Easily the most unpleasant film of the year, Uncut Gems also manages to be aggressively annoying while telling a story that ultimately means nothing.
We begin with an Exorcist-like prologue of a rare black opal discovered in a collapsed mine in Ethiopia. Why? It's hard to say, other than to create a mythic feel for the opening of a movie titled after the shiny rock. The myth continues to build as the camera dives into the gem and we are taken on a roller coaster ride through ethereal color wheels and kaleidoscopic nebulae until we realize we are inside a human colon. Specifically, Adam Sandler's colon. It's a nasty way to start a movie, but it suggests lots of the nastiness to come. If the treasure is such an innate part of this character that it is figuratively inside his colon, the dragon-sickness born of greed soon becomes the defining characteristic of our protagonist.
Speaking of which, Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a veritable rat obsessed with money and material things. He is a Jewish-American jeweler in Manhattan who spends his money gambling and his time jabbering about all kinds of things. In fact, the whole movie attempts to take us into his headspace, and so it is immediately apparent that his life is a cacophonous circus: chaos erupts every time he opens his mouth, both due to his ungodly squawking and his impressive tendency to curse and lie and flatter and plead all at the same time. He's an oily, overweight wreck of a man who thinks he's on top of the world, despite the sizable debts he's accrued due to his addictions. He's also a disgusting man who has a gorgeous wife (Idina Menzel) he ignores in favor of his employee (Julia Fox).
Ratner makes many mistakes in this movie, so much that the film could be trying to turn itself into a classic tragedy, but he is so endlessly unlikable that I found myself wishing for the worst to happen to him. And of course it does. the two-and-a-quarter hour runtime, then, is a deadly slow slog toward the gruesome inevitable, punctuated only by three or so delicious scenes with Menzel, who absolutely and articulately detests her lying, cheating husband. Apart from these comparatively quiet moments, the movie blurs into lengthy "chase" scenes of us chasing Howard around the city; he's constantly on the move, constantly blurting out obscenities and trivialities, and we get the feeling that the stress and panic are totally self-induced because his addiction is to danger and high-speed chaos, not just money itself.
Apart from Menzel, the only thing I liked about this movie is its cinematography from Darius Khondji. It's not terribly pleasant -- much like the story and characters -- but it heightens the seedy, grainy, and somewhat alluring sparkle of Ratner's world. It's a similarly sickly gleam to something in a hospital or cell phone store, with a greenish-blue hue that shines a little too much. It's a fascinating approach and Khondji is perfectly in sync with Sandler's kinetic frenzy. Too bad the screenplay, direction, and acting are so incredibly off-putting -- horrible people doing horrible things to each other, all for the love and misuse of money -- that I wanted to remove my face rather than finish watching.
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