Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS   ***1/2

Josh and Benny Safdie

2019

IDEA:  A jeweler in New York City's Diamond District desperately attempts to claw his way out of a series of debts, placing his faith on a rock he's procured from Ethiopia that's allegedly worth over a million dollars.

BLURB:  Walking a particularly tremulous tightrope, Uncut Gems is at once a withering indictment of commodity culture and capitalist exploitation and a deliciously screwball symphony of bad judgment, its sense of escalating mayhem equally conducive to expressing the terrifying freefall and manic farce of one man’s sensational flameout. This idiosyncratic tonal mixture is seeded in the opening sequence, in which the Safdie brothers boldly juxtapose timeless geologic beauty with humanly abjection, setting material greed, capital worship, and subjugation on an ancient temporal plane that has evolved and warped across millennia. Where it ends up is inside the splenetic body of Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, an inveterate huckster and gambler whose entire life cosmology is predicated on monetary transactions in pursuit of an impossible profit. Channeling and reinforcing the relentlessness of his wheeling-and-dealing, the Safdies create a whirlwind of barely controlled chaos, their scenes increasingly fueled by proliferating conflicts and mishaps tied to Ratner’s compulsive, almost primal need for the agitation of modern capitalist life. That this life can really only lead to spiritual, cultural, and physical depletion is the thesis underlying even Uncut Gems’ most brazenly comic constructions, an axiom that one waits in uneasy anticipation to spring on its unexamined protagonist. Yet while the Safdies are primarily concerned with Ratner’s epic follies, they don’t lay the blame on just him, or merely on his disastrous choices; rather, like the mythical allure of the opal at the film's center, everyone becomes ensnared by the market logics of an economy whose cessation would spell our own.

A Hidden Life

A HIDDEN LIFE   ***

Terrence Malick

2019

IDEA:  Based on the true story of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to vow his oath to Hitler during World War II. 

BLURB:  Verdant mountains extend as far as the eye can see, towering into the sky, shimmering in streams of crystal water as implacable and enveloping as the blankets of rolling mist. The pastoral Alpine landscape of A Hidden Life is as quintessentially a breathing monument to the sublimity of nature as Malick has ever conjured, an earthly cathedral that invites our full-bodied reverence. For the first half of the film it appears in nearly every shot, wide-angle lenses wrapping it around the characters, rendering the very condition of being-in-the-world as an inextricable, continuous intertwinement with a splendor that is always there, even when your consciousness intends elsewhere. As ever, Malick is all about guiding it back. In A Hidden Life, perhaps more than ever before, he does this with laser-focused political intent, framing the spectacular plenitude of nature as a constant, cosmic rebuke to the festering evil of fascism. Through the unwaveringly principled Franz, a humble steward of that nature, Malick conveys how moral responsibility is a fortifying act allied with social and ecological perdurance. To turn one’s back on virtue, he argues, is not merely to abandon personal ethics but to diminish all of the world. Frustratingly, A Hidden Life sheds some of its power as that diminution is forced upon Franz, the tautological scenes of his imprisonment tending to blunt both theme and affect. But at its best, the film invokes the awesome magnitude of life beyond the bounds of our futilely constricting human systems, and attains its poignancy by wondering what the world might be like if conscientiousness didn’t so often have to be an audacious position.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE   ***1/2

Céline Sciamma

2019

IDEA:  On a remote part of Brittany in the 18th century, an artist and the woman whose marriage portrait she's hired to paint find themselves falling in love.

BLURB:  The portrait around which Portrait of a Lady on Fire revolves is the product and locus of reciprocating female gazes, a representation of a history of women’s voices and labor hidden and subsumed under patriarchal culture. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a mise-en-abyme of Céline Sciamma’s film itself. Like the painting, which is forged from the intimate and egalitarian meeting of female subjects, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fashions itself as a distaff oasis, restoring to the canons of both painting and cinema the agency of women. It is in this uncovered milieu that Marianne and Héloïse are free to entwine their gazes and their bodies, as well as to explore roles of subjectivity and representation that find their conduits in the visual arts. Sciamma’s frames, alternately awash in limpid pastels and lit in golden Vermeer light, effectively turn the medium of film into an extension of painting, taking portraits of the central women in lingering two-shots that allow every minute gesture to seem infinitely present, impressing themselves upon our memories. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is as much about the power of the gaze to hold and retain as it is about its transience, its inability to fully materially grasp an object, no matter how intently ones stares. It’s in this way that Sciamma’s film charts a fairly familiar trajectory of forbidden love made briefly, hotly present. But by situating this narrative within this idiom, and by interrogating the politics of its aesthetics, she is able to make it into something that defies the fate of its romance: a portrait that indexes a whole other world of feeling and desire that no mimetic image can contain.

Waves

WAVES   ***1/2

Trey Edward Shults

2019

IDEA:  An African-American family in southern Florida deals with the repercussions of their decisions.

BLURB:  True to the title, emotions and sensations cascade through Trey Edward Shults’ film like barreling waves, endlessly redistributing between its characters rations of grief, rage, and hope. Leaning as heavily into formalist flourishes as fervid melodrama, the director makes the film into a palpitating field of intensities, a living mood ring that makes you feel every hot, cold, devastating, and rapturous temperamental vagary in appropriately oscillating surges. What Shults is after here, and what he conveys with such affective force through this rhythmic expressionism, is how people inherit and transfer energies both positive and harmful, and particularly how this manifests within one family’s fragile ecosystem. The first part of Waves, which is orchestrated more like a bullet-paced thriller than a domestic drama, is focused primarily on the harmful energies. Plunged into the subjectivity of the obstinate, overweening Tyler, it’s a breathless flurry of 360-degree pans, booming music cues, and strobes blurring into police lights, a portrait of a young man’s downfall precipitated by a father, and by extension a culture of masculinity, that equates strength with dominance. The second half is no less immersive, even as it replaces Tyler’s blinkered male perspective with the more open, feminized one of his sister. Here, Waves ambitiously revises and redeems the tragedy that cleaves it in two, showing how the aftermath of a family trauma can, in the best case scenario, be transmuted into redemptive love and understanding. Shults’ move toward the homiletic in this part flirts with the banal, and risks awarding easy resolutions where none exist. But it’s the bone-deep performances, the naked emotionality, and the director’s visceral command of form and feeling that give Waves its sense of tidal release.