Netflix Review - Uncut Gems (15)

This is my fuckin' way. This is how I win. All right?

The Gist: Adam Sandler (bear with me) is Howard Ratner, a gem dealer in NYC's jewellers' district with a scheme to cancel out the host of financial worries that threaten to engulf him. A compulsive gambler, Howard is striving to outrun some scary creditors, whose patience is running low. But a rock full of uncut Ethiopian opals may just be his salvation. That's if he can hold onto it long enough to sell it for serious profit - while keeping himself afloat, pacifying enemies and friends alike and untangling his disastrous personal life. For Howard it's a week that starts off 'fraught' and then goes places that word couldn't begin to describe.

The Juice: Let's say straight off that this is a movie for everyone who'd forgotten Sandler can seriously act. (Even those of us who remember him in 2002's Punch-Drunk Love may have begun to lose faith.) His morally dubious dealer is a remarkable character creation, bouyed up by a pith-and-profanity-packed screenplay for sure, but brought to vivid life by a central performance that drives this crime drama juggernaut all the way to its frantic end. Howard is a study in venal desperation - hustling night-and-day around the city in a frenzy of (very possibly deluded) positivity, trying to pull the unravelling strands of his life back together. With his adveraries closing in and his addiction kicking into high gear, there's no principle or loved-one he won't betray. And yet somehow, possibly due to his sheer tenacity, you end up rooting for the poor bastard. Kind of.

The intensity of Sandler's performance is matched by what co-directors the Safdie Brothers have created here. Their movie is a hard-paced odyssey through the seamier side of the gem trade with a near-relentless soundtrack, crowded spaces and overlapping dialogue - much of the latter rapid-fire and angry. This is a gratingly noisy landscape, one in which Howard (along with us) fights to hear himself think and where oases of silence are few and short-lived. It's a full-on sensory assault, one that given time really does a number on the viewer's mind. In this crazed mix comes a host of memorable support performances - Idina Menzel as Howard's jaded wife, newcomer Julia Fox as his devoted employee-mistress, NBA star Kevin Garnett in a key role as himself... plus some truly chilling potential nemeses. They all contribute to the escalating insanity of one guy's life.

The Judgement: 8.5/10. Uncut Gems is a treatise in greed and addiction, the opening scene confronting us with the true exploitative nature of what we're about to see. There's an element of pain brought by the movie's jarring wall of sound and accompanying sense of anxiety (levels of which only mount as Howard's life spins out of control). It's worth the exhausting trip, however, most of all to witness that central self-mortifying tour de force. Forget Happy Gilmore, forget Little Nicky, forget both Jack and Jill. Howard Ratner is a whole other proposition - a character with whom you'll likely associate Chandler forever after. Welcome to the nerve-jangling chaos of his world.