Uncut Gems review: Bobby dazzler Sandler could cash in at the Oscars

Charlotte O'Sullivan10 January 2020

Early on in this ferociously involving New York thriller, gem merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) sets eyes on a black opal and groans: “Holy shit, I’m gonna come!” Later he writhes with delight in the back of a cab when he realises a sports bet has paid off.

Success can go to a man’s head. Howie’s good fortune goes straight to his loins. Daniel Day-Lewis apparently loves Sandler’s sexy-scuzzy performance. Of course he does. Day-Lewis’s wife Rebecca Miller appeared opposite Sandler in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). Day-Lewis’s favourite director, Paul Thomas Anderson, cast Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love (2002). If you’ve seen either of these films, you won’t need telling that the king of low-brow comedy is a seriously good thesp.

Still, a lot of people need persuading. When the Oscar nominations are announced, Sandler is widely expected to be one of the candidates for best actor. The odds of him winning the award, though, are 25/1.

Howard would adore those odds. It’s 2012, and over the course of the movie he tries to capitalise on the preciousness of his opal, eventually making a bet-to-end-all-bets, involving superstitious NBA star Kevin Garnett (playing himself, with aplomb).

King of comedy: Adam Sandler as jeweller and gambling addict Howard Ratner

If his gamble works, Howard will be able to pay off a $100,000 debt to his loan shark brother-in-law, Arno (Eric Bogosian, whose eyes emit silent screams). It will also impress Howard’s flighty mistress Julia (newcomer Julia Fox; bound for stardom) and bitter wife Dinah (Idina Menzel). Not to mention all the people in the universe who think Howard’s a pushy moron and a “crazy Jew”.

The film’s young directors, Josh and Benjamin Safdie, are Jewish. They say they deliberately made Howard “aggressive” because they’re tired of seeing Jewish characters who are “nebbish or a little bit weak”.

That’s a direct challenge to Woody Allen, whose Jewish heroes are invariably timid hypochondriacs, but it’s also an up-yours to directors like Guy Ritchie who, in The Gentlemen, serves up a Jewish villain both weedy and greedy. The Safdies take anti-Semitic tropes and rework them in a way that challenges racism.

If this film has a message, it’s that all capitalists are rapacious. The Safdies, by the way, have an experimental streak. They opt for a manically spaced-out electronic score, shock edits and cinematography that makes grand things look grubby and vice versa. Their vision is bracingly nostalgic; the city, here, is a palimpsest of Scorsese’s New York (Scorsese’s not being robbed; he executive-produced the film).

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Though there are nifty set-pieces galore, the most memorable concern the glass ante-chamber that protects Howard’s showroom from the corridor outside — a claustrophobic (and, as it turns out, often malfunctioning) enclosure which seems designed to turn all visitors into gibbering wrecks and/or make them as angry as Hannibal Lecter. It’s just a shame that Uncut Gems short-changes Menzel and totally wastes the sublime Lakeith Stanfield (as Howard’s unofficial assistant).

Meanwhile the ending, though undeniably tense, is somewhat generic. And sentimental. Howard is a fan of mystical connections and, in a rush of rhetorical fervour, claims kinship with Garnett.

The film’s final moments suggest Howard and Garnett do, indeed, have a uniquely profound bond. Nice try, but that feels like a bromantic fantasy. US critics deem this quite the big gem. Having looked at it closely, I’d say it’s being over-valued. But not by much.