Safdie brothers find gem in Sandler
“It’s pretty funny how this happened,” says Adam Sandler about how he signed on to star as compulsive gambler Howard Ratner in “Uncut Gems,” the latest audacious, adrenalized thriller by New York filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
Sandler has just taken the stage after the movie’s world premiere screening at the Telluride Film Festival in August. The audience’s ears are still ringing from the movie’s pounding score, and you can hear people saying that they need a drink, or something stronger, to calm their nerves after the wild, anxiety-inducing ride of watching Sandler get pummeled by Howard’s foes and by the catastrophe of his mounting losses for 134 minutes.
With fake teeth, heavy gold jewelry, a slouchy black leather jacket and a tacky designer shirt with the tag still dangling, Sandler plays a charismatic but insufferable jewelry dealer whose marriage (to Idina Menzel) is on the rocks and career is always in crisis mode.
Howard sells bling to NBA players (notably, ex-Celtics star Kevin Garnett in a terrific supporting role) from his claustrophobic 47th Street shop, bets big on their games and careens from one rash bad decision to the next.
“I was doing ‘The Meyerowitz Stories’ with Noah Baumbach, and my agents kept saying, ‘The Safdie brothers want to talk to you in Cannes,’ ” said Sandler, wearing nylon athletic shorts and untied sneakers. “They kept saying, ‘Just meet the Safdies. They want to talk to you about something.’
“Well, I didn’t want to meet them, or anybody. I didn’t even want to fly to France. I’m psychotic; I like being alone. But they said, ‘They did ‘Good Time’ (the 2017 dark heist thriller starring Robert Pattinson). So I watched it alone in my office, and five minutes in I was going, These guys are incredible! I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t handle it. I had to look away from the screen. It was just the greatest movie. So I called my agents back up. What were those guys’ names again?”
It turns out the Safdies had been trying since 2012 to get their “Uncut Gems” script in front of Sandler. He’s their childhood idol, “the genius whose records taught us growing up about sex and comedy,” said Josh Safdie during the brothers’ recent visit to San Francisco. “We didn’t make it over the moat of celebrity at that point. Who the hell were we to think we could get this guy? But life works in really special ways.”
Over the next five years, the Safdies continued to build their reputation for gritty, urban, frenetically paced dramas (which include “Heaven Knows What” and “Daddy Longlegs”). They cast professional and nonexperienced actors, and record a lot of cross talk to re-create the unstudied cacophony of city life.
“Uncut Gems” is above all a character study of the underdog Howard, who was originally inspired by a former boss of the Safdies’ father in New York’s Diamond District. The film is a constant stream of Howard
Louisa May Alcott’s oft-adapted 1868 novel gets a fresh look courtesy of Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”), who wrote the screenplay as well as directed. Boasting a stellar cast — Saiorse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen as the March sisters; Laura Dern as their mom and Meryl Streep as their aunt — the film jumps back and forth in time as it takes a thematic approach to the beloved book.
Tomatometer score: Rotten Tomatoes Consensus: “With a stellar cast and a smart, sensitive retelling of its classic source material, Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ proves some stories truly are timeless.”
Sam Mendes’ war drama evokes yelling, haggling, kvetching. He never shuts up, whether talking himself into a payday or out of a licking.
Sandler’s performance has wowed numerous critics as being the finest, most fully realized performance of his career. He won the National Board of Review’s best actor award and is considered a likely Oscar contender. It’s quite a moment for someone once considered America’s leading man-child goofball.
“I was very nervous up top because I have a wife and kids, and I know what Howard was doing, how he was just so stuck on himself, seemed intent on destroying his family,” Sandler said in Colorado. “I was nervous
Tomatometer score: Rotten Tomatoes consensus: “Hard-hitting, immersive, and an impressive technical achievement, ‘1917’ captures the trench warfare of World War I with raw, startling immediacy.”
SPIES IN DISGUISE
The designated Christmas week family film has an odd premise — a sophisticated super spy (voiced by Will Smith) is turned into a pigeon to disguise him for a mission to save the world. His sidekick in this animated adventure is a not-so-suave, violence-hating scientist (Tom Holland), whose to say a lot of stuff, and these guys would talk about Howard being a hero, how much they loved him. They had to ease me into things because they believed in it so much.”
In fact, the idea of crafting a film around their father’s largerthan-life boss “whose stories were like these pulp nonfictions, each one felt like a mini-film you wanted to see,” said Benny, became a decade-long obsession for the Safdies.
“If you go back and look at my journals over the last 10 years, they’re bizarre reading because everything is ‘Howard this, Howard that,’ ” Josh said. “It’s my life, but I’m warping it through the circumstances of the character.”
Tomatometer score: Rotten Tomatoes consensus: “Reaffirms the Safdies as masters of anxiety-inducing cinema — and proves Adam Sandler remains a formidable dramatic actor when given the right material.”
The Safdies compared Howard to the archetype of the classic fool, tripping over himself with every step. “He’s one of these larger-than-life, mythological Jewish figures. He’s a dreamer, the guy who’s just trying to earn his place and feel like he belongs,” said Benny. “He’s got that Rodney Dangerfield, very Jewish overcompensation thing going on. It’s not like he’s a sociopath and doesn’t know what’s what. He knows what’s wrong and still does it because he thinks maybe then everything will be OK.
“Sandler had to wrap his mind around Howard doing a lot of bad things, but not being a bad person.”
Benny, 33, is clean-shaven