Croupier.

In the films offering the skill of the gambler, the figure takes risks involving their own talent, while in the presence of gambling the film is often set in a casino environment without the central characters especially involved in the thrill of the win. In the films most resembling Uncut Gems, the gambler places bets with the high of hoping that luck will go their way. Reviewing the film, Sheila Malley says, Howard is "useless without panic" (RogerEbert), while Glenn Heath Jnr sees the film is "exhilaratingly stressful." (Cineaste) It creates probably the best possible cardiacal angle available in the gambling film. If our leading character were Garnett, the basketball player who ends up buying the opal that is central to the story, then this would be closer to The Hustler or The Cincinnati Kid, someone who could gamble on his own ability, and if it had been Howard's girlfriend, who works for him and places the big bet near the end, she could still walk away if the bet weren't to come off. But though it occasionally crosscuts to other characters Julia in the toilet at a club with another guy taking drugs; Julia placing that big bet the Safdies want to stay close to that exhilarating stress. If it spent time with his wife, that would be diluted by her feelings (anger, contempt and frustration), or with the debtors (ever escalating rage), or with Garnett: the initial empowerment when he borrows the opal, bewilderment when he gives it back, bewilderment when it looks as if it has been sold to someone else, and empowerment again when he purchases it and wins a game. What it takes from both The Gambler and The Bad Lieutenant is finding a place between potential distance (a casino worker, girlfriend etc.) and the intensity of the practitioner (eg, a card player, a pool shooter). Howard is a character hyperactively involved and incapable of changing the outcome. Near the end, cursing and cussing, hoping and praying during the game where he has placed a three-way bet on Garnett's team winning, all he can do is look on, while Garnett is involved in the specifics of the game. Even if Garnett knows that Howard will be betting huge amounts of money on the outcome, his purpose is to play the game well. Howard may insist that he is not an athlete, that gambling is how he wins, but the difference between a player involved using their ability and their body, and a gambler relying on prediction and chance, is enormous. The film knows the best place to focalise the tension is by staying as close to Howard as possible.

Critic Richard Brody reckons Howard is "...a lot like a director behind a camera" and this is a halfway useful analogy. Depending how open the filmmaker is to improvisation, the more chance will be involved, but even the most preconceived of directors will be reliant on chemistry between the actors, hoping that the crew will work well together and that the film will cut well in the edit suite. But the filmmaker has the advantage of controlling far more of the variables when making a film than a person placing a bet. (Unless the result is fixed, of course.) Howard reckons that such is the faith Garnett has in the opal that he won't believe he will lose and in turn Howard is sure he will win as well. But this is closer to superstition than to creativity, with Howard hoping that this talismanic object can galvanise Garnett into playing brilliantly and will thus make Howard a fortune. Uncut Gems might appear to be all about money but this is partly what is the central paradox of a certain type of gambler: that they aren't so interested in accumulating wealth but in dispersing it the moment they have any, they often have to risk losing it on a bet. As Jacob Avery says in Ethnography, "to be sure, most players will attest that winning is better than losing, but experientially, I submit that there is only the slightest difference between them." ('Taking Chances: The Experience of Gambling Loss'). The figure obsessed with money isn't the gambler but the miser, which might explain why often the miserly character (from It's a Wonderful Life to the various adaptations of A Christmas Carol) is presented less sympathetically than the gambler. Howard might be cheating on his spouse though the marriage seems well over buying an uncut gem at an exploitative price from African miners though the details remain vague and refusing to play fair with his various debtors who are generally scuzzy themselves but as with most gamblers, the viewer still wants him to win the bet and are horribly shocked when he is killed. Were many a scrooge to die of a heart attack and leave a fortune to those more worthy, few would be unhappy, though films, plays and novels sometimes give the miser the chance to redeem themselves and show generosity never better exemplified than in Scrooge's conversion in A Christmas Carol.

