Uncut Gems
Crime Drama | 135 Minutes | 2019 | United States
(4/4)
Directors: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie | Producers: Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Sebastian Bear-McClard | Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie | Starring: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian | Music: Daniel Lopatin | Cinematographer: Darius Khondji | Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie
Howard Ratner has probably always been like this, restless to the point of manic and almost ruthlessly self-absorbed, engaged in a dogged and increasingly dog-eared pursuit of money, laden with an addictive personality which shreds away at his already fraying nerves. Perhaps he was once better at hiding it. Now he has managed to smuggle a rare black opal from the mines of Ethiopia, but salvation will come at a cost.
Howard (Adam Sandler) is a jeweller in the Diamond District of New York City. Barely keeping his head above water, he manages to run two moderately successful cons. The first means holding off his creditors through a mixture of greasy charm and evasion, scrabbling together whatever funds he can muster to buy some time through short-term payoffs. His wider business revolves around the proclivities of star athletes, who his associate Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) recruits to peruse the jewellery and gems in his store.
Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.
Howard places a parlay bet on Garnett, hoping that the opal will inspire a winning performance. He stands to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to pay back his creditors, but his brother-in-law and loan shark Arno Moradian (Eric Bogosian) has put a block on the bet, as he and a couple of henchmen browbeat Howard into paying back a loan. Howard is stripped naked and tossed into the trunk of his car during his daughter’s school play, forcing him to make an impromptu call to his estranged wife Dinah (Idina Menzel), who he has left for the much younger Julia (Julia Fox), a Manhattan socialite who works the counter at Howard’s store.
Uncut Gems then is not the story of how Howard seeks to pay back his debts, but instead of how physical threats become intangible stressors in one man’s perilous quest for more. Carnal knowledge stands in place of possession, a transactional thirstiness trumping the sentiment of to have and to hold.
The narrative arc bears similarities to Scarface as a tale of excess and opportunism, but the movie substitutes grit for any pretence of glamour. In another film the small and unimposing Larry (Mitchell Wenig), a creditor who always seems to arrive on the back-end of larger dilemmas, might turn out to have a surprise in store for Howard. But in Uncut Gems the threats are always explicit. You can see them coming, and the only question is whether you can batten down the hatches, postpone them through a series of buzzers, or slip out through the back door.
At the mine in Wollo Province two years prior, there was a clamour of workers as a young man was carried to the surface with a shattered leg and protruding bone. Local miners hectored their Asian supervisors, while two plucky remnants pried away at the rock below. In the Diamond District the cacophony of noise in every jewellery store and bartering house seems to make it impossible to get a handle on any given situation, but there is no disguising the motivations, which scarcely change in colour, running in tightly-packed bands of green.
Uncut Gems offers a rare vision of compulsion and claustrophobia. It is buffeted by the electronic score of Daniel Lopatin, figured here as the iridescent slants and cosmic wonders of the inner structure of a gem: densely packed but refracting light, navigating the space so as to glide through gaps like tunnels. As a stylised take on a slice of life, the picture induces the same sort of stress as that felt by its protagonist.
In the lead role Adam Sandler demonstrates once more his dramatic chops, embodying Howard through the reflective glare of his glasses with a thick and phlegmy Jewish accent. Beyond all of the garrulous and frenzied wheeling and dealing, there is a frailty to Howard, for instance as he lies on the treatment table fearing he may have colon cancer, or hopes to relieve some of the weight of the day by snuggling in bed with Julia. He knows that from his marriage to his debts he has messed things up, but there is still an exuberance to his gambling and to his affair with Lisa which is not borne solely of greed or desperation.
Everybody in Uncut Gems comes off well, from the directors Josh and Benny Safdie who have carved out a crime thriller even gutsier than the last, to breakthrough performances by Kevin Garnett and Julia Fox, and to wily veterans like Eric Bogosian and the always stellar Lakeith Stanfield. We never really think that Howard will come out on top, though the film keeps us guessing, but then that’s not the point. Instead we share in the perspiration and shortness of breath, groping for some kind of resting place.
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