THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 35
dollars.) To viewers who didn’t know
the backstory, “Good Time” might have
looked more like a crowning achieve-
ment. Connie and his accomplices tear
through Manhattan, Queens, Long Is-
land, and Brooklyn, showing us parts
of New York that don’t always appear
onscreen. One scene is a frenzied sprint
through the New World Mall, in Flush-
ing; the brothers had permission to shoot
there, but they showed up without warn-
ing and shot largely with hidden cam-
eras, as if they were still running a guer-
rilla operation. “Good Time” craftily
updates the Safdie template: if their
early movies sometimes felt improvised,
this one had evident narrative momen-
tum, supplied by a main character who
is always on the run—and, therefore,
constantly improvising. Many viewers
may have been too dazzled by the ac-
tion to notice the obstacle that the broth-
ers put in their own path. To under-
score the sense of physical push and
pull, they managed to make a violent
action movie with no guns.
M
ost of the reviews of “Good Time”
were enthusiastic. But there were
some dissenters, notably A. O. Scott,
the Times critic. Scott, who had loved
“Daddy Longlegs,” conceded that the
brothers were “clever and crafty,” but he
found himself repelled by the new movie,
especially by the way Pattinson’s char-
acter mistreats a series of black charac-
ters. “This pattern does not seem acci-
dental,” Scott wrote, and he wondered
whether the brothers meant to hold up
for critique Connie’s “bottom-of-the-
barrel white privilege,” or whether they
were merely trolling—engaged in “coy,
self-disavowing provocation.” He con-
cluded that it didn’t much matter. The
movie, he wrote, was merely “a rickety
genre thrill ride.” At its heart, it was
“stale, empty, and cold.”
The brothers have said that these ra-
cial disparities were intentional: they
were filming in 2016, and wanted to
reflect the cruelty and confusion that
they perceived all around them. And yet
you need not agree with Scott’s critique
in order to acknowledge that he iden-
tified something true. (For anyone sick
of redemptive Hollywood fare, Scott’s
condemnation—stale! empty! cold!—
might even have sounded like an unin-
tentional endorsement.) The Safdies
have long resisted the idea that film-
making should be morally instructive,
with admirable heroes and clearly iden-
tified villains. Instead, they take an ap-
proach that is at once more generous
and more unsparing, refusing to either
condemn their characters or prettify
them. Most of all, they resist the idea
that movie characters must learn and
grow; their heroes tend to be stubbornly
stuck. “I don’t know many people who
change—in particular, who change over
a short span of time,” Josh Safdie says.
“That’s just not how life unfolds.”
The Safdies aim less to edify au-
diences than to envelop them: they
want to create immersive experiences,
which generally requires that they im-
merse themselves. In order to make a
film as unflinching as “Heaven Knows
What,” Josh Safdie spent so much time
in Holmes’s world that he scarcely reg-
istered its bleakness. (“Once you’re in
the darkness, your eyes adjust,” he said.)
On the press tour, Jones, their star, was
mumbly and glassy-eyed, as if he were
having trouble getting out of charac-
ter. When the film was released,
Safdie proclaimed Holmes a
“movie star,” and her life sud-
denly grew more glamorous;
she modelled in a fashion shoot
with Lady Gaga, and had a role
in “American Honey,” the well-
reviewed film about travelling
magazine sellers. Since then,
though, Holmes has faded from
view. Buddy Duress was another first-
time actor, gangly and charismatic, who
appeared in “Heaven Knows What,”
and again in “Good Time,” which was
informed by his time in jail. He had a
number of acting opportunities, but
ended up back in jail on drug charges.
“He’s so talented,” Safdie says. “He was
doing so well. And he just got sucked
back into that world.”
This is another thing that makes
some people uneasy about the Safdies:
they like to surround themselves with
interesting and sometimes troubled
characters, who help inspire their mov-
ies, and who don’t necessarily find their
own lives transformed in the process.
But it would be wrong to suggest that
the brothers’ unblinking films reflect a
lack of compassion. The true subject of
“Good Time” is fraternal love, passion-
ately expressed and imperfectly demon-
strated. The Safdies seem to sustain
close friendships with virtually all their
collaborators, and with each other; if
Josh hears Benny say something that
he likes, he often responds by rubbing
Benny’s ear or squeezing his arm.
“Uncut Gems” may not mollify crit-
ics of the Safdies’ tendency to appropri-
ate styles and poses from real life, or to
let their characters make bad decisions
without authorial censure. It is partly
a film about Jewish identity: Howard,
the hero, is, in Sandler’s words, a “ba-
dass Jew,” living in a Jewish enclave on
Long Island. Like James Caan’s simi-
larly badass character in “The Gambler,”
from 1974, Howard is infatuated with
basketball. The Safdies’ jewelry movie
is also a basketball movie, set in 2012:
Kevin Garnett, the retired Celtics star,
convincingly plays himself, a prospec-
tive customer of Howard’s and also an
important figure in Howard’s betting
strategy. Scott Rudin, one of the pro-
ducers, said he was drawn in partly by
the “race politics”: Howard is a Jewish
man whose clientele is largely African-
American, and whose prized
possession is a black opal sto-
len from an Ethiopian mine.
When Garnett suggests that
Howard exploited the Ethiopi-
ans by underpaying for the opal,
Howard defends himself with
a basketball analogy. “I see you
out there when the fuckin’ sta-
dium’s all booin’ ya, you’re thirty
up, you’re still going full tilt,” he says.
“Come on, K.G.—this is no different
from that.” Through the Safdies’ eyes,
we watch Howard fondly but not quite
credulously. This is just how he is.
I
n October, “Uncut Gems” screened
at Lincoln Center, as part of the New
York Film Festival. On the red carpet,
Sandler worked the media alongside
many of the colorful characters who fill
out the film. Mike Francesa, the sports-
radio fixture, plays a bookie; Wayne Di-
amond, an astonishingly tanned fash-
ion designer, plays a high roller; Keith
Williams Richards, a former longshore-
man, plays a tough guy—his first act-
ing job, though possibly not his first
time acting tough. The film radiates
outward from Howard, who revels, Saf-
die-like, in travelling between worlds:
we follow him to a Passover Seder, where
