Starting with the prelude that opens on black Jews working in the opal mines of Ethiopia, the intersection of the Jewish and African-American communities emerges as the thematic crux of the film. The jewelers take anyone with cash, but with some rappers, they’ll cut a deal and rise together. When we were there, we met so many rappers who had come with the purpose of getting a statement piece and implicitly announcing themselves. This was its own tiny enterprise, with the owner helping to get the attention of people in the industry, and you still see stuff like this in the Diamond District now. Aspiring rappers would come in to buy jewelry, and behind a shelf of gold chains, they could cut a record. Josh jumps right in, a fraternal rapport that sounds to the untrained ear like talking over each other: “He was telling us about this jeweler who had a recording booth in the back of his store, on Pitkin Avenue in East New York. “Our dad would bring jewelry to areas where the only non-black residents were the other Jewish jewelers,” Benny says. He’d regale his boys with tall tales of the dealers and clients with whom he’d do business, and in them, they saw an opening to a world adjacent to their own. Their other point of reference was their own father, another deeply flawed larger-than-life personality who worked in the Diamond District. He knows everyone, knows how to make stuff happen he’s what’s referred to in Yiddish as a macher.” He’ll give everybody a moment, even the guy delivering packages. If you’re paying, everyone’s the same to him. “Everyone’s equal in Howard’s showroom, as long as they’ve got the money. Cash served as a field-leveler, and one that he could work to his advantage. “You’re taking a calcified version of the place that Jews were put in, and seeing how it’s formed over centuries.” In other words, he is as capitalism made him, a figure vilified for being too good at the game he was forced to play. “Howard is what happens when a person goes into an industry fueled by consumerism,” Benny says. But the Safdie boys wanted Howard to be something closer to a “prideful kabuki version” of a Jewish caricature, someone who could “wear the stereotypes as a badge of honor, then barge right through them.” And as an incorrigible horndog with a fetching shiksa girlfriend on the side, doubly so. As a gambling addict obsessed with maintaining his precarious balance of bets and debts - someone whose life literally depends on the numbers in his bank account - Howard would seem to play into that perception. It’s the first stereotype anti-Semites go to when playing dirty: the covetous penny-pincher, rubbing his hands together as he counts his shekels. The almighty dollar looms large in both Howard’s life and the story of the Jewish people. In the Diamond District in particular, the materialist culture perpetuates the idea that through consumerism and the acquiring of riches, you can transcend bigotries and discrimination. “The church saw capitalism as a threat, a dirty business, so why not let the Jews do it? They ended up using the only thing they had access to as their point of integration. “If you go back to Middle Ages, the Jewish people were given the thing that nobody wanted to do, which was working with money,” Josh Safdie explains to InsideHook at the offices of distributor A24, just a brief schlep from the film’s shooting locations 20 blocks northeast. It’s also a bustling hub of Semitic history and heritage, a physical space where Jews continue to negotiate age-old prejudices and forge ahead into a cross-cultural future. The lion’s share of the film plays out in and around 47th Street in midtown Manhattan, an orthodox enclave termed the Diamond District for its flourishing bling trade. Is Howard Ratner, the lecherous jeweler in the eye of the cinematic hurricane that is Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film Uncut Gems, good for the Jews? Directors Josh and Benny Safdie kept returning to this question over the long process of conceiving and creating the character with eventual leading man Adam Sandler, his mere presence a powerful image of Jewish iconography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |