On the night before my day off from my day job as a Starbucks barista, I was faced with a difficult decision. I’d been making it a point for the past month or so to make a trip to a ramen joint every time I went to Boston on my days off, trying to find the best places in the city to have that most beloved of Japanese dishes—sometimes I’m baffled by how much comfort food exists in Japan. Noticing that my next stop, Ganko Ittetsu Ramen, would bring me right next to the Coolidge Corner Theatre, I decided I’d watch a film, but I realized that I couldn’t really decide on whether or not to watch Uncut Gems or Little Women.

The easiest solution comes in the simplest of responses-in-the-form-of-questions: “Why not both?”

Sometimes the easiest solutions are the best ones. Even if it kind of hurt my wallet a little bit.

I’d decided on watching Uncut Gems first at 3:30, which gave me enough time to have an intermission of sorts at Ganko Ittetsu, and come straight back for Little Women at 6:45. It was perfect. Practically mainlining my veins with caffeine, I prepared myself for my impromptu double feature and collected myself as I sat in a little screening room to watch my first exposure to the Safdies’ work, along with a little old lady, a burly bald-headed man, and two couples, one of which had a woman who brandished her phone like a switchblade and simply would not shut the fuck up during the entire run time.

Uncut Gems

At one point in the film, jewelry store owner and gambling addict Howard Ratner, our protagonist, turns the radio on as he’s driving his family home from a Passover celebration, and makes a stop at his New York apartment to see if his mistress has indeed packed up her things and left as he wrathfully demanded earlier. Billy Joel whistling over a gently melancholy melody on the piano can be heard creaking through the car speakers. Howard makes the sad attempt at an excuse that he needs to grab something from his place. His eldest son complains about needing to use the restroom. An argument between his parents going through a divorce ensues.

Howard’s soon-to-be ex-wife caves and lets him go up to his apartment and his son comes along so he can relieve his bowels. The drums kick in, and the Billy Joel song, “The Stranger”, is blaring now, exiting the diegetic directly into our earholes. He sings, “Well we all have a face/that we hide away forever/and we take them out/and show ourselves when everyone is gone…” before the song quickly fades out. For some reason, this brief moment really stood out to me while I was watching Uncut Gems, perhaps because while the song doesn’t entirely play out, “The Stranger” really seems to sum up Howard’s entire existence in this film, in an almost wry and twisted sort of way.

Howard begins the film obsessed with the namesake uncut gems, black opal, and quickly encounters a foil of sorts in Kevin Garnett, as himself, who asks to borrow the opal as a source of cosmic luck for his NBA matches. A common compliment that gets thrown around for Uncut Gems, often uttered as this insurmountable feat of cinema by unfit and tired cinephiles (I myself am guilty of this), is that the film “made [them] care about basketball [of all things. Sports! I couldn’t give two flying shits about sports, like seriously, who the fu—]”

I think it’s probably not a bad idea then to unpack how the film does this so well. Aside from the way the film tactically includes scenes of Howard and later Julia placing the bets on-screen in clear view for the audience, and the film simply confirming good turnouts in the basketball games by having Adam Sandler do the typical sports fan thing of repeated feral screaming, yelling, and gesturing toward expensive LCD displays, Uncut Gems accomplishes the colossal task of “making [everyone] care about basketball” by laying down clear and concise stakes for the audience.

We know how much Howard’s bets on Kevin Garnett mean to him because like the uncut gems themselves, his bets mean the entire world, the entire universe to him. His entire life is at stake. We spend the whole movie watching Howard’s wildly stupid ambition leading to polar opposite outcomes for him. We watch Howard being an absolute garbage can of a human being and yet we oddly want him to succeed, all because of that ambition and because of his sheer resilience.

In the chorus of “The Stranger”, Billy Joel sings:

“Don’t be afraid to try again
Everyone goes south every now and then
You’ve done it
Why can’t someone else
You should know by now
You’ve been there yourself”

Howard has seen what his ambition does to him, and yet he continues to do so, not so much out of determination, but almost as if it were simply in his nature, as if it were the only thing worth doing in his entire life. Even when he wins, Howard gets immediately kicked down the first time he wins an outrageous bet on KG’s performance in the NBA matches due to a loanshark who happens to be his brother-in-law, Arno, stopping the bet. So many things go wrong for Howard over the course of Uncut Gems, and it’d be difficult to argue that he doesn’t deserve any of it. But by the time that final 1.2 million dollar bet rolls around in the third act, I found myself clenching my chest in anxious ecstasy, sincerely wishing that this time, this time he would win and get away with it, and perhaps redeem himself in some sort of depraved way. So truly, you see it all the time, but Uncut Gems made me care about basketball; I cared deeply in a way that I would’ve never imagined, surpassing even the excitements and elations I’d have during my brief stint as a sports fan as a young adult.

 

Little Women

I’ve been following Greta Gerwig’s work for quite a little while now ever since I saw Frances Ha back when I was in college, and it’s such a delight to watch Gerwig’s directorial powers already so effortless and masterfully on display in Little Women. I spent most of the film in awestruck wonder at the way Gerwig commands the camera, the ornate and authentic beauty of the set and wardrobe design, at the way she captures nature and at her unflinching fidelity and devotion toward the golden hour. All of this is only amplified by the fact that Gerwig chose to shoot Little Women on film instead of digital—apparently after Steven Spielberg convinced her to do so after having her smell the inside of a film camera.

Gerwig seems to continue to exercise her ability to manipulate montage in a way that is at once deliberate and natural. As far as I could tell, she’s always had a thing for emphasizing the swift passage of time in the context of coming-of-age or bildungsromanesque narratives. Here, we see Gerwig telling Little Women in a more nonlinear fashion. She does this with a brisk pace that is somehow still easy to follow; she teaches the audience right away that she will be dipping her cinematic toes into two rivers of time, flowing into one or the other as she sees fit. She somehow makes this easy to follow, mainly through logical and relevant match cuts and visual parallels, while differentiating the passages of time through other visual elements like color schemes and palettes, continuity, and other cues like the way the women have their hair done when they’re older. It never feels overwhelming to track, nor does it feel needlessly brash or stylistically boisterous. This all culminates in the end where the lines converge, and we have a fascinating scene where the framing device of the film crashes and bleeds into the narrative, and when this happened everyone in the theater laughed, after collectively sniffling in silence in ten minute intervals.

I wish I felt more capable of talking about Little Women, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t actually have much familiarity with the source material, and honestly, for now I would much rather allow women who’ve been touched by the film speak on it. I will say that I had a wonderful time watching the film, and I was especially moved by the film’s unapologetic display of women openly and warmly expressing their affection for one another, through their fellowship and their intimacy, their verbal and physical expressions of love romanticized yet normalized on screen. It’s a beautiful thing.