Shine on, crazy diamond
UNCUT GEMS
Direction: Josh and Benny Safdie Actors: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, Idina Menzel
The greatest scene in Uncut Gems — a great film — involves Howard Ratner (played by Adam Sandler) coming face-to-face with the object of his desire. It’s an object he has been fighting to acquire for about an hour. We’ve been made aware that if he fails to obtain it in a certain amount of time, he’d be at risk of losing everything — his family, his money, perhaps even his life.
But when the elusive object is finally within touching distance, Howard — a New York jeweller — realises, along with us, that the glass door separating him from it is jammed. It is also bulletproof. There is no way in.
It is the most thrilling, frustrating and anxiety-inducing action scene I’ve seen in a long time — and not a single punch is thrown, nor a single shot fired.
The effect of the scene, and of Uncut Gems in general, is to tether you, for two hours, to the most repulsive train wreck of a man.
Howard is up to his neck in debt, the million-dollar ‘uncut gem’ he spent a year trying to get has sort of been stolen, his wife is divorcing him, his children seem to be turning into him, his mistress is seeing someone else, he’s worried he might have colon cancer, and the door of his showroom is jammed.
Directors Josh and Benny Safdie pull off the most difficult dramatic deadlift; they make you care about a self-destructive man with next to no redeeming qualities. Uncut Gems is also the most accurate film about addiction perhaps since Steve Mcqueen’s Shame (2011).
It features what is without a doubt the greatest performance of Adam Sandler’s career. As he pinballs from one bad decision to the next, all you can do is observe in horror as his life disintegrates before his eyes. You root for him not because you want him to win; you root for him because you want him to survive.
This is the first time that the Safdies are working with the legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji, and there is that familiar unforgiving quality to his New
York City. It’s a place where you just don’t matter, no matter how successful you are. And a place where, no matter how successful, you are always alone.
Uncut Gems is a capsule of our terrible times; a lightning-in-a-bottle movie that I believe will be studied in film schools, debated among our (hopefully) saner descendants.
Who cares if it was ignored by the Academy?