36 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
he encounters the ten plagues, and to
a night club, where he encounters the
R. & B. star the Weeknd. The film ra-
diates inward, too: it is only a mild
spoiler to reveal that “Uncut Gems”
both starts and ends with the viewer
tunnelling through Howard’s body.
When it was over, and the audience was
happily dazed, the Safdies and their
collaborators shuffled onstage.
Garnett, during his playing days,
liked to present himself as an implaca-
ble warrior. Asked about his acting work,
he gave an earnest reply: “I wanted to
be very present.” His wide-eyed inten-
sity matches the film’s mood, but he
was not the first basketball player the
brothers considered. One early version
featured Amar’e Stoudemire, whom
they met while working on the Cooke
documentary, and who usefully com-
plicated the film’s view of identity by
being both African-American and Jew-
ish. (Stoudemire was not cast, partly
because he declined to shave his dread-
locks, which he did not have in his
playing years.) For a while, they talked
to Joel Embiid, the Cameroonian star
of the Philadelphia 76ers, but then it
turned out that the movie would be
shooting, inconveniently, during bas-
ketball season. Each time the player
changed, the script needed to change,
too. The brothers used N.B.A. footage
without permission, and are
planning to offer a “fair use” de-
fense if the league objects; to
strengthen their hypothetical
case, they present the games
exactly as they occurred, taking
no license with the outcomes or the
chronology. (Moviegoers hoping to
avoid spoilers should avoid learning
anything about the 2012 playoffs.)
The bigger challenge was casting
Howard: he needed to be Jewish, and
he needed to be riveting, but beyond
that the brothers were flexible. They
tried to get the script to Sandler. When
that didn’t work, they pursued Harvey
Keitel; they eventually decided that
Howard should be younger, although
not before having a convivial Seder
with Keitel and his family, at Stou-
demire’s house. For a while, Jonah Hill
was attached, but then the brothers de-
cided that he was too young, right
around the time Hill decided that he
was too busy. So they returned to San-
dler, this time with extra muscle: Mar-
tin Scorsese, who had signed on as ex-
ecutive producer.
If you’re going to film a love letter to
an unlovable character, it helps to have
a star whom audiences already adore.
The Safdies, like most people who were
teen-agers in the nineteen-nineties, grew
up on Adam Sandler, whose seemingly
simple comedy is driven by a feral spirit.
In his best roles, Sandler is stubbornly
and sometimes unsettlingly irrational,
an Everyman who insists on doing pre-
cisely what he feels like doing, even if
he can’t quite explain why. During a re-
cent conversation with Brad Pitt, which
was filmed for Variety, Sandler conceded
that Howard might sometimes be “un-
likable,” but Pitt stopped him. “He was
never unlikable,” Pitt said. “Never.” The
trailer for “Uncut Gems” went viral as
soon as it was released, in September. It
showed Sandler, resplendent in big white
teeth and little rimless glasses, stalking
the streets of the Diamond District, al-
ternately triumphant and pathetic, as
people shout his name. The Safdies were
gratified to see images on Twitter of fans
dressed as Howard for Halloween—six
weeks before the movie came out.
In the course of filming, Sandler
came to be treated as an honorary mem-
ber of the Forty-seventh Street frater-
nity. On the “Tonight Show,” he proudly
explained to Jimmy Fallon that
the jewellers had given him a
professional-grade loupe. “I
started looking at everybody’s
jewelry, to see if it was good or
bad,” he said. “And then—this
is the weirdest thing—I discovered, be-
cause of the loupe: I have a penis!” He
smirked. “And, guys: it’s also ‘uncut.’”
As Fallon collapsed into hysterics,
Sandler finished the bit. “But I have to
report to you, sadly: it’s not a ‘gem.’”
Sandler brings a trace of laziness to
everything he does, as if he were always
looking for a corner to cut; in this film,
he often seems to be moving slightly
slower than everyone else. Even so, there
is no shortage of motion or sound.
When not comparing “Uncut Gems”
to a heart attack, critics have called it
“a merciless assault on the senses,” offer-
ing earnest and divergent opinions about
which sedatives might best help view-
ers recover.
The brothers have grown used to re-sponses such as these. But, Josh Safdie
says, “the whole point of it is not to as-
sault people—the whole point of it is to
create a feeling of what that world is.”
For “Uncut Gems,” the Safdies brought
in the cinematographer Darius Khondji,
who is renowned for an elegant style,
which the brothers both admired and
wanted to disrupt. ( Josh Safdie liked to
torment Khondji by sending him im-
ages of buildings by the architect Mi-
chael Graves, who is known for exuber-
antly flouting conventions of good taste.)
The Diamond District—which sprang
up during the Second World War, when
a cohort of Jewish gem dealers fled Eu-
rope—is not a cozy place, and the film
is full of sharp angles, glass surfaces, and
harsh light. The brothers’ bet is that, if
they get enough details right, and cre-
ate a vivid enough character, we will find
this world as engrossing as they do—
and maybe as lovable, too.“
J
ust filming something stupid,” Josh
Safdie said, when a curious onlooker
asked what he was doing. He was on
West Forty-fifth Street, near Times
Square, aiming a handheld camera at a
human statue—a man dressed in gold
from head to toe, with gold paint cov-
ering his face. The man walked over and
conferred with the brothers: “Everybody
had fun comments to say to me when
I walked by. They said, ‘Stay golden!’”
If people had looked closely at the
man in gold, he might have seemed fa-
miliar. Another member of the crew re-
ferred to him as “Sandman,” and Josh
Safdie frowned. “Just call him How-
ard,” he said.
Sandler befriended the Safdies during
the filming of “Uncut Gems,” and when
he heard them talking about making a
quick short film he asked if he could
take part. A few years earlier, Benny
Safdie had starred in “Solid Gold,” a
five-minute film about a rather unsteady
human statue. (Passersby, none of whom
knew they were in a movie, tended to
be encouraging and compassionate.)
And so, on a recent night, the brothers
made a trip to Times Square to film a
sequel: now Benny was all in silver, and
slightly better at standing still; Sandler,
in gold, was the new wobbler. The broth-
ers seemed energized by working the
way they once did, without permits and
without much of a script.