Adam Sandler is one of those rare
celebrities that it’s easy to forget is genuinely talented until the rare
moment they decide to actually put in the effort. Sure, it’s easy to hold Jack
and Jill, Grown-Ups, Pixels and The Ridiculous 6 against him, but it’s
also hard to argue against The Wedding Singer, Punch Drunk Love,
Reign Over Me, Funny People, or his stint on Saturday Night Live. (Plus,
everyone who’s worked with him has nothing but nice things to say, so there’s
that.) If the latter occurred more frequently than his paid vacations masquerading
as Happy Madison productions, there’d be no argument. That said, the
infrequency of his great roles does have the added effect of people being
surprised that he still has talent whenever they do pop up, and Uncut Gems
just might be the one to get him an Oscar nomination.
Our story follows Howard
Ratner (Adam Sandler) a New York jeweler who’s so addicted to the rush of high
risks and big sales that he’s in debt to just about everyone from Harlem to Brighton
Beach. This impulsiveness has caused money to disappear from his pocket as fast
as it fills up, and has tested the patience of everyone in his life from his
wife (Idina Menzel) to his mistress (Julia Fox) to his business partner
(Lakieth Stanfield). One day, Howard gets his hands on the solution to all his
problems: a potato sized, 4,000-karat uncut opal worth over a million dollars
that he managed to get for much less. But in one of his adrenaline-fueled stupors,
he ends up trading it to basketball star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) in
exchange for one of his championship rings, which he immediately pawns. Once he
snaps out of it, he remembers that the opal was supposed to go to an auction,
he races to get it back, while dodging an array of loan sharks, grifters and gangsters
out for his blood.
You can tell a lot about a
movie by its opening shots, and Uncut Gems leaves one hell of a first
impression. We zoom into the opal just as it’s excavated from a mine in
Ethiopia, twisting and turning through a digital simulacrum of the universe
within, before pulling out on a video of Howard’s colonoscopy. Perhaps it’s
symbolic of the cosmic exploits that led to this upcoming chain of events, but
more likely it’s metaphorical of Howard’s tendency to pull everything out of
his ass. Quite fitting considering the movie is a frenetic, constantly moving
procession of Howard making excuses, digging himself out of one hole just so he
can hop into the next one.
In many respects, Howard is like an adult version of the myriad of manchildren that Sandler has played over the
years: he’s immature, obnoxious, vice driven, prone to fits of rage, and makes one
stupid decision after another. The only thing he’s better at than burning
bridges is hocking off tacky bling to his celebrity clientele. And it’s what he
thrives on. Like a true gambling addict, Howard isn’t so much drawn to the
process of big earnings as he is to the thrill of pushing himself to the knife’s
edge to see how much he can get away with. It’s why he started an affair, it’s
why he keeps making bets with other people’s money, and it’s why he has every gangster in town on his tail, mainly his mobster brother in law Arno (Eric
Bognosian). In fact, the only bad thing in this movie that wasn’t Howard’s direct
doing is Kevin Garnett becomes mesmerized by the opal, which he believes to be
a good luck charm, and suddenly becomes hard to get a hold of once he gets his
hands on it.
Sandler pulls this off with
finesse, not by trying to make this character sympathetic, but by making him
human. As scummy as Howard may be, there are aspects of him that we’ve all seen
in other people, or maybe even recognize within ourselves. The energy he emanates
is electric, feeding off the chaos he creates while bouncing from one end of
New York to the next like a human tornado. Although this is being paraded as a
one man show, he’s rounded out by a solid supporting cast, including Idina
Menzel as his completely over his bullshit wife, newcomer Julie Fox as his on
again off again mistress, Eric Bognosian as his impatient brother in law, and
even Kevin Garnett turns in a solid performance as basically himself, but has a
crazed twinkle in his eye from the moment he first gazes upon the rock.
That’s not to say this is all
just a character study of a guy whose self-sabotaging impulsiveness constantly gets him in trouble. The Safdie brothers managed to make this into
an intensely frenetic chase that rarely ever takes its foot off the gas or lets
the audience have more than a moment of silence. The plot is more or less cut
from the same cloth as their previous film Good Time, which was also
about a scummy crook racing around New York to collect money in a short amount
of time while making a series of dumb decisions, and also drew a brilliant performance
from a previously stigmatized actor. Likewise, the film is also composed of the
Safdies’ signature blend of neon-colored cinematography, frantic,
claustrophobic camerawork, bass-heavy synth score, hectic dialogue comprised primarily
of characters talking over each other, and chaotic, overpowering sound mixing.
Of course, this assault on the senses is all in service of enhancing the true
source of the audience’s anxiety: Howard persistently ignoring all the ticking
clocks and barreling headfirst toward self-destruction with reckless abandon,
consequences be damned.
Bottom line, Uncut Gems
is an anxiety fueled thrill ride powered by a magnetic performance by one of
Hollywood’s most underestimated actors. It takes the Safdie brothers’ artfully
trashy signature filmmaking style and injects it with novelistic ambition, giving
us something that could rival the likes of Martin Scorsese in
a year where Scorsese dropped one of his most ambitious films ever. Maybe
avoid this if you’re prone to anxiety attacks, but if you get off on the thrill
of danger as much as our protagonist does, then do I have the movie for you.
8/10
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