Uncut Gems

I watched the movie Uncut Gems last night on my television. (I purchased it from iTunes.) The movie is a thriller made by Josh and Bennie Safdie. I think it was a very good movie. It was filled with energy and focuses on a fascinating character. However. I can see why some would dislike the movie because they did not like the ending or because the main character prioritized his gambling over his family.

In this post, I would like to do three things. First I will give a little background about the filmmakers. Then I would like to say something about Howard Ratner, the main character in the film. And, finally, I would like to spend some time thinking about how Aristotle's Poetics might help explain one of the central questions in interpreting this movie.

So, let me start with the directors.

The sibling duo of Josh and Bennie Safdie have gone from guerrilla filmmaking to something resembling mainstream success, first with Good Time (a movie about a robbery gone wrong worth seeing, at least in my opinion) and now with Uncut Gems. Prior to Good Times the Safdie Brothers made a series of short movies, sometimes without even going to the trouble of obtaining a permit before filming on public streets. This sort of grab the camera and just start filming still can be seen in the way they made Uncut Gems. As Kelefa Sanneh described their work in an article in the New Yorker:

For years, the brothers were do-it-yourself visionaries, finding ingenious ways to make their little movies seem big; they used the city as their soundstage in part because it was free. When they began shooting “Uncut Gems,” last year, Josh was annoyed to see that his crew had posted flyers with filming permits on Forty-seventh Street; he was hoping to keep a low profile, in order to capture life in the district. Then he saw the platoon of trucks parked around the corner and remembered that he was involved in a major production, much too big to be surreptitious. For street scenes, the Safdies assembled about a hundred extras, who mingled with people going about their business. If the extras caught someone gawking at Sandler, or at the camera, they were instructed to create a simple distraction: approach the gawker and, posing as a tourist, ask for directions to the nearest subway station.

If you look through the streaming site Fandor you can find some of the Safdie Brothers early short films. These include some of their short, decidedly non-commercial, movies like: The Back of Her Head, We're Going to the Zoo, There's Nothing You Can Do, Solid Gold, and The Black Balloon.

Anyway, those are the Safdie Brothers, now let's go back to the movie.

Adam Sandler, in a stellar perrormance, plays Howard Ratner, an economically successful jeweler in New York's diamond district. Howard is, by most definitions, not a good person: he gambles. A lot. Despite having a wife and children in a beautiful house on Long Island, he lives with his girlfriend in an apartment in Manhattan. That is, when they are on speaking terms.

Despite his obvious flaws, one of the great things about Uncut Gems is that I found myself rooting for Howard even as he borrows more money he can not pay back in order to bet on basketball games. This happens more than once. Despite the fact that Howard is constantly moving, always working, and always on the phone trying to keep his gambling habit going, he makes time for his family. One of the few quiet scenes in the movie is a passover dinner scene that slowly shows the grandparents, parents, and grandchildren ejoying a dinner, followed by leisurely conversations among the older adults while the young children run around the house playing a game. It really is a touching scene.

This dinner is a real contrast with the rest of Howard's life. A lot of bad things happen to Howard; and he brings them all on himself. In no particular order, I watched Howard being punched in the nose, being stripped naked and forced into the trunk of his own car and forced to call his wife to let him out, being thrown into a pool and losing his glasses, and taking a bus from Philadelphia back to New York after Lakeith Stanfield's character purposely left him behind at a basketball practice to avoid paying back a debt.

Uncut Gems provides evidence to one of the things I believe about movie directors. Any journeyman director can film and edit a film that makes narrative sense. (Assuming the script had a decent plot.)  A great director is one (or two in the case of the Safdie Brothers) that can coax a great performance out of an actor. Sandler has done great acting in The Meyerowitz Stories and Punch Drunk Love. Can you name another movie where his acting was great? 

Go ahead, I'll wait.

I didn't think so.

