Uncut Gems review: The best performance of Adam Sandler’s career

Dir: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie. Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Mike Francesa, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian. 15 cert, 135 mins.

Adam Sandler knows how to confound his critics. His career has developed a tendency to slip into semi-parody, as he cashes $500m cheques and, in return, delivers the Hollywood equivalent of a family vacation video (take last year’s Murder Mystery, conveniently set in the sun-kissed Mediterranean). But, on occasion, he’ll whip out a collaboration with auteurs such as Noah Baumbach or Paul Thomas Anderson and kick off the same cycle of disbelief at his talents as a dramatic actor.

Yet what’s fascinating about his work is that the artful and artless represent two sides of the same coin. Whether it’s the Sandler of Pixels or The Meyerowitz Stories, his characters are always some heady combination of bitter egotism, childish naïveté, and impotent rage. He’s the unappreciated master of ruffled masculinity. In the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, he plays Howard Ratner, a gambling addict and jeweller in New York’s Diamond District – it’s the best performance of his career. Sandler toys with his audience’s empathy, disgust and pity like a cat with its next meal.

Much like the Safdies’ Good Time, which stars Robert Pattinson a small-time crook having the worst night of his life, Uncut Gems follows a downward spiral of self-made disaster. Howard, cornered by those he’s in debt to, attempts to outsmart destiny by acquiring a rare black opal from an Ethiopian mine in the hopes of selling it at auction for a cool million. His plan goes awry when he reluctantly agrees to let basketball player Kevin Garnett (generously sending himself up) borrow the opal as a good luck charm for the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals.

Howard thrives on the facade. His arrogance comes from the belief that there’s no situation he can’t talk himself out of (or into). He’ll use gold-and-diamond encrusted Furbies and fake Rolexes as a distraction, treating human beings the same as magpies. But the bitter comedy of Uncut Gems is how easily Howard can be broken. He’s humiliated time and time again – chewed out in public by his assistant (Lakeith Stanfield) and dressed down in private by his estranged wife (Idina Menzel, whose stare could melt steel). Even the person most loyal to him – his doll-faced, attentive mistress (Julia Fox, in a knockout debut) – ends up screaming in his face outside a club at 3am. He’s pathetic, but both Sandler and the Safdies find ways to spin tragedy out of karmic retribution.

The film magnificently frames modern life as a world of illusions, where a busy life equates to a successful one and the gamble always pays off. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each line of overlapping dialogue and jittery camera move is carefully orchestrated. The film opens on a tracking shot that travels through the cosmic heart of the opal before smoothly transitioning into the inside of Howard’s rectum during a routine colonoscopy. It’s mysterious and grotesque in equal measure, as Daniel Lopatin’s twinkling synth score interjects at crucial moments to hint at the opal’s supernatural hold over those who come into its possession. In fact, the only moment of stillness in the entire film is when Howard is left alone with the gem, fondling it with a mix of sexual desire and religious awe. For the audience, it comes with the crushing realisation that he’s sacrificed everything for a piece of rock and a hare-brained scheme. Uncut Gems is a fairytale written by the hand of capitalism, where mystical highs are followed by crushing blows – and there’s always a price to pay.