Are Diamonds Forever? Uncut Gems and My Existential Crisis
“I never thought a film about basketball gambling would be one of the most spiritual film-watching experiences of my life. But it happened.
“When I worked in Manhattan for a huge corporation I would sometimes get falafel in the diamond district near my office. I remember walking down these tiled hallways connecting blocks, men with eye loupes gazing deeply into jewelry. It felt like I was in some secret city. It also felt like illegalities were feverishly burning just below the surface of every surface. I would also go to this area to buy expensive shoes that were far too underpriced. Stolen? Fakes? I don’t know. But it was a culture I benefitted from and chose not to look too closely at for fear of seeing my own reflection in the human-rat-race of status and wealth that the entire island continues to be subsumed by. My heart rate climbed, my breath shortened as I saw the planes of familiarity in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, an endless circle of futile climbing and falling, climbing and falling.
“In the opening of the film one is taken through a metaphysical whirlwind— a precious gemstone, through the cosmos, into a colonoscopy (I can’t explain it, just see it). Birth, life, death, nature, science, spirit collapsed all in barely the first few minutes of the film. Daniel Lopatin’s soundtrack adds to the otherworldly, providing a throbbing digital atmosphere of another ethereal space we’ve all crowded into. A war between elegant beauty— like each carefully set diamond on a gem-emblazoned Furby, or the perfect basketball shot— and utter chaos (no spoilers), battling in search of some kind of order or meaning or sense to the pulsating, relentless, maddening human experience. The whole film asking: What and why do you worship?
“I am pretty sure I once sat (eating a falafel) near the very fountain Adam Sandler gets thrown into in Uncut Gems which sent a deeper pang of recognition to tap on my shoulder, my memory of my own implication in the cycle of ‘winning.’ For me, the film became a stark, recognizable portrait of the faded, fabled ‘American Dream’ hawked in stores and media throughout the globe. The film looks at money and power searching for something more— some semblance of connection, hope, some divine intervention boiling underneath it all. Though Oscar sweeper Parasite deals with some similar issues, Uncut Gems was overlooked because the mirror it creates scares the hell out of everyone in America; Gems doesn’t sugar coat with the same kind of cartoonishness as Parasite that makes the looming issues seem just a little unreal, just a tiny bit foreign, slightly ‘over there’ and not ‘in here.’ Uncut Gems is a neverending punch in the face reminding that even if it seems like life can be gamed, it can’t. Even if we live in a country where one thinks every single thing can be bought, inexplicable, divine moments of purpose are never actually for sale.
~ Donna Kozloskie
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