Uncut Gems: A Practically Spotless Anxiety Attack

Directed by Benny and Josh Safdie, Uncut Gems is undoubtedly one of the finest films I've seen this year, though I hated nearly every second of it; that's the point. It is little more than two hours of the habits of unscrupulous jeweller Howard Ratner catching up with him when his ambition finally exceeds the tolerance of those he's more than happy to take advantage of, a slideshow of the different habits of a man of corrupt, caricatured character. This movie is one nerve-wracking scene of mayhem after another, as Howard tries to manage the many problems he's created for himself. And while he's a character who's nearly impossible to empathize with, I found it even more difficult to stop watching him.

Forget Happy Gilmore and say hello to Greedy Careless. Adam Sandler is completely unrecognizable in his electric portrayal of this unpredictable, self-centered, and self-serving Jew of a jeweler. Sandler gives what is easily his most remarkable performance in any of his movies as this profane and selfish businessman, and not just because he's finally playing someone other than a drunk bachelor. Howard is wildly irritating in all the right ways, both a blatant womanizer constantly yelling at someone on the other end of a phone call and a reckless gambling addict who uses people as pawns to try to capture some hoped-for money king. Sandler sells the role with such self-serving earnestness that you're going to have the time of your life hating him. He doesn't even have the heart to be kind or good to his wife, nor is he loyal to her, either. Sandler makes Uncut Gems unpleasant to watch in all the right ways.

People with a habit of making high-stakes business deals don't usually fit the stereotype of being considerate, and the dialogue in this movie mirrors that. It's bedlam, one scene after another of groups of rude, terrible people trying to talk over one another, because reasons. Uncut Gems is obviously this way by design, and it's a design that is both perfectly stressful and irritating, yet unsettlingly natural. This movie feels less like lines being spoken by actors, more like people talking to each other. This is part of what makes Howard and all of his associates so perfectly unlikable - they don't look or sound like they're acting. This movie even takes advantage of the fact that it's about a high-profile businessman to feature high-profile cameos in ways that don't feel like cameos at all. Kevin Garnett and The Weeknd both play themselves in this movie, and both men sell it so well that I barely had a second thought about them.

Everything that happens in Uncut Gems is as precarious as a deal gone wrong, and Howard's pathetic attempts to fix the life he has slowly destroyed do nothing to make it better. In a way, this movie made me want to see Howard do well and stabilize his life, if only because his family consists of surprisingly decent people. Still, I've watched enough movies to know that this probably wasn't going to happen, and so the question I had wasn't if Howard would be able to right the ship, but rather how it would land on the rocks, when, and how badly. I couldn't care less about Howard; you're not supposed to. Still, the filmmakers smartly tie him to characters we actually have a reason to care about. If Howard goes down, they go down, too.

The Safdie Brothers, both of them Jewish, do something very interesting with Uncut Gems. They take advantage of their ethnicity to get away with showing us an irresistibly over-the-top caricature of Jews. Their movie plays into every forbidden stereotype surrounding the ethnicity of its characters, but it plays into them in such a spectacular and piercingly taboo way that you know it's intentionally this way for a reason. Howard is such an awful person that you can't help but watch him drive his way through over two hours of what is, in essence, a slow-motion car wreck. This movie is an irresistible character study, sometimes because it can be sober, but also because it's such an excessive caricature that is entirely impossible to look away from.

Still, Howard's life eventually catches up with him to smash his sense of self into a million pieces. How could it not? And when it does, there is a distinct and unusual soberness in seeing a terrible person be truly broken, if mostly over their circumstances, but also a little bit over what they've done. Usually, we see the hero at their lowest point about two-thirds of the way through a movie, but while Howard is the protagonist of Uncut Gems, he's no hero. But while he's in trouble for no reason other than his own irresponsibility, he's still human, if barely, and the moments in this movie where his humanity finally shines through reveal him to be a surprisingly complex and complete character, in addition to already being an interesting one. The realization hit me harder than I had expected: Howard is a person.

This movie begins with the MacGuffin of a gemstone that seems to distort both the light flowing through it and the sound the air around it makes, and it ends with the violence that man's lust for such an item inevitably causes. Howard and those he's trying to take advantage of almost swirl around each other in a dance of betrayal and mistrust, and the climax of Uncut Gems is heart-stopping, due in part to guns, due in part to a basketball game. This entire movie is a cinematic panic attack, and it only gets more unbearable and beautiful with time. Never have I ever had a movie make me feel quite the way this one did. To say that I liked Uncut Gems would be in the same vein as if I said that I liked Box Jellyfish or that I liked World War II. Anyone looking for something to watch on a casual movie night should avoid it like the plague. But allow it to be an unpleasant experience, and it won't let you down, even if Howard undoubtedly would.

Uncut Gems - 10/10

Luke 12:13-21