Netflix Month: Uncut Gems (Dir Josh and Benny Safdie, 2h 15m, 2019)

At the centre of Uncut Gems is a simple fact; the film is a meditation on riches, on materialism, on sport, in which all of its key figures but one fail. Adam Sandler's towering, neurotic, career-best performance, as Howard Ratner is blown away in a moment of utter senseless violence, quickly joined by his foil for the entire film, the loan-shark brother-in-law, Arno (Eric Bogosian). Kevin Garnett (playing a thinly veiled version of himself)'s Celtics run out of luck after Uncut Gems fades to black, losing the 2012 NBA season to the Miami Heat and the unseen arrival of one of modern basketball's key figures, Lebron James. The opal-studded rock on which their hopes and dreams hang, from its financial worth that drives Ratner to riskier and riskier bets, to its talismanic quality and obsession for Garnett, runs out of luck for both of them. Uncut Gems is a film about the ruinous powers of obsession and addiction.

Films have captured both before; Terry Gillam's superb Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas captures chemical addiction in a wonderfully strange series of sequences in which camera angles, ratios, and the visual language of cinema is warped, whilst Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard 8 captures the down-at-heel life of Vegas gamblers in unflattering sensibilities. But no film has captured the nervous energy of both, that need for the next hit, the next bet, and the fear of everything crashing down or losing everything that practically run not only the narrative arc of Ratner's life, but permeate the film itself from its nervy, off-kilter performances to its clattering, too-high-in-the-mix soundtrack, to its twitchy editing style and trigger-finger explosions of violence. At the centre of it all is the stone.

We begin in Africa, with its discovery at a mine worked on by Ethiopian Jews, something that Ratner refers to several times through the film, at once amazed by, and openly swindling, the people who found and smuggled this extraordinary object to him. We see an injured worker brought forth, injured, carried prostrate in a shot that recalls the opening Serra Pelada sequence to Geoffrey Reggio's landmark Powaqqatsi, but the sudden arrival of Chinese overseers throws the film's modern sensibilities into focus. Whilst the film leans less into geopolitics, the financial and human costs of these gems compared to, for example, 2006's Blood Diamond as two men head into the mine, its discovery, already at the cost of severe injuries starts several of the film's key characters on their way to ruin.

Enter Sandler; much like his other undeniable dramatic high-point, the Paul Thomas Anderson directed Punch Drunk Love, Sandler's introduction is highly unorthodox. Far from the establishing close-ups of many of Sandler's other appearances, the camera dives inside the gem itself, a shot that recurs in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it montage of shots from birth to his then current NBA career that accompanies Garnett's gaze inside it. If this interstellar travelling through the gem is not visually spectacular enough, riffing off the mesmeric work of German geologist Eduard Gübelin, it morphs slowly into inner-body photography, and we are slowly introduced to Sandler's protagonist, as a camera travels around his colon.

It is Sandler as Ratner that dominates this film. From his very introduction, to his sudden and brutal murder at the end of the film, we are thrown into his head, into the chaotic juggling of wives and mistresses and countless business deals. His performance is electric-at points, he towers over the screen as only De Niro or Pacino can, the American dream writ large in crazed grandeur as he careens from success to failure and back again, chasing the next fix, the next gamble or piece of jewellery that acts at collateral, or the next step towards the next big score. Not even in Casino, Scorsese's paean to the American gambler, do we capture the neurotic nature of gambling addiction, the need for this next fix, and the way it is slowly destroying his relationship with his wife, children, mistress and friends, which only deteriorates further with the introduction of the opal-studded rock, and Kevin Garnett.

This nerviness, this sense of Ratner's heightened tenseness permeates the narrative, from his first meeting with Garnett, flitting between pawnbrokers, his shop, his family, and his mistress, as his matters begin to spiral out of control, entwined with the rock, its upcoming auction, and tangled web of gambling debts, as he attempts to barter new pieces to the pawn brokers to pay for his ever-heightened financial straits. It's present in every scene with the thugs, headed by his brother in law, Arno, culminating with the film's brutal finale of bloodletting, the violence that has been threatening from the very beginning released suddenly in death.

