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. 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. 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. You don’t want to mess with Nico, but better him by a factor of a thousand than Phil. He has two men tasked with collecting, Phil (Keith Williams Richards) and Nico (Tommy Kominik). The problem is that Howard needs Garnett’s goodwill and deep pockets to keep at bay his creditors, the most formidable of whom is Arno (Eric Bogosian), a saturnine fellow who strives not to let his tribal loyalties (he is Jewish and cut from the same cloth as Howard) interfere with his business. Basketball star Kevin Garnett ( played by basketball star Kevin Garnett) is in the store with his entourage and wants the rock something fierce, and when Jewish-jeweler hustle meets black-basketball-celebrity hustle, it’s something to see. The thing - which is inside a fish - is so obviously cursed that it might as well be Imhotep from an old mummy movie. 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. 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. It is not an easy watch, unless you enjoy having your fight-or-flight responses triggered at the outset and continuing (for hours, maybe) after the lights come up. The shard of space and time in between is where Howard lives, for a spell, and where this awesome, freaky movie is set. For Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), the Jewish jeweler protagonist of the Safdies’ most manic film, Uncut Gems, standing still is akin to nonexistence while motion invites devastation. Life, by implication, is a switchback ride over an abyss, on a road that might drop off at any instant. 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. For the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh, the frame doesn’t frame, not for very long.
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