12/2/2023 0 Comments Josh safdie uncut gems![]() Largely because of their characters’ chronic instability and periodic stumbles, the brothers’ narratives have a way of lurching forward in sudden unexpected jerks, creating a style of storytelling that might be described as absurdist picaresque in its unforeseeable swerves, and seemingly digressive in terms of their overall logic and coherence. Abel Ferrara impersonating a digital pirate and street hustler in Daddy Longlegs.) (They can also enlist celebrities to play jokey cameos, e.g. And the way that Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji (a master/specialist in different forms of urban or pastoral blight or beauty, ranging from The City of Lost Children to Se7en to Stealing Beauty to Panic Room to The Ninth Gate to Midnight in Paris) nimbly moves through and around both city streets and the various interiors, for example during a family Passover Seder, matches the ease with which the Safdies can mix documentary elements, such as Garnett and The Weeknd’s performances, with their fictions. The fact that the Safdie brothers grew up being shuttled back and forth between a father in Queens and a mother and stepfather in Manhattan already suggests some of the riddled and perpetually challenged chutzpah of Sandler’s Howard Ratner, torn between modest suburban origins and an obsession with hitting the big time that seems synonymous with the Manhattan hustle. But if he winds up ineptly kidnapping the wrong hospital patient, he also does a fair job of impersonating a security guard who tries to arrest him.įinally, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), the jewelry shop owner and family man with a gambling addiction in Uncut Gems (2019), even more of a quintessential New Yorker than his predecessors, seems to combine most of the bad traits of Lenny and Connie while adding a few of his own, making him at once more established and more deceitful - and arguably more charming as well as more destructive. Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson), the inept bank robber and all-around delinquent on the run in Good Time (2017), is equally incompetent when it comes to his diverse efforts to spring his mentally disabled brother from jail and hospital, screwing up the lives of several other people in the process. In the autobiographical Daddy Longlegs (2009), Lenny (Ronald Bronstein, co-writer of the brothers’ three subsequent features), a divorced film projectionist, often seems as childish and as out of control as his two little boys, but his passionate love for his sons is seldom in doubt. This is far less true of other Safdie leads: New Yorkers to the core whose strengths and flaws seem inseparable from that city’s spiritual vibrations and social manners, and whose manic-depressive tangents and crash landings might be said to have a more universal resonance, conjuring up messes that we all have some recognizable part in stirring up as well as suffering from. Though I find the results believable enough as an account of lost souls, these junkies for me lack the charisma of other Safdie protagonists - meaning that the messes they create seem to be almost entirely their own, at least as the film depicts them. The latter took shape after Josh Safdie, doing research on Manhattan’s Diamond District for Uncut Gems, encountered Arielle Holmes as a panhandler, and eventually got her to write and star in her own beleaguered story - anticipating the casting of basketball star Kevin Garnett and pop star The Weeknd, both playing themselves, in Uncut Gems. Less persuasive, at least to me, are the young junkies, both female and male, playing themselves in the 2014 Safdie opus Heaven Knows What. ![]() ![]() This dizzying pattern seems to culminate in their new film Uncut Gems, which registers at times as a slapstick remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) - at least if one can allow for a substitution of a certain amount of manic Jewish optimism for depressive Catholic despair. They exasperate their colleagues, spouses, and other family members, who almost invariably wind up forgiving these crumb-bums for their lies and deceptions after hearing their shame-faced apologies, which are typically followed by further deceptions. Maybe because these scheming and prevaricating characters know how to tell lies and (somewhat less often) how to apologize for or cover up their various messes, they also qualify, at least some of the time, as skillful escape artists as well as stylish con men. The movies of Josh and Benny Safdie are dominated by compulsively impulsive hustlers who continuously revise their own lives as well as those of everyone else in their immediate vicinities, most often with chaotically disastrous consequences for everyone concerned. ![]() “Would you forgive me if I die?” - Question asked in the first scene of Heaven Knows What Commissioned and published by New York’s Metrograph Chronicle in mid-December 2019.
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