Let's start with Adam Sandler. He's arguably the most frustrating A-list actor in Hollywood. He can be a great actor. Punch-Drunk Love might be my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Funny People is about an hour too long, but Sandler is incredible in it. Reign Over Me. The Meyerowitz Stories. Spanglish. Seriously, this guy could be a critical darling if he wanted to be. He doesn't really care though. He'd rather make mediocre movies at fun locations with his best friends. And who could blame him? I'd love to make millions of dollars doing that. Also, it means that every couple years, he can ride a wave of good press for making a movie like Uncut Gems.
Uncut Gems is a movie about a gambler in New York City who keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole and finding ways back out. It is intense. This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who saw the Safdie Brothers' last movie, Good Time, which is also about a desperate man trying to survive the criminal underworld. They amped up the intensity this time. The end result is a movie that is both intense and exhausting. Depending on your personal makeup, one will win out. I get how this blew a lot of people away. It was too much for me though. Even as I was technically enjoying the movie, Sandler's performance, and the mastery of craft on screen, I was also resisting the urge to check my phone to see how much time was left.
There is a lot to like about this movie. Sandler's performance deserves all the accolades it can get. Kevin Garnett plays himself in 2012, and he's surprisingly really damn good. The screenplay is nimble in how it juggles the many people who want to hurt Sandler's character. I liked the movie. It just wasn't my tempo. I have a problem with characters that don't fit in the world of the movie.
Let me explain. I need to believe that the world of a movie could produce a character like the one I'm seeing and foster him until the point when the movie begins. If you put a character like Pee Wee Herman into the movie Spotlight, it's not going to make sense. That world and character exist with a different set of rules. I don't actually believe that Sandler's character, Howard Ratner, could exist in the world of Uncut Gems for so long. He has a good life. He owns a high-end jewelry shop. He can afford to house his family in an expensive house and house his mistress in a fancy apartment in the city. And he's maintained this fairly successfully into his 50s. So why does it all come to a head now? Did he have a family fortune that he'd been spending? Is there a reason why he ramped up his intensity now? Frankly, I would've even been fine if some character just said "you've been lucky that this hasn't bit you in the ass until now", but that never happened. For some reason, I had trouble seeing past it. I liked the movie, but the fact that I treated it like a fantasy world took away a lot of the stakes.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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