Garnett delivers a speech to Howard about race and exploitation, which brings the story back to Ethiopia. Then boom! He’s off again, diving into the clamor, trying to hustle the basketball star Kevin Garnett (as himself) or manage an unruly partner in his hustle (an excellent Lakeith Stanfield). Every so often Sandler gets to expand the character’s emotional register, in lulls and moments of tenderness and real feeling. It’s an intensely physical role - Howard racks up the miles - and generally a reactive one. Sandler makes a persuasively unsteady hub for this pinwheeling anarchy.
UNCUT GEMS REVIEW MOVIE
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short the movie mostly is too, though at 135 minutes it’s not short. He’s a Rabelaisian figure, absurd, lewd, excessive, and while the Safdies are obviously fond of him (the scenes with his children are a tip-off), they don’t cut him much slack. They bat him around, dunk him in a fountain, almost break his nose. For the most part, the Safdies seem to enjoy mucking up Howard’s plans, intensifying his rotten luck, bad choices, collapsing home life and squabbles, pointless or otherwise. Howard believes that the opal will save him - he plans to sell it at auction - but like good fortune, the precious lump keeps slipping from his grasp. Like the “Exorcist” relic, the opal proves an ominous if more contemporary fetish with a near-magical, increasingly dangerous hold on everyone who comes in contact with it. This turns out to be a huge black opal that soon ends up in Howard’s possession, though not for long. The magical discovery here is made by two Ethiopian miners, who sneak away from the bedlam to dig out a similar-looking lumpy rock. More specifically, the dusty, enigmatic opener in “Uncut Gems” drolly echoes the start of “The Exorcist” (1973), where a priest at an archaeological dig in Iraq unearths the demonic relic that sets off the ensuing horror, the possession and spewing vomit. Structurally, the opener echoes the clichéd place-setting in Hollywood adventures, the ones with dashing heroes, offensively exoticized extras and maybe a mummy or two. The location shooting initially seems pointless (what happens could be conveyed in dialogue), and like the casting of Sandler, it broadcasts that they’re working with a higher budget.
It’s unusual, though, for the Safdies, as is the site: a mine in Ethiopia, where throngs of men are scrambling around a gravely wounded worker. Written by the Safdies with their regular collaborator, the filmmaker Ronald Bronstein, “Uncut Gems” opens with a prologue, a familiar enough narrative strategy. But Howard has his plagues: He’s a gambler and presumably an unlucky one given the heavy debt that he’s carrying. There’s a leisurely Passover Seder in the middle of the movie that’s suffused with love and alive with squalling kids, bustling women and well-padded men chewing cigars. He’s a careless family man, but he dotes on his sons and still clocks in for homey obligations. He has a few employees, one of whom is his mistress (Julia Fox), and an aggrieved wife (Idina Menzel) who’s fed up with him. They’re not interested in the dumb, easy stuff movies give you - the likable, relatable characters, the sermonizing and moralizing they’re too busy deploying color and noise, pushing the form, testing their (and our) limits.Īmid this enjoyable chaos, Sandler plays Howard Ratner, who has a small jewelry store in the Diamond District of Manhattan. It’s easier to admire than to love, and I hate the ending, but the Safdies clearly like working your nerves. It doesn’t seem to add up to much - a little man lives his life - but this is just enough. The Safdies, two of the more playfully inventive filmmakers working in American cinema, won’t stop, either, which makes “Uncut Gems” fun if also wearying and at times annoying. So, naturally it stars - why not? - Adam Sandler as a cheat, liar, loving dad, bad husband, jealous lover and compulsive gambler who can’t stop, won’t stop acting the fool. It’s a tumult of sensory extremes, of images and sounds, lurching shapes, braying voices, intensities of feeling and calculated craziness. “Uncut Gems,” the latest from the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, blows in like a Category 4 hurricane.
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