UncutGems is the Safdie brothers' most manic film, and Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner is the summation of the Safdies’ culture, in which the drive for life collides head-on with the drive for death, and the upshot is cinema
Photo: Julia Cervantes/A24 For the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh, the frame doesn’t frame, not for very long. Someone is always moving in or out, streaking past the perimeter, forcing the camera to swerve right or left in the hope of catching the action before it hurtles on. Life, by implication, is a switchback ride over an abyss, on a road that might drop off at any instant.
It is not an easy watch, unless you enjoy having your fight-or-flight responses triggered at the outset and continuing after the lights come up. Only Howard could have fun at a film like this, and I use fun very loosely, with a nod to Freud’s Todestrieb — i.e., the death drive. In his first scenes, he waits at his fortified Manhattan jewelry store to receive an uncut gem surreptitiously extracted from a cave and then smuggled into the U.S. from the mines of Ethiopia.
The audience has no choice but to root for Howard, even when he gets out of a jam and promptly leaps into another when he should be kissing the ground and thanking his God for a new lease on life. I would say that Howard Ratner is the ultimate Adam Sandler role, if I didn’t think maybe Adam Sandler is the ultimate Howard Ratner role. They share a metabolism, certainly. Sandler has one great handicap as a performer: His eyes are dead — or else turned so far inward that they’re dead to the world.
Sandler does not triumph in a vacuum. He requires co-conspirators, nemeses, immoveable objects to throw himself repeatedly against. Idina Menzel has a bloodcurdling moment or two as the wife who has deadened herself to Howard’s wheedling at obviously great cost. An actress new to me, Julia Fox, is stupendous as the mistress/employee who will never deaden herself to him — who comes fully alive only when she has to keep up.
I put Uncut Gems on my ten-best list having no idea what I was supposed to take away from it. Only now, as I think back, do I understand that what I took away was my life, and thank you, Safdie brothers, for letting me keep it. In cultures like the Jewish one portrayed here, there is a pressure to act, always act, to seize whatever can be seized or else not advance — as Albert Brooks framed it in Defending Your Life — to the next level of existence.
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