Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS   ***1/2

Josh and Benny Safdie

2019

IDEA:  A jeweler in New York City's Diamond District desperately attempts to claw his way out of a series of debts, placing his faith on a rock he's procured from Ethiopia that's allegedly worth over a million dollars.

BLURB:  Walking a particularly tremulous tightrope, Uncut Gems is at once a withering indictment of commodity culture and capitalist exploitation and a deliciously screwball symphony of bad judgment, its sense of escalating mayhem equally conducive to expressing the terrifying freefall and manic farce of one man’s sensational flameout. This idiosyncratic tonal mixture is seeded in the opening sequence, in which the Safdie brothers boldly juxtapose timeless geologic beauty with humanly abjection, setting material greed, capital worship, and subjugation on an ancient temporal plane that has evolved and warped across millennia. Where it ends up is inside the splenetic body of Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, an inveterate huckster and gambler whose entire life cosmology is predicated on monetary transactions in pursuit of an impossible profit. Channeling and reinforcing the relentlessness of his wheeling-and-dealing, the Safdies create a whirlwind of barely controlled chaos, their scenes increasingly fueled by proliferating conflicts and mishaps tied to Ratner’s compulsive, almost primal need for the agitation of modern capitalist life. That this life can really only lead to spiritual, cultural, and physical depletion is the thesis underlying even Uncut Gems’ most brazenly comic constructions, an axiom that one waits in uneasy anticipation to spring on its unexamined protagonist. Yet while the Safdies are primarily concerned with Ratner’s epic follies, they don’t lay the blame on just him, or merely on his disastrous choices; rather, like the mythical allure of the opal at the film's center, everyone becomes ensnared by the market logics of an economy whose cessation would spell our own.