Perhaps this is possible, and plausible, because the miser's relationship with money isn't physiologically about the heart but about the anus, with the miser the archetypal instance of what Freud would call the anally retentive. Armand White might insist that "Uncut Gems brazenly presents a son of Shylock" but only if we insist he hasn't been cut from the same cloth. Whatever we may think of the anti-semitism involved and how Shylock has become associated with money lending and greed, this is what he represents in the text. If there is a Shylock to be found in Uncut Gems it would be his brother-in-law by marriage, Arno (Eric Bogosian), who has lent him money. (Though there is little suggestion he is miserly; more desperate to get his money back.) The miser can eventually give away his money because it isn't so centrally part of his existence and its hoarding a reflection of his inability to live. The gambler often cannot give up because it has become the very basis of his nervous system and of course thus an addiction. The filmmaker can sometimes be closer to the gambler, sometimes the miser. Director Francis Ford Coppola "mortgaged everything he owned, including his house in the Napa Valley and his automobile, to make the $31.5 million [Apocalypse Now]." (New York Times) Eric Rohmer, in contrast, "had a mania for economy, for cutting costs, borrowing equipment and props, volunteer cast and crew members. He got "...money in small amounts raised by a network of small production companies, cutting staff down to only a few, doing a lot of the work himself, Rohmer, until just before the end of his career, managed on a pittance." (BestQuest) Better to say perhaps, keeping in mind Brody's claim, that Howard is a little like a certain type of director.

Equally to film a miser's life would be to focus more on solitude and monotonous tranquillity; to film a gambler's is usually going to involve a convivial rush, and this is precisely what is at play in Uncut Gems. Howard is almost never alone (except when locked in the boot of the car by Arno's goons) and even then he is on his mobile, telling his wife that he needs her to exit a school play, go into the car park, and release him from his darkened incarceration. Howard is an irrepressible jack-in-the box, released back into the world not with an added awareness of his stupidity, but all the more determined to continue living like a fool. The film could probably have only offered a happy ending by pausing the action rather than concluding it. When a cowboy rides into the sunset or a couple walk off into the horizon holding hands, these are conclusions rather than pauses. The viewer doesn't expect the bandits to return to the town the following morning or for the couple's relationship to fall apart over the next month. The cowboy has done his duty and protected a village, and the couple will go off and marry, probably have children. It doesn't much matter as long as we believe the film has ended conclusively. But to have ended with Howard and Julia making a fortune would have seemed inconclusive: the film isn't about making money but taking a risk, and Howard would keep taking those risks. It makes sense The Gambler ends with its hero carved up, The Bad Lieutenant shot dead, and in Uncut Gems Howard dead too. The only conclusion they can offer it seems is a negative one; anything positive would lack that finality. Films can of course offer finality within the optimistic (and no genre more than the romantic one) but the difficulty with many a gambling film is that we would have to believe that not only has a fortune been made but that a compulsion has been contained. Nothing suggests this possibility in the Safdies' film.

However, perhaps more than any other gambling movie, Uncut Gems creates the formal properties to match the gambling fever. When looking at an earlier work like The Cincinnati Kid, even though each closely identifies with Jeanne Moreau and Steve McQueen, the form wouldn't indicate this. The image might: sweat on a brow, a tightening of the lips etc, and the editing and the camera movements may well too. But this wouldn't be about pace but emphasis. In th film, McQueen loses a card game as Edward G Robinson turns over a Jack to produce a five-card flush. The camera zooms in on the card, cuts back to a close-up of McQueen's eyes, and rapidly cuts back and forth between McQueen's eyes and the Jack's eyes, then other characters' eyes are shown in close up too, before showing us Robinson's eyes before the camera zooms back out. All the while the Lalo Schifrin's jazzy, orchestral score insistently underscores the action. But the camera remains still and the zoom isn't used so differently from its deployment around the same time in many a spaghetti western. The form captures well McQueen's loss but while it conveys the drama of the situation, it doesn't transfer the frenetic inner tension. There is no reason to condemn the film for this. The Gambler and California Split made a decade later don't do so either. They are all great works in a different way, and one might insist they are better ones, more capable of creating a perspective on gambling without getting lost in the addiction itself. However, the Safdies take full advantage of the technological developments and formal expectations that Bordwell analyses in The Way Hollywood Tells It. They manage to make us more than identify with Howard's predicament. They put the viewer in it.

In this sense, when Brody says, "anyone with the misfortune to get involved with him [Howard] is also inevitably going to get burned", this could include the viewer, their own heartbeat pounding a little faster than usual in the cinema. But Brody might be a little wrong when it comes to anyone who gets involved with him is unfortunate: Julia may well walk away with a fortune now that Howard is dead, Arno dead too, and the two henchmen likely soon to be arrested. It is an unhappy ending if she loves Howard more than the money but her affection towards him has always been moot, no matter the butt tattoo she gets with Howard's name after he tries to break up with her for what he sees as her cheating. But of course a happy ending for her isn't the same as one for the film, just as in Body Heat or The Vanishing, getting away with murder might be all very well for the femme fatale and the serial killer but is pessimistic in the first film and terrifying in the second. Not all films with villains invoke this possibility, but the more potential sympathy or at least consideration we have for the characters, the more chance the viewer will at least accept this is a happy ending from their perspective. In Body Heat, Kathleen Turner has set up William Hurt and disappears to a distant resort with the cash, while in The Vanishing, the serial killer proves himself clever even when it looks like he has been found out. The films respect the characters' intelligence and we are left to admire their impressive manipulations while horrified by their deeds.

