Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Uncut Gems
2019 · Josh Safdie · Uncut Gems on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for how many people are talking at the same time. (sound)
The dialogue mix lets voices collide and never cleans them up. You keep losing the thread of one conversation to another running under it. Howard is working three at once and losing all three.
Payoff: The mix puts you inside Howard's head, where every channel stays open and none of them ever closes.
Notice how often a scene gets cut off before it finishes. (cutting)
Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie interrupt. A conversation reaches its point and the film jumps somewhere else, then does it again, for over two hours. No scene is allowed to land.
Payoff: Continuity cutting normally lets a character think before acting. This film removes the pause, so Howard never stops moving and neither do you. In the reading: post-continuity. The edit's refusal to let a scene settle is what the reading calls post-continuity: no pause left between seeing and doing.
Watch how little space Khondji leaves around Sandler's head. (camera)
Darius Khondji shoots on long lenses that flatten the Diamond District into a wall. Bodies pile into the frame, backgrounds press forward, and Howard is crowded inside every room he enters.
Payoff: The lens does the trapping before the plot does, so you feel the squeeze from the first scene on.
Count how many times a buzzer door has to open. (staging)
The jewelry store runs on a double-buzzer vestibule. Everyone entering or leaving waits to be let through, and the Safdies keep staging the story at that lock.
Payoff: The door is the film's basic machine: Howard is forever waiting on someone else to release him.
Look at the opal whenever somebody holds it up to the light. (setting)
The camera travels inside the stone in the opening minutes and finds color and depth in there. After that, everyone who looks into it, Kevin Garnett included, starts behaving differently around it.
Payoff: The stone works on people like a charged object rather than merchandise, and nobody can fix what it is worth.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Howard is always being let through a door by someone else. Watch who works the buzzer.