Uncut Gems (2019)

 Adam Sandler has recieved career high praise for his performance as Howard Ratner, a profrane, philandering, gambling addicted, Jewish, New York City jeweller in the Safdie Brothers film 'Uncut Gems'. A character study that touches on the world of organized crime, Sandler is stretching some little used acting muscels and gives an impressive, surprisingly raw performance. So while Sandler is good here, the film itself is a cliche ridden, unpleasant slog of two and a quarter hours, lacking likable characters, humor, or much of a point.

It was truly an unpleasant watch. Much yelling, much profanity. A film full of unlikable characters making selfish, short sighted decisions. There is a knowing quality to the piece, the writer/directors come from a similar world apperently, so while this may be a slice of life picture, who would want this life? 

Howard Ratner is an unpleasant fellow. Perhaps once legit he is now a borderline conman, heavily leveraged due to a sports (specifically basketball) gambling addiction he is unable to control. The principle figure to whom he owes money is his brother in law, which is even more awkward then it might be due to his marriage to the man's sister being on the brink of disunion, though the couple has decided that a formal announcement to friends and family can wait until after Passover. Howard spends  most evenings not with his family at his suburban home, but at his city apartment with his much younger mistress, an employee at his high end jewellery store.

Howard has purchased (at a discount) a rare Ethiopian black opal, a visually complex jewel of which it is said you can see the beginnings of the universe inside. His intent is to put the stone up for auction, but when basketball star Kevin Garnett (the film is set in 2012) visits his store he shows it to him. Garnett is taken with it, asks to borrow it, Howard reluctantly allows this, Garnett wins his game that night and attributes this to the gem.

Now Garnett is a serious bidder for the auction, but Howard decides to use his father in law as a plant to imitate a bidding war and try to juice up the final sales price. His creditors are upping their pressure, including having him abducted outside his teenage daughters play and left naked inside the trunk of his own car. Pressures build, tensions mount, Howard is keeping an untenable number of balls in the air as we wind towards the films climax, which while generally well exicuted was still not enough to save the movie for me.

I don't care about jewells, I don't care about basketball, I didn't care about these characters, nor did I appreciate the tedium of the pacing. The film overshoots on the sense of stress, your supposed to undertsand that Howard is feeling it, but there is nothing about him, no rooting interest, that would make me want to vicariously feel that stress with him, but the film insists that I do anyway.

I can see talent in the creation of 'Uncut Gems' and in Sandler's performance, but I didn't get anything out of watching the film that could compensate for the utter opressivness of the experince. I just hated it, and if that's what they were going for then they did a good job. But still I hated it. *