Uncut Gems

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a gem dealer, in the 2019 film, Uncut Gems (Josh and Bernie Safdie).  The picture is produced in part by Martin Scorsese and channels some of the raw hysteria and aggression that powered some of that director's best pictures.  The movie is relentlessly animated, full of fierce and obscene talk, and the picture is impressive on a number of levels.  In the end, I think Uncut Gems is less than the sum of its parts -- there's nothing in the movie we haven't seen dramatized with equal vehemence in pictures like Goodfellas and Robert Altman's California Split.  Ultimately, the fate of the film's protagonist isn't compelling because Howard Ratner is so despicable on so many levels -- Sandler's performance is brave and he, certainly, doesn't hesitate to dramatize the sordid moral squalor and obsessional greed that afflicts this character.  The flaw in the picture is similar to a fundamental defect in Scorsese's magnum opus Raging Bull  -- Jake LaMotta was such an awful person that the audience never knew whether to fear his berserk anger or despise  or pity him.  The reason Raging Bull is a masterpiece is that LaMotta's horrific behavior is linked inextricably to his equally insane physical courage -- he risks his life in the ring; we can admire his courage while remaining horrified at its sources.  (And Scorsese somehow manages to make the brute seem pitiful at the end of the film -- something the Safdies don't accomplish.)  Sandler's Ratner seems to think that he can talk his way out of the dilemmas that his bad behavior has caused.  At the end of the film, he seems as amazed as the audience that he isn't able to successfully wiggle out of his moral (and physical) entrapment.  We know what's coming but, when it happens, we don't really feel anything for the character.  By contrast, Jake LaMotta survives and, implicitly, even wants a movie to be made about him -- this is far more disturbing than the conventional ending (a bullet through the brain) that concludes Uncut Gems.  There's no suspense in Uncut Gems -- we know how this has to end:  it's just a matter of getting from point A to point B.

Ratner runs a jewelry shop in the Diamond District in New York.  He seems to have a Black partner, Damany, and a luscious girlfriend, also, works in the store.  Ratner is a family man who lives in New Jersey.  He has a wife who physically resembles a somewhat older and hardened version of his girlfriend -- his wife despises Ratner and her beautiful features are frozen into a sneer:  she looks like some kind of chisel.   Ratner makes a living selling "bling" to professional athletes, rappers, and gangsters.  He's what Tony Soprano used to a call "a degenerate gambler."  At the outset of the film, Ratner is in trouble because of unpaid gambling debts -- he owes a lot of money to a tough guy who periodically assaults him through two gorillas.  (It turns out that this guy is his brother-in-law.  We learn this during the family Passover in which Ratner morosely recites the plagues visited on Egypt -- a list of troubles that seems roughly equivalent to his own problems).  Ratner has tapped some downtrodden Ethiopian Jews for uncut gems -- in this case, a fist-sized chunk of rock in which four or five huge opals are embedded.  (In the film's prelude, we see the aftermath of a horrifying accident at the opal mine that creates chaos in which two men can chip a big chunk of rock out of the deserted mine.)  Ratner is trying to sell diamonds to Kevin Garnet, a famous basketball player.  Garnet plays himself and he's pretty good.  Ratner gets the opal delivered while Garnet is in his shop -- it  comes in the guts of a big fish shipped on ice -- and the basketball superstar is fascinated.  When the glass of a counter in the showroom breaks while Garnet is studying the jewels, the basketball player is not injured and he takes this as a sign that he must acquire the opals in their matrix of rock.  Garnet takes the opals, leaving his Boston Celtics championship ring with Ratner as collateral.  (In this movie, everyone calls everyone else "nigger" or "my nigger" and there is, also, a lot of ethnically charged conversation about the fact that Jews are obsessed with basketball.)  Ratner immediately pawns Garnet's ring, uses the money to place a bet against great odds on a basketball game in which Garnet is playing, and seems to win.  But the thugs who are pursuing him, and administering periodic beatings, don't want him squandering his money on long-odds bets and they have surreptitiously canceled Ratner's bet made with the bookie.  Ratner remains in big trouble.  His girlfriend walks out on him.  He keeps getting intimidating or threatening messages over Passover.  and it's clear that the only way he can escape this jeopardy is by making a killing on the uncut gems in the opal.  But Garnet has the gems and regards them as lucky and doesn't want to release them to Ratner.  Ratner is convinced that the gems are worth almost a million dollars.  He retrieves the opals from Garnet who (he is confident) will buy the stones at a premium at an auction set up though a firm like Sotheby's.  Unfortunately, the gems are appraised at surprisingly low figure -- only about $150,000 contrary to Ratner's expectation of over a million.  (This is a surprising plot defect -- Ratner is a professional dealer in gems; surely, he would now how to appraise these kinds of stones.  Ratner's lapse in judgment here, which might be attributed to "wishful thinking", is puzzling -- we don't have any sense that Ratner's judgment, clouded by his gambling mania, is affected with respect to his shrewd and, obviously, successful gem business.)  Ratner persuades his father-in-law (Judd Hirsch) to bid up the gems at the auction and, catastrophically, he ends up the high-bidder.  Now, Ratner has to come up with money to buy back his own opals, plus commissions and fees. As a desperate final measure, Ratner takes the money from the auction (which is really owed to his father-in-law) and has his girlfriend place a complicated bet on the Celtics' game.  She has to fly by helicopterto Mohegan Sun casino to place this baroque bet that will pay off in vast sums, but only if something like 26 separate preconditions are met.  Back at the gem store, Ratner is besieged by his brother-in-law and his thugs who want their money back.  Ratner locks them in a security vestibule and, then, watches the basketball game.  All 26 qualifying events occur and Ratner wins the bet.  It doesn't matter.  The thugs kill him and his brother-in-law and content themselves with looting the store.  Most likely, Ratner would never have received any money anyhow.  His girlfriend takes the duffel bag full of money and departs in a limousine and it doesn't seems likely that she is going to look for Ratner. 

