The Exponential Anxiety of Uncut Gems
[Contains Spoilers]
Uncut Gems is undoubtedly a masterpiece. As a film, it’s a carefully constructed patchwork of tropes, symbols, and characters with each scene complemented by a spacey score, dizzying cinematography, and an outstanding script. The world of Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler, feels as alive as the Manhattan streets it depicts, with the manic repartee of loan sharks and celebrities giving it an incessantly propulsive force. Yet as a movie, Uncut Gems works with consummate grace: it entertains, enthralls, suspends, but above all, it creates some of the most visceral anxiety I’ve ever watched on celluloid.
But before delving into how Uncut Gems’ directors, the Safdie Brothers, made a true jewel of a movie, I want to recall the Brothers’ previous flick, Good Time.
In Good Time, Robert Pattinson and director Benny Safdie play brothers Connie and Nick Nikas, small-time bank-robbers who pull off a heist during the film’s opening, resulting in the injury and incarceration of Connie’s mentally-handicapped brother Nick. What follows transpires during the length of one frenzied night as Connie attempts to bail his brother out of jail by any means necessary. The attempts to free Nick from prison range from the legal to the illegal - using his load of newly stolen cash at a bail bondsman, sneaking him out of his guarded hospital bed, sussing out a new score to meet the exorbitant cost his bondsman requires. With each failed attempt, Connie becomes more exhausted and battered but remains resilient in traversing one insane night in Queens.
Each attempt is a narrative unto itself that segues into the next, each resolved not by success but failure and with another hair-brained scheme popping into Connie’s head at each dead-end. The pattern is subtle but structurally integral to the film. The dramatic arc of each of Connie’s stratagems ends not in advances but returns to square one. Even an anecdotal digression fits this same model when we meet another criminal who recalls a Tarantino-esque flashback about a run-in with the law resulting in dosing the security guard of a carnival’s haunted house with a Sprite bottle filled with LSD. This too ends not in tragedy or success, but the return to an anxious limbo that defines the structure of film.
Yet while Good Time builds anxiety with linear growth, Uncut Gems builds it exponentially - treading the line of an anxiety attack the entire way. The Safdie Brothers use their antihero Howard Ratner to show a character teeter at the very edge of disaster, motivated by a teased redemption that never manifests. Howard finds a way to gamble everything, double-or-nothing, and this simultaneous failure coupled with success is what makes the movie simultaneously painful and entertaining.
If Good Time is about spinning one plate at a time until it shatters, Uncut Gems adds another plate just when you think the three already spinning are about to cover the floor in shards.
Howard Ratner or “Howie” is the successful owner of a jewelry shop in New York’s Diamond District, a single street in Manhattan running only one block. We learn that Howie has a family with a failed marriage that’s only for show. He owes $100,000 to threatening loan sharks, and he has just recently smuggled an uncut opal from Ethiopia that he plans to auction off for $1,000,000. On top of all this, basketball superstar Kevin Garnett visits his store before game five of the 2012 NBA semifinals. When Howie shows him the opal, Garnett can’t help but sense something portentous in the presence of the uncut gem. Garnett agrees to exchange his 2008 championship ring for the opal as collateral for the night, hoping it’ll help him win the night’s game. What follows is Howie’s complicated (and stress-inducing) quest to retrieve the opal from Garnett before the auction, all while avoiding his creditors and balancing his home life with his secret lover. What complicates all of the above is Howie’s addiction to sports betting. As a businessman, he doesn’t want anyone - least of all his loan sharks - from finding out how deep in the hole he really is. Howie pawns Garnett’s championship ring for one day, using the money to bet on the same game Garnett is playing. He uses contingent funds like these to gamble, so that when he loses, he must borrow more money and hazard more bets, his schemes appearing more like a house of cards than the solid opal he obsesses over.
When Howie is confronted by the forking path of either accepting failure or contriving another maneuver to turn his lead into gold, the snowballing effect puts him more at risk if caught with his pants down. In other words, the payoff becomes exponentially greater while the risk becomes exponentially higher. What the movie accomplishes is its believability; we can’t help but see Howie take another gambit and come out on top because, like Kevin Garnett, his wife, and his creditors - each of which he cajoles that they’ll get back what Howie owes - we too are drawn into Howie’s world of empty promises. We know we wouldn’t follow in Howie’s footsteps, but you can’t help but believe in his passion, even if its a delusionary passion that resists the terrible reality that the future is unpredictable. And it’s not that Howie’s motivations are evil or immoral. Howie drinks his own Kool-Aid when he stands by his optimistic faith in a positive outcome. And of course, the Safdie Brother’s ingenious decision to cast one of TV and film’s most likable faces as our antihero has us unconsciously root for the guy. This casting choice facilitates a universal illusion we all share: the belief that you can turn a nothing - an empty promise, credit masquerading as a return, a rock found in the desert - into a tangible something.
