Con-Artists: "I Care A Lot", "Uncut Gems"

Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a con artist whose grift is particularly cruel: She bribes a doctor into declaring elderly people unable to look after themselves, then becomes their court-appointed legal guardian. Marla is savvy and severe, but her greatest skill as a scammer is her knowledge of the countless ways that legal and health-care bureaucracies leave the elderly and disabled vulnerable. Under the guise of protecting her patients, Marla easily persuades doctors to alter their medications and isolate them from the loved ones who might guard them from her ploy. More neo-noir than nuanced character study, I Care A Lot's writer-director Jonathan Blakeson’s film nonetheless shows how easily a shrewd scammer can manipulate systems that already cause grave harm. The treacherous face-off between combatants ostensibly on opposite sides of the law wades into dark comedy territory, especially when Marla's indignation is spiked by Roman resorting to thuggery rather than beating her fair and square in the courts. The inference that her entire scheme is considered more or less legal makes the whole scenario even queasier. 

"To make it in this country you need to be brave and stupid and ruthless and focused," says Marla while tied to a chair at mobster Roman's mercy. "Playing fair, being scared, that gets you nowhere. That gets you beat." The main problem is that Blakeson gets cold feet when it comes to keeping Marla an aggressively vile presence deserving of moral condemnation, which applies the brakes on the picture. So “I Care a Lot” limps to a close, which is a shame, as it opens with fantastic authority, promising a character study of a loathsome psychopath that’s never fully realized. Source: www.theatlantic.com

Uncut Gems (2019) begins with an unusual transition sequence, where we first see a badly injured Ethiopian miner and a mob of fellow Ethiopian miners on the verge of revolting against what looks to be Chinese mine-owners. Through a presumed smuggling network, an unscrupulous Jewish jeweler in NYC tries to sell these opal gems and other shiny things to black rappers and superstitious NBA stars with a surfeit of disposable income. Uncut Gems is very much a critical reflection on modern Jewish identity and one of the most self-consciously Jewish films since the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Uncut Gems centers on the manic Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweler in NYC’s seedy Diamond District, whose life is nothing short of a high-wire enterprise on a near daily basis. Howard has a mistress named Julia DeFiore (Julia Fox) who works at his jewel store and lives in his apartment (far removed from the suburban home he shares with his estranged wife and family). And, most importantly, Howard is a compulsive speculator and gambler, whose downwardly spiraling habits threaten his own sanity and welfare.

In The Ordeal of Civility (1974), John Murray Cuddihy draws attention to how the Jewish sense of persecution underwent something of a narrative reboot in the nineteenth century (which radically accelerated after World War II). Cuddihy points out that whereas pre-modern Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile “as a punishment from God for its sins,” beginning in the nineteenth century—after Jews were granted civic emancipation in the predominately Christian nations of the West—secular Jewish elites began to re-frame the Jewish Diaspora in secular terms: "Before Emancipation, Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile as a punishment from God for its sins. After Emancipation, this theodicy, now turned outward to a new, Gentile status-audience, becomes an ideology, emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology was so pervasive that it was shared, in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews, Zionists and Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world." (Cuddihy, p. 177) “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government,” Jewish columnist Joel Stein bragged in the Los Angeles Times in December 2008. “I just care that we get to keep running them.” Mr Stein’s reckless candor cost him his job at the LA Times. As F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected on the Hollywood of the 1930s in The Last Tycoon (1941): "Hollywood is a Jewish holiday, and a gentile's tragedy." 

In many lengthy sequences, Uncut Gems is unnerving to watch, due to the cacophony of voices talking over each other with extreme intensity, and within an environment of constant crisis and chaos, like a continuous cinematic panic attack, all of which is accentuated by Darius Khondji’s cinematography and the film’s frenetic pace. Of the film’s noise pollution, P.J. Grisar, writing in The Forward, puts it this way: “Jewish auteurs’ resistance to examining a Howard Ratner is understandable. There’s a justifiable fear that such characters are 'a shande far di Goyim.'” In a similar vein, Noah Kulwin, in a review of the film titled “In Praise of the Difficult Jew”, goes so far as to say: "Ratner is the latest in a long line of Jewish perverts and idiots, men whose fundamentally crude nature can overpower nearly all other parts of their personality. It’s a key part of what makes Adam Sandler so well-suited to the role, given the gross-out nature of his oeuvre, and his portrayal revives a variety of Jewish stereotypes." Gabe Friedman, in his review for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, notes how the film “deeply explores modern Jewish identity.” Heather Schwedel refers to Uncut Gems in Slate magazine as an “extremely Jewish film.” According to Richard Brody in The New Yorker: "The panic and the paranoia that drive Howard have an underlying historical undercurrent, a weird sense of belonging that he finds in the uncertainty, the instability, the terror, the exclusion that he endures—even if he largely brought it on himself." 

Ultimately, however, Uncut Gems fails due to a series of fundamental flaws. The script feels incomplete. Various characters are shown, in passing, vocalizing digressive and inconsequential asides. There is the prevailing chaos in dialogue and miscellaneous diegetic sound. There is the agonizing weight of profanity used throughout the film. But the most serious and critical flaw is that Howard Ratner is not a character we can feel sorry for, root for, or even care about. He displays no dignity and his narcissism is boundless. The film’s defenders will likely offer some form of postmodern argument that this is deliberate and provocative, that standard character arcs—especially when this arc may involve redemption or growth—are passé, etc. 

But when the audience doesn’t care about a movie’s protagonist in any substantive way, that movie will be forgotten in time. The phenomenon of Jewish neuroticism, while often joked about in Hollywood comedies (Woody Allen, Judd Apatow) or elaborated upon in Jewish literature (Philip Roth, Sam Munson), is—like other Jewish “stereotypes”—typically a subject that non-Jews writers are not allowed to broach, else they be branded anti-Semites. The stereotypes of Jewish intensity, overcompensation, obnoxiousness, money obsession, sexual addiction, paranoia, and continuous persecution complex are on full display in Uncut Gems, as is that world-weary form of Jewish pessimism which, in this case, seems to have its ultimate expression in the lead character’s suicidal death wish. Source: theoccidentalobserver.net