Howard Ratner is a Jewish jeweller, running a store in the heart of New York’s Diamond District. Having carved a stellar career in comedy, it’s no wonder Sandler is careful to pick and choose his share of dramatic roles and what a choice this was. The Safdie brothers latest directorial effort, Uncut Gems, is a welcome addition to the services already stacked catalogue: an ambitious crime thriller led by Adam Sandler. It’s a bold visual metaphor that suggests some kind of mystical connection between the rare stone’s beauty and Howard’s insatiable need to possess, and eventually destroy, everything he loves-and that, unlike much of the rest of this movie, left me thinking, “I wonder what that means,” rather than “Fine, we get it already.With streaming services at an all time high, Netflix has now become established as a behemoth for exclusively premiering movies having recently helmed the likes of Marriage Story and The Irishman towards in the end of 2019. This journey into the rock, in both cases, is linked to a Fantastic Voyage–style trip inside the protagonist’s body.
There is one image from the film that will stay with me, though: In the opening and closing shots, the jittery hand-held camera (the cinematographer is the legendary Darius Khondji) moves inside the stone named in the title, exploring the opals’ microscopic crystalline structure in trippy psychedelic color. The Safdies, too, are exploring territory we’ve seen them map out before, albeit this time on a larger scale. It’s certainly hard to imagine any other actor who could pull off the role, but it’s also not news that the former Billy Madison can act: Between Punch-Drunk Love, Funny People, and The Meyerowitz Stories, among many others, he’s been playing dramatic characters, many of them with a similarly obnoxious edge, for going on two decades. Sandler is being widely praised for his performance as the grating, grasping, yet somehow pitiable Howard. (Lumet, who specialized in character portraits of desperate misfits struggling to survive on the streets of a crime-ridden New York, has long been a point of reference for the Safdies, whose earlier movies also include the semi-autobiographical family drama Daddy Longlegs and the junkie romance Heaven Knows What.)
But as he gets deeper into trouble with an ever-widening group of enemies, the movie’s tone darkens, ending in a hostage situation at the jewelry store that recalls the gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight standoff of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon.
At times, especially in the scenes involving Howard’s family life, his level of daily dysfunction has a slapstick side: At a performance of his daughter’s high school play, for example, an encounter with hired thugs leaves him naked and locked in his own car trunk.
#Uncut gems review movie
“I hate being with you, I hate looking at you, and if I had my way, I would never see you again.” Whether or not you agree with her may determine how you come out feeling about Uncut Gems, an abrasive movie about an abrasive man. “I think you are the most annoying person I have ever met,” Dinah tells her husband at one point, in a tone utterly devoid of spousal affection. Then again, most conversations in Howard’s world are operatic screaming matches, conducted over the competing noise of overlapping background dialogue, the incessant buzzing of the locked bulletproof glass door that leads into the shop, and an ambient-perhaps too ambient, as in omnipresent-electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, who composes under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. Then there’s his mistress (Julia Fox), an employee at the jewelry shop whom he maintains in an apartment of her own: After he catches her in the bathroom of a club flirting with the bad-boy singer the Weeknd (also appearing as himself), their every encounter devolves into an operatic screaming match. Within 24 hours, Howard is in trouble with a whole new set of people, including his wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), who’s so disgusted with his compulsive gambling and checked-out parenting of their three kids that she’s pressing him to move forward with divorce plans. He pawns the ring, then uses the money to bet big on that night’s Celtics game. That poor decision on Howard’s part leads to a cascade of worse ones. It’s certainly hard to imagine any other actor who could pull off the role, but it’s also not news that the former Billy Madison can act.
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