Howie may have always been a thrill-seeking risk-taker, but evidence suggests that it’s his obsession with the uncut gem’s symbolic promise of a rectified emotional life that activates the inevitability of his meltdown. For instance, we learn that the debt he avoids in the opening is $100,000. Later, we learn that the cost to obtain the uncut gem from an Ethopian mine was $100,000. We can infer that the predicted ten-fold return, the $1,000,000 that he expects the gem will auction for, catalyzes the anxiety that propels Howie and the movie itself. If we zoom out further and ask what leads him to pursue such a gamble, we should look no further than his domestic life. His relationship with his wife - a show for friends and family that both have agreed will end by their Jewish Passover - the stilted attempts at conversation with his daughter, the possession and jealousy he has for his workplace amour. The reason these failures exist in the first place isn’t because of any gem but because of the tragic irony that he is incapable of looking inward. Rather than peering into his soul, he stares into the variegated play of colors in his gem. The beauty of self and gem is paralleled by Uncut Gems’ bookended CGI sequences with the camera weaving through the microscopic interior of the gem at the movie’s start and the microphotography inside Howie’s innards just before the credits roll. Soul and gem both contain labyrinths of inscrutable beauty but with his attention lopsided to the point of self-destruction. Either that or the gem is only beautiful to Howie because of what it will bring, not for how it appears.
The promise of the gem’s monetary value that keeps Howie from losing hope is only as real as others will give it. This is precisely why Howie nearly breaks down in public when it’s appraised at a fraction of the million dollars he expects it to sell for. And the only person interested in the uncut gem as an end and not a means is Kevin Garnett. He perceives the gem’s beautiful power so intensely that it galvanizes his win during game five of the NBA semifinals. When Howie finally gets the opal back, Garnett can’t keep it together on the court and loses to the Philadelphia 76ers. You could make the Marxist allusion to Garnett’s genuine use value of the gem with Howie’s exchange value of it as a commodity, but there’s something far more interesting in how the two men relate to the gem. Howie’s appreciation of the gem is as an object of power. It represents his belief that he can control the present and future, a delusion actualized by Garnett when he dominates the 76ers, opal in possession. Howie’s passion for the gem transmutes into Garnett’s passion in the game; the gem serving as a nexus between Howie’s contrived faith in the opal and Garnett’s trust in that faith. That energy for Howie doesn’t come from the gem itself like it does for Garnett, but in his illusory hope that it will somehow save his life from imminent decay.
Between the opening and closing sequences of the hypnotic beauty of interiority is the core mechanic of anxiety felt in both the viewer and in Howie. He inverts his anxiety into an energy that neglects to stop and reevaluate what it is he’s really doing. The OED’s definition of anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome,” is clearly germane to our assessment of Howie’s character. He destructively internalizes his anxiety into a fuel for his ego, forcing himself to ignore the consequences that affect himself and his loved ones. Uncut Gems is composed of motions toward anxiety peaks, points in the narrative that seemingly can’t get any more anxiety inducing, arguably four such peaks in the film. When Howie reaches the end of each of a series of anxiety peaks, he makes another wager and doubles-down, triples-down, quadruples-down.
Howie is like a dynamo, a machine that transforms mechanical energy into electrical energy, converting physical force into a stored power that can be later distributed for future distribution. When we ask ourselves what it is that fuels Howie’s energy, it can’t be success or pleasure because he gets so little of it here. The only thing he seems to have a surplus of is the uncertainty of what’s to come. Like the trend of “anxiety reappraisal,” where a declaration of one’s anxiety as excitement neuters the part of anxiety that’s bad at parties, Howie stores the dread of future uncertainty to energetically draw others into his disturbred version of reality. When he gives the iconic line to Garnett, “This is how I win,” what he means is that he doesn’t win by winning as a basketball player like Garnett does. Instead, he wins when he reassures other people to coexist in his mercenary sense of reality that fuels his gambling. He sells a pitch of hope and returned profit, one that enables him to pursue the white whale of success the uncut gem portends. This conversion of reality occurs externally when he euchres people to play his game and internally when he amplifies his compulsions, stokes the flames of his neurosis, and ultimately engenders a negative feedback loop in which the ends have to justify the means.
