Uncut Gems
Even Adam Sandler must be tired of making shitty Adam Sandler movies. I don’t fucking blame him. To keep making those would be the spiritual equivalent to letting people in the 7-Eleven parking lot kick you in the balls for five bucks. The Harelip did that one night. She dressed up like a man with a fake beard and let people go at her crotch like it was a three-legged dog at a sadist’s convention. She thought the joke was on the kickers since she has no balls and she made enough money for a USB cable and a week’s worth of meth. She also took so much abuse to her uterine that she now can’t have kids. So, who was the joke on, after all?
Still on the kickers, I guess, because she hates kids and doesn’t have to spend some of her drug money on abortions anymore.
The point I was making so eloquently by talking about the Harelip’s shattered genitals, I think, is even the Adam Sandlers of the world do something different once you’ve been kicked in the balls long enough. For some of us it takes a lot more kicks to figure this out. For Sandler, the man wears a titanium jockstrap when it comes to critical consensus, or to the comments of anyone with a brain. He just doesn’t give a fuck if he poisons the comedy atmosphere with lazy, worthless and unfunny farts like a million cows making methane.
My problem with Sandler is not that he’s talentless, it’s that we’d never know if he has talent because he’s too fucking lazy to try. That’s way fucking worse. I don’t understand why anyone would make movies like a bad parent feeding babies sawdust mixed with sugar: A shrug, another spoonful and reasoning, “They keep eating it.” You do that long enough and your conscience turns to mush and poo. It’s a slippery slope from Jack and Jill to supporting genocide and selling arms to African warlords.
The asshole must know this. Why else would Sandler go from a string of forgettable garbage Netflix movies, the kind enjoyed only by people who trust Dr. Phil and get excited to see Rob Schneider to turning in what is easily the best and most challenging work he’s ever done?
Not only is Sandler really fucking good in Uncut Gems, but it couldn’t have been easy. It’s outside his narrow lane, it’s messy and he is occasionally forced to reconcile a flurry of emotions in a single moment. He plays Howard, a man who calls himself a jeweler but actually deals in schlock for wealthy, insecure dumbasses. He hustles overpriced and frequently fraudulent bling to people who have more money than sense. We’re talking heavy gold ropes, giant bejeweled Furby pendants with roving eyes, and watches with questionable provenance. Essentially, Howard sells to jewelry shoppers what Sandler has sold to moviegoers: Crap.
Howard is a weasel, an amoral opportunist, compulsive liar and gambling addict. He owes bookies, he owes family, he owes pawn shops. He acts like a loving father, but he’s cheating on his wife. When he should be comforting his child he’s watching a basketball game he bet on. When he should be at a daughter’s play, he’s locked naked in the trunk of his car after failing to pay a debt.
Howie paid to smuggle a black opal out of Africa, and he plans to sell it at a high-end auction. It could be his salvation, a payday big enough to settle his debts and finally give him some breathing room. The gem’s value varies depending on how stupid he thinks you are, like the price of a stolen cellphone offered by a crackhead.
On impulse, and probably mostly just to impress someone, Howard loans his opal to Boston Celtic Kevin Garnett who comes to believe it helps him play better. As collateral, Garnett leaves his championship ring, which Howard immediately hocks and then bets that money on a high-risk basketball game. He needs to win that bet to pay off a loan shark, buy his mistress nice shit and then buy back the ring in time to trade it back to Garnett for the ring. Only, and as happens all the time in movies and in my life, things don’t go as planned. Garnett doesn’t want to give the opal back. Without it, Howard can’t go to auction, get the ring out of hock, and he can’t get the violent goons off his back. So, he has to run new scams to resolve old ones, and even newer scams to hide the last ones.
The movie is chaotic as wannabe players and con men talk over each other and chase people and deals. It’s like watching like a drunken high wire act with Howard somehow almost always catching himself at the last moment before he tumbles into the abyss. It’s exciting and tense, but exhausting too, because this feckless asshole doesn’t learn. He never gets better, he only bets higher. Everything is transactional and the only consequences he considers are his own and even those only in the very, very near term. I can’t think of a single good choice he makes. Even when he has a clear way out of his messes, he can’t resist throwing that away for an even dumber and bigger risk.
The writers and director Bennie and Josh Safdie keep a lot of balls in the air. They make the tension and the threats palpable. For most of the movie, the camera feels like it is right there, a participant in the arguments and the fights, swirling around to try to catch some important piece of all the conversations going on at once. It’s not exactly enjoyable, but it is well done from that perspective.
The movie is claustrophobic. You feel like you’re not watching so much as in the middle of people in this cramped, shitty jewelry store, and in closets and dark hallways, so tight to Sandler you can see up his nose. That’s effective in illustrating the walls closing in on him. The Safdies also do a hell of job directing traffic, too, moving you and characters in and out of the front and background and layering arguments and conversations as the stakes and tension rise.
But the Safdies open and end Uncut Gems with some mega cheesy, new-agey visuals and seriously awful synth music that made me worry I’d wandered into the wrong theater and was watching an 80s Golan-Globus Cannon Film production. It’s incongruous and weird. It’s also indicative, I think, of the same problem the Safdie’s had with Good Time: they can’t resist their own indulgences to include shit they like but that doesn’t fit. For that matter, a little less chaos in the story would have been clarifying.
Like I said, Sandler is pretty fucking great. He does more good acting in one scene where he asks his wife to reunite than he’s done in the rest of his career. In the moment he is trying to look calm while his eyes and the quiver in his lips reveal how desperate he is. He’s such a schmuck, though, that it’s hard to ever feel anything for him. Rather, you’re just strapped to him like a GoPro on a subway rat for two hours, always dodging, scrambling and trying to make a score.
It’s a good movie, nearly great, and I think the Safdies will get around to making a great one eventually. For now, though, they’re too unpolished to be perfect, like an Uncut Gem. As for Sandler and any hope he is going to change. Fat chance. he still is surrounded by the same hacks and he still probably likes sweet and easy money. Hell, he probably thinks doing a good job this one time justifies a dozen more movies about urinating on walls, in pools and in pants. But at least he was good this once. Four Fingers.