Uncut Gems offers us no coda, no idea how Julia will feel about gaining a fortune and losing a boyfriend, and some might speculate who might go after her if aware that she now has large sums of cash. They may after all even go after Howard's family since there is the suggestion that the goon who shoots Howard was earlier on the phone to others with the idea of targeting the family. What can be said with some confidence is that Arno has been very unfortunate in his dealings with Howard, suffering the stress of trying to get back his loan, and then getting taken out by his own henchman. He might be the most sympathetic character in the film, the one who isn't high either on the possibility of a huge win (Howard and Julia), taken by an opal with magical powers, (Garnett), excited by the chance to beat up Howard (the henchmen) or ferociously angry with Howard's uselessness (his wife, Dinah). He looks more disappointed by Howard than anything else, and seems as much to regret marrying into the family as he is annoyed at loaning Howard cash, evident when he says "...you think I am stupid Howard, you think I am stupid you and your whole family." He isn't looking for revenge; he is looking for credence, a man determined to save face over putting a bullet into someone else's. When he gets murdered a minute after Howard, it is almost as shocking and potentially more tragic taken out by his own hired hand who doesn't know how to control his temper.

Yet to speak of sympathetic figures here might be foolhardy: the characters resemble more than a little a line from Two Jakes: Gittes regards himself in an unpalatable town as the leper with the most fingers, the most honourable figure in a dishonourable environment. There is always a risk in creating characters whose values the viewer doesn't share, but rather than saying film is obliged to create positive characterisation, it is much more useful to think of how films generate interest in people one would likely find unpalatable. Cinema is full of vigilantes, robbers, hitmen, gamblers, philanderers and the power-crazed but not many will reject a film based on the unpalatability of people's professions. There may be plenty teachers, nurses, doctors and engineers in film (all regarded as amongst the most respected of jobs) but this is no guarantee of lovability or even a modicum of the agreeable: as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Annie in Misery make clear. A character can be in the scuzziest of professions, make the most terrible decisions, but there we are, hoping they pull off that last heist, the big gamble, or dodgy financial transaction. Both passion and purpose can go a long way and if the film visually and acoustically aligns itself with these qualities then a character that might have few admirable traits becomes someone the viewer nevertheless finds companionable. Howard is a man who has left his wife, ignores his kids, takes up with a mistress, screws over his brother-in-law, takes advantage of African miners, compels his father-in-law to risk large sums of money at an auction, and swears his way through the film. The Safdies say, "the goal for us it to make sure you see what makes them [their characters] special, and what makes you love them" (Dazed). Howard it seems is good company partly because he goes with his impulses without actively seeking to harm others. There probably isn't a mean bone in Howard's body, and the accumulated misery he inflicts on those around him comes from misguided optimism meeting a foolhardy addiction. This is so in most Safdie Brothers films, whether it is the central character in Daddy Longlegs drugging his kids so he can do a shift at work, the drug-addicted couple in Heaven Knows What unable to sort their lives out, or Connie in Good Time, making a hash of an escape from prison. They aren't people you'd wish a close friend or relative to marry, but you could dine out comfortably on the anecdotes they would offer.

It is perhaps the best way to see the Safdies' work and Uncut Gems most of all. Many films are good stories but they aren't always anecdotally vivid: one can't imagine discussing the story in a pub with a few friends. Their work has this quality but they also increasingly have a form that can give to the breathless tale an intensity that critics have consistently invoked: "Wild injection of pure cocaine" (The Playlist), "the cinematic equivalent to mixing cocaine with acid" (LA Weekly) critics offer. It would be a terrible diminution of film if the best a work can hope for is to resemble a drug someone has taken, but there is a place for cinema as a hit. While intensified continuity perhaps should be used more sparingly than it presently is, a drug used in moderation, Uncut Gems couldn't quite have been made without it.


© Tony McKibbin