Admitting anxiety is often the bane of toxic masculinity; the polar opposite of confidence and strength, but Howie is neither pushy patriarch nor a beta-male adversary. Rather, he appears caught between power and powerlessness: he owns a successful jewelry store but crumples to the floor from a punch to the face; he convinces powerful men to do as he says but ends up locked in the trunk of a car, he turns an incontestable loss into more bought time but is mocked by his family. His power is not in his strength. His power (if you can call it that) is his ability to alchemize trust in those that challenge his faith in future outcomes or his belief that he’s on top when he’s more in debt every minute. When we see Howie shove his chimeras around like they have the same mass and weight of tangible objects (like a gem), he has to ignore the reality of his weakness, his inability to be anything less than in decline.
To give an example of how these moments of peak anxiety keep the movie simultaneously accelerating without riding off the rails, we should look at the scene where Howie’s creditors show up at his daughter’s school play. Howie is incapable of stewing in a fear that elucidates the reality that the securities of his family and private life have been compromised, and he uses the anxiety of the moment to energize himself and confront them. Of course, his energy/anxiety is our (the audience’s) anxiety, and we can’t help but become charged and taken along for the ride. He ends up assaulting one of the men, running through and out the school doors but is eventually kidnapped by an SUV loaded with men outside who strip him naked and lock him in the trunk of his car. Even here, Howie refuses to surrender to the situation and calls his wife in the middle of the school play to let him out of the trunk. While most would finally admit how dispossessed they really are (the man is literally naked) he shamelessly walks back into the school in an entirely new set of clothes to the confusion of his family and friends, pretending as if nothing ever happened.
During such scenes of peak anxiety, we get a false sense of resolution. What lets him off the hook is the condition that he keeps another promise with another party, which if kept, will pay off a previous debt that he’s been using to pay off another debt. Confusing, I know. When he finally pays off these debts, he pays with a different kind of interest - his creditor’s permanent distrust of his methods and motives. Every little victory comes with the major loss of another’s trust, sometimes from creditors, other times his closest loved ones. In the case of the example above, his wife loses the last modicum of respect she has for her husband.
We could see the delayed satisfaction of resolving these repeated instances of peak anxiety, (like some kind of monetarily driven “edging”) as becoming bigger and wider, but we could also see them as becoming more and more condensed, compacted tighter and tighter until finally erupting like a split atom. The last of these moments of peak anxiety - the final game of the NBA Championship where Howie essentially bets his and his family’s life on Garnett’s win - are where his compulsions climatically catch up with him.
Movies like Good Time emphasize the striving to master reality and break through the determinism that entraps people from realizing agency. The pattern of these movies stage situations that are nearly surmounted but then brought back to a point of stagnant neutrality, the development not of upward or downward movement but a return to normality with the characters more desperate, more tired, more defeated. But what makes Uncut Gems so effective, so masterful at what it does, is that it does the seemingly impossible - it manages to ascend and descend at the exact same time. Because of the Safdie Brothers incredible job at balancing mood, dialogue, rhythm, and story, we are shown with equal poise how Howie’s anxiety at his imminent failure converts itself into resistance. When Howie is bested and forced to concede, he resists confronting reality. He makes a deal with another devil, another creditor and is forced to make not one, not two, not three - as many deals as he can - until he’s finally shot in the face at the exasperation of the loan sharks unwillingness to put up with his stalling. In this way, we feel two sides of Howie’s anxiety, the dread that what he pursues is bound to catch up with him and the beautiful deception he falsifies for himself and others that maybe everything will turn out all right. Which is what makes the finale so effective. The ending is simultaneously both of these things. Because Howie was right. He wins a million dollars on his bet on Garnett and he does ascend to the heights he had been climbing all along. But all the while he has also been descending into the world of his creditors, be they his family, his furious loan sharks, his fate. He’s shot in the head as soon as the Celtics win on TV and the paradox of his win with an accompanying loss lifts Howie’s veil to reveal pure tragedy.
Few movies so deftly pull off something so enjoyable and painful at the same time. The pleasure and pain come in equal parts because of the Safdie’s perfected formula, resulting in a movie that defies physics by going in two different directions at the exact same time. Unpretentious but deep, dense but translucent, Uncut Gems challenges and rewards at every turn, ensuring that the castle of sand Howie builds and its ensuing collapse edifies an obvious but ignored lesson: that when we locate beauty not in the expectation of a glittery future to come but in the guaranteed beauty of the present, we treat the self, others, and the world as a proper return.
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.