Lesser film would build to these moments, but the Safdies keep it bubbling up, something that, through not only Arno, but Ratner himself, is always present, that barely restrained hair-trigger temper that erupts several times through the film in strong language and destructive behaviour, with Ratner at one point breaking down into near apoplectic tears and yelling as he tears through his office. This is a man barely in control of himself, and even less in control of the events that buffet him here and there, and we only see his grip slip further.

We've seen Sandler do this before, but, for all his rage, Barry Egan was utterly likeable, a little man simply trying to make his way in the world, finally trying to stand up for himself, and his equally awkward lover. Ratner is a monster, a practically feral mess, whose wife is divorcing him for the mistress he bawls out for consorting with and doing drugs with the (utterly bizarre cameo from the) Weeknd, whose business partner abandons him as his gambling addiction lays bare what he's pawned and sold on, whose connection with his own family, and faith are little more than a crutch to propel him to bigger sales, and bigger wins. And yet, Sandler makes this performance utterly electric; you cannot tear your eyes away from him, as he storms and rages and swears and cheats his way through the film.

But more than this, it permeates the entire film. Its soundtrack by Daniel Lopatin (AKA Onetrix Point Never) is practically this nervous energy given form, a disquieting and often disorientating mix that, crosses the gamut from new age music, in much the same way as Reznor and Ross's soundtrack for Gone Girl created an unsettling sense of skin-deep fascias behind which the disturbing and the violent brew, to the percussive and neurotic "Windows" that calls to mind, in its looping world-music building of layers of xylophones and woodblocks and chanting the soundtrack to the seminal anime Akira, a work that certainly captures the altered states of post-modern Tokyo as Uncut Gems captures gambling addiction. The presence of the majority of the cast as vocalists, treated and voices left naked, only further ties this remarkable soundtrack to the film it accompanied, acting, as only the best scores can, like a manifestation of its on-screen drama as a sonic ghost.

At the centre of Uncut Gems is the towering figure of Garnett, and it is he who arguably comes closest to the bearer of the film's narrative thread, not just from his compulsive need for the rock, as it becomes a talismanic totem for him, but also through his connection to Ratner, as a talisman, as a manifestation of the need for greater and greater odds to win, to make his scores, both in terms of the objects he sells, and the bets he places, finally count against his losses. Garnett, in short, represents Ratner's ambition-he appears several times in court footage (from the setting of 2012), the camera tracking him, the scenes edited in masterfully so that we see him often just before or during scoring.

Garnett himself is a remarkable foil to Ratner; his first appearance as a towering figure admiring the bling and astonishly strange tat, including gilded Furbies on a chain contrasts strongly with his encounter with the rock, gazing through a blindingly fast montage of his entire life, a perfect encapsulation of its bizarre properties and, as Ratner puts it, the ability to see the entire universe in the gem. He is, very much, the straight man to Ratner, a man who simply wants the stone, both for its aesthetic quality, and its supposedly talismanic quality. But, in a way, perhaps Garnett's need, his addiction to the rock, is just as all-consuming, as addictive, as necessary to the way they exist as Ratner's gambling addiction.

The film is dominated by these two personalities, between the ultra-powerful, top-of-his-game in the game of his life sportsman, the straight man to the bizarre tragicomedy of Ratner's life, his balancing act, and indeed his life, collapsing around him. It's the film's sweetest irony that, of all its central figures, it is Ratner's mistress and employee, the plucky and likeable figure of Julia (Julia Fox) who remains loyal and comforting to the explosive and unpredictable jeweller, and unquestionably, alongside Ratner's wife and family perhaps the few who aren't corrupted to one degree or another by the presence of the rock, who triumphs, walking away with the spoils of gambling

But in the rock's wake, in gambling's wake, in the wake of the chaotic trail of encounters and scrapes and violence that is inflicted by, on and around the rock, from its discovery, to its final appearance, meshed into the lifeless corpse of Ratner, Uncut Gems is an exploration of wealth, of power, of greed that jitters, perfectly uncomfortable, from arresting central performance to score to the very arc of its narrative, to its final, inevitably brutal conclusion. Like few films from the house of Netflix, it is a modern classic, a macabrely funny and uncomfortable dig into the heart of modern America's obsession with the illusory glitter of golden treasures,, on and off the court. 

Rating: Must See.

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