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. One nerve-wracking scene of mayhem follows another as Howard attempts to manage the numerous problems he has 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. Howard's not unlike the news, in that sense.

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 greatest performance in any of his movies as this selfish, profane 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 financial king. Sandler sells the role with an earnest selfishness, making Uncut Gems unpleasant to watch in all the right ways. He doesn't even have the heart to be kind or good to his wife, nor is he loyal to her, either.

Considerate isn't the first adjective that comes to most people's minds when they think about high-profile businessmen, and the dialogue in Uncut Gems mirrors that. It's bedlam, one scene after another of rude, terrible people trying to talk over one another, because reasons. Uncut Gems is this way by design, a design that's stressful yet natural. It feels less like lines being spoken by actors, more like people talking to one another, and 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, selling their inclusion so well that I barely gave them a second thought.

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 stabilize his life, if only because his family is somehow decent, and because any and all failure on his part would affect them. Still, I've watched enough movies to know this probably wouldn't be the case, 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 with likable traits, such as actual morals. If Howard goes down, they go down, too.

The Safdie Brothers, both of them Jewish, do something 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 spectacularly taboo way that you know it's intentional. 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. Sometimes, Uncut Gems can be sober, but mostly, it's a hard-to-forget caricature.

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 sobriety in seeing a terrible person be truly broken, if mostly over their circumstances rather than any sense of guilt. 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 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. The realization hit me harder than I had thought it ever could: 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 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; trust me on this one. This entire movie is a cinematic panic attack, becoming more stressful and startling 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