This sordid tale is presented with a ferocious attack -- cameras pressed to within inches of faces contorted by greed or rage or fear.  Everyone talks simultaneously in a weird argot comprised entirely of ethnic slurs and swear words.  The dialogue overlaps on so many levels that it is like Robert Altman on dexadrine.  In the opening shot, the camera glides closer and closer to the opal, then, enters the opal and passes through its crystal structure to emerge in some kind of wet tunnel -- this turns out to be the rectum of Ratner who is having a colonoscopy.  Uncut Gems isn't subtle.  In its first five minutes it establishes that Ratner is an asshole and solely an asshole.  (And Kevin Garnet is a garnet.)  The film is full of people bellowing at one another, either threatening or imploring.  Everything is shot in extreme close-up.  In one scene, Ratner's neglected daughter performs in a play where she vomits gold coins.  Again, the imagery here is not too subtle.  Sandler is excellent as Ratner -- he is increasingly cornered to the point that the bullet through the brain seems less comeuppance for him and more a merciful coup de grace; it puts him out of his misery.  The film has an astonishing score created by someone named David Lopatin.  The score is like Philip Glass in combination with Carl Orff -- there are odd intervals of chanting (voices that sound like both Gregorian chant and, sometimes, like Tibetan monks throat-growling) and there are bells, high-pitched choirs, whoops, and classical interludes with woodwind and synthesizer arpeggios.  The score is so good that it justifies several sequences that would otherwise be pointless.  After a visit to a nightclub where Garnet is celebrating his 36th birthday, Ratner and his girlfriend fight -- they both walk in opposite directions with the camera tracking on each of them alternatively.  The scene has no point; they aren't going anywhere consequential, but exists only as a showcase for the spectacular music roiling underneath the images.  In the final shot, the camera enters the bullet wound in the grinning and dead Ratner's face and, then, burrows through the wound into the crystalline world of the opal -- this is like the famous scene involving the bullet wound in Mick Jagger's head in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel's Performance. 

The film is good and I recommend it.  I don't like its morality, however.  Twice in the picture, Ratner makes a "Hail Mary" sort of bet, putting down huge money against wildly improbably odds, and twice he beats those odds to win.  This is an idiotic plot convention that is not only unrealistic but, also, depressingly conventional -- every deviant gambler in the world thinks he can save himself by one last, wildly aggressive wager.  There is another name for such people and it's used by the Casinos:  "losers."  I don't think it's useful to suggest that the way out of financial hardship is gambling.  That's a myth that Vegas and, even, the States in their lotteries peddle to the poor and ignorant.  I don't think that an otherwise ostensibly realistic film should show the hero twice beating the odds and making enormous profits on a bet -- it's a bad example.