Review by Eva Zee
Approaching the end of the decade, no shortage of critical ink has been spilled on the way the typifying aesthetic form of the 2010s was pastiche – or, perhaps more accurately, a form of pastiche which relates to its forebears in a mode situated halfway between reverence and parody. It is in this cultural space, shared with the vaporwave that soundtracks it, that the Safdie brothers’ new film, Uncut Gems, operates. However, rather than the empty rearrangement of signifiers in affectively novel but intellectually stale patterns, which is so often the fate of such retrograde projects, the omnivorousness of Uncut Gems suggests an (aesthetically) accelerationist critique of nostalgia’s codependence with capital.
As Adam Sandler’s Howie lovingly recounts the historical significance of his prize opal (extracted, as all wealth and culture in the West is, through the labor and suffering of the Third World, which the Safdies clarify in the very first sequence of the film), so does the film trace its lineage through a series of temporally disjointed referents spanning decades, from the 80s textures evoked in the title screen and score to the fussily recreated, unmistakable milieu of 2012. Such obsessive ethnographic documentation of a moment is typical of backwards-looking art, but here it is transformed into a scalpel for the dissection of said moment – historicist analysis being the first step towards dismantling. This is the overarching project of the film: to dismantle the predominating sociocultural forms of the decade.
Uncut Gems is a repulsive movie, from its first gesture to its last, relishing in the violent and juvenile with gleeful disregard for the superficial import afforded it by the weight of borrowed tropes and signifiers. Jewish faith, the highly recognizable patterns that our culture imagines for divorce, sports trivia, mob movie tropes, and The Weeknd are all swept up in the grasping, avaricious tendrils of the narrative engine, and reassembled into a grotesque, late-capitalist ooze. One might call it the perfect antiparticle to Stranger Things in the cosmology of artistic nostalgia, a positively hateful treatment of its own formation, an anti-movie with none of the tedious handwringing (a la Dogme 95) implied by the term.
From this primordial soup of cultural flotsam emerges Howard Ratner, one of the most memorably devoted acolytes of capitalism put to screen in the past decade. His total, blind faith in the very acts of spending and making money, in and of themselves, is the engine generating Gems’s labyrinthine forward momentum, and he therefore becomes aligned with the film’s self-annihilatory conscience as the arc of narrative bends back towards inevitable collapse. Howie’s pure, untainted need for excess is what ends his life and the film (although his acquisitive spirit lives on in Julia (Julia Fox), to whose perspective the movie takes a late-stage shift), gesturing towards the aesthetic suicide that pastiche essentially represents when it takes on the dominant, maximalist shapes that it has tended towards in post-aughts Anglophone culture.
One could even begin to perceive this dissonance in the way Daniel Lopatin’s score, itself a dubiously transformative reworking of older forms, is quietly slotted in to the film in ways that run directly counter to its oversaturated synthesized mawkishness. What begins as an Job-ian comedy of misplaced belief and apparently meaningless suffering molts into a more potent autocritique, cinematically asserting that the nearly universal prevailing direction of culture is the equivalent of the pathetic final squirmings of a greedy idiot. Howard Ratner sows the seeds of his own destruction, happily, knowingly, and with a grin on his face, more interested in the pursuit of a rock foolishly invested with value far outstripping the conservative institutions of family, religion, and heterosexual romance that he clings to out of fear. The admonition is clear: a retreat to tradition is no more helpful than full-throated embrace of capital’s whims.
Of course this very self-critical impulse, Gems’s raison-d’etre, limits the scope of the movie, perhaps unforgivably to some. Like the slavishly referential art the film positions itself in opposition to, Uncut Gems still becomes a meaningful experience only in light of its relationship to antecedents, only when properly situated in a decades-spanning conversation between films. One might reasonably question the value of such introspective projects, which target the superstructural manifestations of capitalism’s putrefying effect upon culture and history primarily, rather than the economic and imperial bases which engender it.
Is it truly worthwhile to pursue an almost entirely inward-facing deconstruction when cinema represents a concrete, measurable violence upon the world? In this capacity, too, Uncut Gems prods at the nagging worries underlying all film culture and production under capitalism, thrown into ever more stark relief by the increasing homogenization of the industry in the West. Under the crushing weight of capital, all culture collapses into a single point, an ugly black hole of unintelligible, degenerated forms, and the Safdie brothers strive to shove our faces into it as hard as they possibly can.