Uncut Gems: Tense & Thrilling

I don't think I have felt more clenched as I did during the two hours I spent in the theater watching Uncut Gems. It is an excellent movie but probably not great if you have a heart condition. A sensory onslaught from start to finish, this movie is relentless, constantly upping the ante and making you bite your fingernails as you wait for everything to either go horribly wrong or horribly great. And until the last minutes, you have absolutely no idea what kind of ending you're going to get.

Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie (aka the Safdie brothers), based on a script they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein, this is a story about Howard Ratner, a man who owns a jewelry store in New York's Diamond District but also has a gambling problem. As you can imagine, that is not a good combination when you have easy access to jewels that you can pawn off to make terrible bets. Ratner is played by Adam Sandler, and you may have heard this already, but this might be the best performance of Sandler's career. It's a dark, twisted character--no goofy SNL hi-jinks here--but his comedy timing helps enormously in the moments when the Safdies decide to give the audience a bit of a break and inject some humor into the proceedings before the next pulse-pounding sequence begins.

The movie takes place in 2012. Howard owes money to a lot of people who are starting to send increasingly violent collectors. However, he thinks he has hit upon the perfect bet when he lends a rare black opal to Kevin Garnett (yes, THE basketball player Kevin Garnett, who has a whole Supporting Actor-level performance in this film and is astonishingly good). Howard also has family drama; he has been cheating on his wife, Dinah (the fabulous Idina Menzel), with his employee Julia (the remarkable Julia Fox, in her first acting role), and as the movie proceeds, we see the dangerous toll his behavior could take on his wife and kids.

The plot is twisty and so compelling, and despite knowing nothing about basketball sports betting, I was thoroughly engrossed in the machinations of Howard's bets and found myself rooting for his teams and his players as feverishly as he was. If you've ever been disdainful of gamblers and wondered how they could take the risks they do, this film will steep you in their psychology and make you understand why this is such a debilitating addiction. Everything about this movie is loud and overwhelming: the dialogue is fast and furious with people constantly talking over each other and yelling, the score by Daniel Lopatin is always thrumming in your veins, never giving you a chance to breathe, and the cinematography by Darius Khondji is vivid and filled with extraordinary colors that reflect the black opal that has set off all this mayhem.

Uncut Gems is an audiovisual feast that genuinely feels like a cinematic rollercoaster. You feel a little bit sick while you're on the ride, but the twists, turns, and thrills make it all worthwhile. Everyone is perfectly cast (listen for some fun voice cameos from Natasha Lyonne and Tilda Swinton!), the story is propulsive and sucks you in, and as a New Yorker, there's of course that added joy where I can recognize the locations, and say "hey, I know that bus stop!" It's a chaotic thriller that injects itself into your veins and you will stumble out of the theater feeling a little bit worse for wear, but so glad you chose this adventure.