Coming late to the party of appreciating - or in my case, appraising - the Safdie Brothers, whose third and fourth features finally break out the indie soil partially thanks to headlining name stars, GOOD TIME has Robert Pattinson in the dead center and UNCUT GEMS is Adam Sandler’s belatedly, showy return to a “serious” acting gig, Yours Truly must confess being a bit underwhelmed, if not forthright disappointed. We might be a bit too fidgety to look for the next Coen Brothers, since these two films cannot hold a candle to BLOOD SIMPLE (1984).
Both films have a white male as their sole protagonist, who has been in a fix and whose scheme of extrication is destined to go awry due to his congenital frailties. In GOOD TIME, in the wake of a botched bank robbery (with those uncanny prosthetic masks and improbable actions), small-time crook Connie Nikas (Pattinson) is bent on rescuing his mentally disabled brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie), who is arrested and roughed up in the prison, subsequently taken to a hospital, whereas in UNCUT GEMS, Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a Jewish jewel dealer in New York, strapped for money as he owes $100,000 to the loan shark Arno (Bogosian), his brother-in-law. After wangling a rare Ethiopian black opal into a forthcoming auction, everything would be fine, were it not for the fact that Howard is a hardened gambler.
GOOD TIME is a taut, guerrilla-style filmmaking spurred equally by psychedelic energy and spaced-out numbness, the brothers’ leanings of bisexual lighting (inaugurated by a magenta explosion) is spectacular to behold and the film never loses that edgy, trippy momentum as the story veers into a nocturnal derring-do where stashed cash and priced drug are in pursuit amid thickening murkiness.
Superbly erasing his usual sex appeal and amping up his rough edges, Pattinson reinvents himself from the ground up to impersonate a petty desperado who is world savvy but also stuck with one-track mind, let familial bond get the better of a more sound judgment, Connie’s obdurate denial of Nick’s neurodiverse condition has only himself to answer for, far better as a biddable analysand than an accomplice, Nick deserves a better guardian.
Female presentation is a hitch (which also sticks out in UNCUT GEMS), Jennifer Jason Leigh has only a short screen time as Connie’s much older, but development-arrested girlfriend, and newcomer Taliah Webster as Crystal, the 16-year-old black girl who is awarded with a wet kiss with Pattinson, is left passively as a mere onlooker without any agenda of her own to leaven the imbroglio, both are wasted opportunities. At any rate, never keen on character development, GOOD TIME is a wired thriller on steroids, adorned with flashy neon-lit aesthetic and a killer, pulsating score composed by Daniel Lopatin aka. Oneohtrix Point Never.
UNCUT GEMS, unfortunately, is much worse, running over 2 hours, it has a conceivable larger budget and using which the brothers concoct a bloated mixed bag of disagreeable people, led by Howard, who can interminably and repeatedly trot out the yawning obviousness and platitude (ok, ok, you are a fucked up; you hit it big, that’s fine; you want to break up with your mistress, just do it man, don’t shove it down my throat! Incidentally, please ask for an official appraisal before bragging about a gem’s value for god’s sake!). Of course, it never rain but it pours, Howard’s penchant for bragging (even before he can actually obtain the lucre) can only compound his already treacherous situation, not to mention his betting habit. The ending is abrupt, but at least, it saves audience from rooting for the smart aleck, since it is simply beyond my ken.
Albeit Sandler’s staunch commitment to regale us with unflappable optimism, UNCUT GEMS suffers from the brothers’ deficiency in understanding people who are one generation older than themselves. In GOOD TIME, Connie is their contemporary, so they nails it, but for Howard, they are still too callow to understand why such a repugnant man prima facie, can make good in the first place, married well with three kids (Menzel arms Howard’s dismissive, disaffected wife with enough rancor and ridicule, yet the only time she is given something else to act, it is all about that she can still fit in her old dress, meh!), gifted with a voluptuous, younger mistress Julia (Fox, terrific in an ill-devised trophy girlfriend role) who simply adores him. They didn’t make that logic stick. by simplifying and mocking Howard, some viewers could get extremely grating about that schlemiel or by extension ascribe which to his Jewish extraction (the sour grape effect), thus sending a dangerous signal here which the filmmakers should be alert about.
The obvious difference between the Safdies and the Coens is that while both tend to champion cynical, unsympathetic characters in their films, the former is critically short of the latter’s black humor, and UNCUT GEMS, is a case in point. Even Safdie’s chromatic flair is muted here (it is remarkably shot in film though, boasting a rich texture), and the whole enchilada is too exhausting to invest one’s uninterrupted attention, nothing is remotely lapidary in this brazen cautionary tale.
referential entry: Joel Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE (1984, 8.1/10).
