I used the word priceless, but to Howard, it has a very defined price. It took Howard 18 months of wrangling to secure the gem. It centers on a few days in Howard’s life just as he obtains a priceless black opal which workers unearthed in an Ethiopian mine in 2010. He’s aided in this by the Safdie brothers’ singular directing style and their breakneck-paced screenplay – which they wrote with long-time collaborator Ronald Bronstein.
#UNCUT GEMS REVIEW MOVIE#
Adam Sandler, in a role he was born to play, gives Howard – and the movie – an unseemly, queasy propulsiveness. It imparts the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of its main character, the inveterate gambler (who is also a conman in his own right) Howard Ratner. The new film from directing team the Safdie brothers is a kinetic roller coaster ride of a movie. I bring this story up because watching Uncut Gems was like reliving those two months all over again, only in concentrated form. While it hurt me financially at the time, I’m privileged enough for it not to have ruined me for long, and it taught me a valuable lesson about fools and their money. It was exhausting and infuriating, but was ultimately a very good thing to have happen to me. The endless stream of promises – which turned into broken promises, backtracking, new negotiations, and, after I handed over my money, fevered efforts to get my merchandise (which assuredly never existed) – lasted about two months. He assured me I could get a top of the line HDTV for $600 at a time when such an item went for two to three times that price. I never met the conman all messages back and forth were relayed through an intermediary, which should have been my first clue that I was being taken. It’s a helluva part, and Sandler aces it.When I was 23 or 24, I got duped by a conman. Sandler’s performance shows that time may have provided him peeks at the errors of his ways, but the fact that he’s continued to get away with things gives him the confidence to carry on, without lessons learned. Howard’s passions for business, money, gambling, women and sports are entirely normal, but he doesn’t seem to have learned much about his own shortcomings over the years. This is also true of the entire cast top to bottom, but the way is led by Sandler. Uncut Gems would need to be on any final list of films in which the greatest percentage of dialogue is yelled.Īnd yet the Safdies and the cast go deep enough here to make the film a genuinely human one it may not be a lifestyle that most people will recognize, but the dynamics and desires and anxieties all feel real, thanks to the way the writer-directors push through the obvious dramatic trappings to tap into credible feelings. This relationship hits the rocks during this period when Howard is sweating over basketball scores he’s bet big on and whether or not he’ll ever get the big gem back. Of course, Howard has a woman on the side, Julia (Julia Fox), a nice young lady who - what else? - works at his jewelry store and for whom he provides an apartment.
#UNCUT GEMS REVIEW HOW TO#
His wife Dinah (Idina Menzel), who well knows how to deal with her husband, is naturally furious. What should be a calm night out for the Ratner family on the occasion of a school theater presentation morphs into an insane set of events that finds Howard locked nude in the trunk of a car. The writers have concocted any number of outrageous incidents that, in fact, feel real and not gags invented just to be toppers. For his part, however, Howard nearly always has an angle, another card to play - what’s a new day without a fresh fire to put out? Of course, Howard doesn’t get his valued piece of rock back when he expects it, and this is just the beginning of promises not met, debts remaining unpaid, lies mounting to cover the shortcomings and everyone becoming angrier and angrier. The Safdies plunge the audience into the deep end of this world, and it’s easy to be both overwhelmed and seriously put off by the vulgarity of it everyone is brash, it’s the norm for promises and expectations not to be met, feverish yelling is the accepted mode of communication and no day is complete without a new unwelcome incident.
Having just acquired it and against his better instincts, Howard lets one of his most valued customers, basketball titan Kevin Garnett, borrow the piece, a misjudgment that sets in motion no end of crises and misfortune. In a brief Ethiopian-set prologue, a football-sized piece of rock is extracted from a mine, and numerous embedded gems are clearly of significant value. On the other hand, some people get off on this, and for Howard it’s the core of his existence.
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