Adam Sandler’s performance as Howard Ratner, the jeweller with a gambling problem is riveting — easily one of this year’s most memorable, and possibly the actor’s best. Uncut Gems , while being mesmerising, also makes for rather stressful viewing. This is not a movie you can watch to unwind. It grabs you by the collar and bedazzles you with glitter-sharp cuts, which seem in tandem with your rapidly-increasing heart rate.
The movie starts in 2010 when Ethiopian Jewish miners find a rare, black opal. The camera zooms into the brightly blinking facets of the stones and just as you lose yourself in the sparkling facets, you find yourself looking at a monitor for a colonoscopy! Ratner is undergoing the procedure to rule out cancer that runs in the family.
- Director: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
- Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian
- Storyline: A jeweller with a weakness for gambling is up against all kinds of odds to stay alive and afloat
- Runtime: 135 minutes
From that point on, we are riding on Ratner’s shoulder seeing and hearing the world from his perspective. Ratner’s world, where he is a jeweller in Manhattan’s diamond district is a cacophonous, dizzyingly bright place where everyone is out to rip off everyone else. So there is Ratner of course, who is deep in debt and like every other addict looking to make good with the next bet. He is on the verge of divorce from his wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), while also having an affair with his employee, Julia (Julia Fox). There is also Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), Ratner’s assistant selling fake watches.
Over the Passover weekend, Ratner who learns of and buys the opal, is hoping to auction it for a million dollars even as he dodges his creditors playing one off against the other. There is the Passover dinner to get through, his daughter’s school play to watch, a superstitious basketball player (Kevin Garnett as himself) to placate, a raucous party to crash, an auction to attend, even as he waits for the results of his colonoscopy. Just remembering all that goes on in the movie is enough to make you breathless.
The movie is bookended by in-depth photography of the opal, inspired according to the directors by the gemological photomicrography of Eduard Gübelin and Danny J. Sanchez. The movie, like the ST Coleridge’s ancient mariner, fixes you with its glittering eye. However, unlike the poem where you can take a breath when the ship is becalmed “like a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” Uncut Gems does not let up at all — there is no breather, no break, just a relentless tightening of the coils of the plot, which in the final count is exhausting.
Uncut Gems streams on Netflix
