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Bong’s protagonists, the Kim family, live in a cramped basement flat – ‘half above ground, half beneath it’ according to the director – cluttered to the point of claustrophobia with water stains seeping through its walls. Courtesy: Universal Picturesīong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) – which centres on a South Korean family conning their way to a more materially fruitful life – deploys similarly stark visualisations of extreme wealth and poverty. Jordan Peele, Us, 2018, production still.
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‘That was immediately symbolic, the trappings of consumerism.’ ‘It’s this idea of taking pop culture and canonising it with wealth,’ co-director Josh Safdie told GQ. Howard’s own shop glitters with golden artefacts, none more crass than diamond-encrusted Furbies.
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New York’s Diamond District – where much of the film takes place – is a site of gleaming metallic and glass surfaces. The Safdie brothers explore the spatial characteristics of this obsession with wealth. Howard – a shallow, habitual opportunist – isn’t just highly strung, but the twitchy embodiment of 21st-century capitalism, bulldozing his way through time, space and people. He exists in a perpetually accelerated state of anxiety, an experience driven home to clammy effect by frequently disorientating editing and overwhelming sound design. Like DiCaprio’s titular wolf Jordan Belfort, Sandler’s gambling addict Howard shouts constantly as he shifts credit from person to person, betting big on basketball games while maintaining an elite albeit tasteless New York jewellery shop. From the crooked stockbrokers who run rampant in The Wolf Of Wall Street (2014) to The Big Short (2015), which unravels the subprime mortgage scandal like a slick heist movie, such films paint a grotesque picture of modern finance: men manipulating capital from remote computer screens while bellowing into telephones. Uncut Gems isn’t the first Hollywood film since the recession to capitalize on this cultural obsession. Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Uncut Gems, 2018, film still. Consider the Fyre Festival scandal (immortalised by not one but two documentaries) and the rise of the Instagram scammer (epitomised by the bizarre Caroline Calloway story) and it’s no wonder that Jia Tolentino declared, in The New Yorker, that scamming has become the ‘dominant form of American life.’ What’s behind the curious appeal of such demonstrably awful people? Hoodwinking was central to Donald Trump’s political ascendency, from the Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy (the false accusation that the former president lacks US citizenship), to Trump’s own self-made myth and the glaring contradiction that a man who authored The Art of the Deal (1987) should file for bankruptcy six times. We still live in the long shadow of the 2008 Great Recession, instigated by vampiric bankers who knowingly sold bad debt. Recently, it seems that scammers like Gooey have infiltrated almost every aspect of economic, political and cultural life. Yet despite the auction’s decorous atmosphere, this is site of the film’s most naked scam.
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Sandler’s character looks more respectable in this scene, dressed in a suit and tie, than he does in his usual gauche designer clothes, flashy jewellery and neurotically trimmed goatee. Howard’s enchanting black opal, the uncut gem at the film’s heart, is up for auction and Gooey is there to artificially raise its value. Midway through the Safdie brothers’ thriller Uncut Gems (2019), Howard Ratner – played with maniacal intensity by Adam Sandler – sits in an elite New York auction room next to his father in-law Gooey (Judd Hirsch).