In addition to his acting, part of what makes Sandler's Howard Ratner so fascinating is his hair, his flashy clothes, his jewelry, his glasses, and his teeth. The teeth, I think, are prosthetic ones made for the role. in my mind they go down as among the great movie teeth along with Ratso Rizzo's teeth of a street person (played by Dustin Hoffman) in Midnight Cowboy
 

and Richard Kiel's lethal weapons in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Enough talk about teeth. Let me move on to the plot of the movie.

The plot of Uncut Gems revolves around a rare black opal or opals and Howard's desire to sell  them to finance even greater levels of gambling. That is where the title, Uncut Gems, comes from. But to me, the opals are a MacGuffin. They help motivate the plot, but they are not really what the movie is about. The movie is about Howard Ratner and his energy. Watching this movie for a little over two hours is an exhausting experience because of how much Howard Ratner moves. He is always going somewhere, walking somewhere, driving somewhere, and often talking on the phone or texting while moving. Some of us do this. Most of us do not do it every waking minute of the day. Howard Ratner does.

You may or may not like the ending, but I found Sandler's Howard Ratner to be something that kept me glued to the screen.

That is, at least in my opinion, one of the things that makes Uncut Gems a very good movie.

I do think that the movie did have some flaws. I thought that the movie was about twenty minutes too long. I did not understand why it was important to include footage from an Ethiopian mine at the start of the movie other than to advertise that the Safdie Brothers finally were able to make a movie with a large budget. I felt like Ratner's store looked a little too much like a set built to spec rather than an actual store in Manhattan. Some of the night scenes and night club scenes were so dark I was lost at times. And, not being much of a sports gambler, some of the parlays and other elements of Ratner's betting confused me.

However, these are not big problems. Overall, I thought Uncut Gems is a very good movie.

Let me now try to explain why I found Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner so fascinating by looking it though the prism of classical poetics. Aristotle is, of course, the progenitor of much of literary theory and semiotics more broadly.

I am by no means an Aristotle scholar, but I do believe that his Poetics could be helpful in thinking about why a character who is decidedly not a virtuous person helps to make a story a great story.

Aristotle, in his book Poetics, of which we now have only part of what we believe he wrote, described a theory of tragedy. There are many important elements of tragedy in his theory, but I would like to focus one just one: KATHARSIS.

The online encyclopedia Britannica defines KATHARSIS as:

the purification or purgation of the emotions (especially pity and fear) primarily through art. ...The use is derived from the medical term katharsis (Greek: “purgation” or “purification”). Aristotle states that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “terror and pity” and thereby effect the catharsis of these emotions. His exact meaning has been the subject of critical debate over the centuries.

So, one way of understanding Aristotle's uses of KATHARSIS is that, by watching (or listening to or reading) a story with a character in an unpleasant situation, pity and fear are later purged or cleansed. However, one of the challenges that has driven readers of Aristotle to spill a tremendous amount of ink is the question of who these emotions are purged or cleansed from: the audience or the tragic character. (What is meant by purging or cleansing and whether it refers to purging emotions or if it means something more like clarification is another set of contentious issues.)


So, if we assume, for the moment, one interpretation of KATHARSIS, I think we can say something like the following:


A. Howard Ratner is a flawed character because he lets his gambling addiction become too large a part of his decision making.

B. Ratner is a fascinating character because he arouses fear and pity in us as we watch.


C. Once the movie is over, we become better people because those negative emotions have be, at least temporarily cleansed from us by the time we have processed the movie after the credits roll. (Let me also suggest that there might also a theory of KATHARSIS that might say that we feel better after watching the movie because we can finally rest after being exhausted by Howard Ratner's non-stop action of.)


I will let others ponder how we might think about an alternative understanding of KATHARSIS as purging or cleansing the negative emotions from the character of Howard Ratner as opposed to the purging or cleansing them from the audience.  In either case, there is a good deal of discomfort in watching the movie because of those strong negative emotions. And this sense of being moved and being deeply uncomfortable with the actions of a character in a story was, at least in my opinion, one of the most important elements of Athenian tragedy