by Chris Feil
In recent years, director duo Josh and Benny Safdie are cornering a market all their own of thriller of toxic neons and fatal consequence, after the deeply grim exploits of Heaven Knows What and Good Time. Nobody makes films quite in the way that the Safdies are making them right now, even if their particular brand of originality swims in back alley, off-putting aggressiveness. This round, their Uncut Gems is a dose of high anxiety filmmaking that’s partly Shakespearean tragedy of hubris and part underbelly crime saga in another unexamined pocket of New York City life.
Their best and most subversively accessible, it’s something enervating, infuriating, and compulsively watchable, all centered on a complex protagonist that also embodies all of the film’s contradictory qualities. That man is diamond dealer Howard Ratner, arrogantly betting off his assets and dwindling goodwill in the hopes of one massive payout, brought to exhilarating life by a possessed Adam Sandler.
Howard’s life is a revolving door of characters to keep pace with, as he struggles to maneuver around them to avoid various debts and accepting personal responsibilities. There’s his associate Demany (LaKeith Stanfield) that brings him clientele and pushes a cache of fake watches. At home, his wife Dinah (Idina Menzel) is well past fed up, but he keep begging for her stick around - along with his girlfriend Julia (spectacular newcomer Julia Fox). Plus debts come due with Howard’s brother-in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian) and his crew of tough guys, and with an increasing threat of violence. But the delicate balance shatters with the arrival of a raw Ethiopian opal that slips into the superstitious hands of NBA star Kevin Garnett (yes, played by the actual Garnett).
The breakneck insanity of the Safdies’ creation here makes for a grand guignol farce, eliciting laughs from the film’s demonic wit and out of shear necessity of catharsis from its constantly oppressive tension. Your mileage may vary on how much the film’s panic-attack pacing equates with an entertaining ride or an insufferable one, and moments of the film prove the filmmakers can’t sustain their vice-like grasp over its sprawling two-plus hours. Yet the filmmaking progression is difficult to deny. This time the Safdies are more fateful storytellers than fatalistic, rending a story (co-scripted between the Safdies and Ronald Bronstein) that’s as archetypally timeless as it is formally of the moment. If the broader plot points are largely uninspiring, their narrative point of view at least distracts from that.
There’s an audacity of style that surprisingly enhances the story’s classicism rather than burying it, assaulting the senses with the weight of Howard’s monumentally bad decision making. A cacophonous soundscape is aided by a subterranean original score by Daniel Lopatin that’s sickly immersive, making the film as much of a torture device as it is an idiosyncratic spectacle. There’s also the alluring and devious work of cinematographer Darius Khondji, capturing everything that’s both distancing and captivating about this world within a gorgeous-gross palette, always undercut with a sense of danger in the frame. What Uncut Gems serves audiences, aside from its sturm and drang, is the strangest cinematic ecstasy they will find this year.
But the highest elevation to the film’s effect comes from the career-best work from Sandler. The kind of beleaguered vulnerability that has defined his other performances in auteur films has gone curdled here, offering up a role that fits the actor like a glove while turning his typical persona on its head. The Safdies’ refine the specific cocktail of Sandlerisms into the molotov variety, coiling his oft-present explosive id into someone fundamentally reckless but fascinating to watch. He’s on a tear here, a depressed court jester from the gallows bent on hilarious evasiveness and oddball complexity. His Howard is a completely realized, believable person no matter how unhinged, egotistical, or dimly risk-taking - all thanks to Sandler digging as deeply internal as he ever has before.
Has the director duo’s efforts progressed beyond rubbing our faces in grimness with joyless masculine observance? While this film does delight wholeheartedly in its protagonist’s downfall, its alliance does appear to fall with the fed-up wisdom of its female characters, with both Menzel and Fox giving incredibly funny and propulsive performances themselves. Uncut Gems is entirely a hell of Howard’s making, and a haunted funhouse of the Safdie’s doing, but this time they appear interested in something human. Even if its our grander, more timeless faults and fatal shortcomings.
Grade: B+