30 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 PHOTOGRAPH BY GUS POWELL
“Movies are against nature,” Josh Safdie (in ball cap) says. “It’s the most perverted art form. It’s trying to replicate life.”
ONWARDAND UPWARDWITH THEA RTS
OUTSIDE SHOT
The Safdie brothers’ new film is a dizzying ode to New York—and maybe a hit.
BY KELEFASANNEH
D
uring every New York Knicks home
game, the scoreboard at Madison
Square Garden displays a message ask-
ing fans to refrain from disruptive be-
havior. It is a reasonable request, but on
a recent night it was not enough to dis-
suade a wiry man with a beard and a ball
cap, who was standing up, cupping his
hands around his mouth, and yelling,
“Hey, Aaron! Aaron Smith!”
A security guard, a few rows closer to
the court, gestured downward with his
palms: Quiet, please.
“I’m just trying to get my friend’s at-
tention,” the man said.
“Text him,” the guard said.
“I can’t,” the man said. “He’s reffing.”
Aaron Smith was indeed one of the
referees that night, working a pre-sea-
son game between the Knicks and the
New Orleans Pelicans. But the man
shouting his name was not a friend, just
a mischievous Googler—who also hap-
pens to be one of the most acclaimed
film directors in the world. His name
is Josh Safdie, and he is thirty-five; he
and his brother, Benny Safdie, who is
two years younger, have directed a se-
ries of movies that have been increas-
ingly ambitious and increasingly pop-
ular. In 2017, they made “Good Time,”
starring Robert Pattinson, a jittery, hal-
lucinatory crime drama, which, once
you got over the jitters, was perhaps
also a comedy. Their latest, “Uncut
Gems,” is a hectic and soulful film largely
set in New York’s Diamond District,
and starring Adam Sandler as Howard
Ratner, a gem dealer and sports gam-
bler who spends two hours making pro-
gressively more frantic transactions, in
search of a payoff big enough to retro-
actively justify the risks. Variety com-
pared the film, admiringly, to a “pro-
tracted heart attack,” though the Safdie
brothers seem to think of it, like its pre-
decessors, as a loving and realistic por-
trait of their home town. Residents and
visitors alike routinely complain that
the city is not as interesting as it used
to be; the Safdies’ work is devoted to
the proposition that any place can be
interesting, especially New York, pro-
vided you look carefully enough.
It was a few weeks before the open-
ing of “Uncut Gems,” and the Safdie
brothers had taken a break from pre-
release screenings (Telluride, Toronto,
the New York Film Festival) to steal a
glimpse of Zion Williamson, the Peli-
cans’ No. 1 draft pick. The Safdies are
obsessive about basketball; in “Uncut
Gems,” Howard’s fortunes rise and fall
with the outcomes of the games he bets
on. But Williamson had foiled their
plans by tearing his meniscus, so the
brothers had to find other ways to en-
tertain themselves. Of the two, Josh Saf-
die tends to be the instigator, driven by
instinct and daring. Near one of the
