![uncut gems uncut gems](https://nofilmschool.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_1500/public/uncut_gems.jpg)
The thirty-something pair have by now made a name for themselves as creators of gritty, persistently uncomfortable New York movies such as 2017’s Good Time and their breakout Heaven Knows What, films that were already extensions of the brothers’ streetwise, comically anxious, ethnically specific shorts and early features. It’s also, more urgently, a gratifying summary of the Safdie brothers’ career to date.
![uncut gems uncut gems](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/8soAAOSwiQZfA1au/s-l640.jpg)
#UNCUT GEMS MOVIE#
It obviously doesn’t work out that way-“obviously” because this is a crime movie on its face, telegraphing from the start that though Howard’s problems are of his own making, their consequences have long ago slipped his control. And it doesn’t stop him from letting Garnett borrow the stone for the weekend: it’s a good-luck charm to get him through Eastern Conference finals, or so the story goes.
![uncut gems uncut gems](https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2019/12/6/1f5adc52-42f4-4579-9926-4fe2bd9a1fea-uncutgems.png)
That doesn’t stop him from trying to exploit the value of the gems, mind you. He feels a connection to the stones: the Ethiopians who dug them up were fellow Jews, after all, a fact he relates with an almost mystical fervor. When fellow hustler Demany ( LaKeith Stanfield) shows up with a new prospective client, Kevin Garnett (playing himself), Howard can’t help but show off his newfangled riches: black opals, which he’d learned of only two years ago on the History Channel and had imported for the sake of an auction scam. Constant threats on his own life notwithstanding, of course. He’s living the life: a (soon to be ex)-wife and kids on Long Island, a young employee-girlfriend that he’s set up in a swank apartment uptown, and a grab-bag of sports gambling debts that he’s somehow, to this point, managed to evade through an intricate network of lies, scams, pawned items, and luck. His stock is equal parts attractive and repulsive: a diamond-encrusted crucifix with Michael Jackson as Jesus diamond-studded Furbies on chains stolen but rich-looking Rolex watches any variety of “new money” albatross fit for the necks of rappers, ballers, and the like. Howard is a loud, restless, successful merchant of needlessly gaudy swag. Uncut Gems, co-written by the Safdies and longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, is a movie about a gambling addict whose most consistent bet is on his own life. The moment affords at least one obvious meaning: Uncut Gems is a movie that lives in the gut, where shit makes a name for itself, where anxiety, folly, and instinct are borne out without morality or restriction. Howard, the Jewish diamond dealer whose fate, we soon learn, is bound up with that of the stones, is in the middle of a colonoscopy when we meet him. And again, it announces this difference in its opening minutes: with a close-up on gorgeous black opals that transports us, Magic School Bus-style, from the mines of the their origin to the similarly cavernous innards of Howard Ratner (Sandler). Uncut Gems is another kind of movie altogether-a great one, for starters. In that case, though, the art is merely a venue for bearing witness to colonial destruction at a safe remove, a posture meant to stoke only the most obvious, helpless anger. Why else would a chaotic Adam Sandler film about the New York diamond district open in the Welo opal mines of Ethiopia, zeroing in on the distraught face and open wounds of an injured black miner? Not that there isn’t precedent for this sort of thing: see films like Blood Diamond, with their flattering liberal awareness and ostensibly political style. There’s a karmic power to the titular stones of Uncut Gems, Josh and Benny Safdie’s startling whirligig of a character study.