Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie, and Josh Safdie, 2019
#3,
2019 Skandies
I had a hell of a time figuring out whether I was watching this one against the grain or not. It’s about an irredeemable gambling addict, but the film doesn’t overtly flag this for us. There’s no scene in which the protagonist’s loved ones stage an intervention: “Howard, you have to stop betting on basketball games! It’s destroying your life!” Instead, it is left to us to recognize how pathological this guy’s behavior is. When we meet him, he’s already in hock to a loan shark to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, and he’s got some hired muscle after him looking to collect. But he has a couple of schemes in play to pay off his debt. Howard is a jeweler, and has a chunk of ore containing some black opal—the titular uncut gems—headed his way from a mine in Ethiopia. He also has a potentially lucrative visit scheduled from basketball star Kevin Garnett (and this is where not knowing anything about these movies paid off for me, because gadzooks did my eyebrows go up when that name appeared in the opening credits). KG demands to borrow the opal, offering up his 2008 championship ring as collateral—and Howard promptly runs down to a pawn shop, gets $21,000 for the ring, and puts it all on a six-way parlay. And, okay, fine—$21,000 won’t get him square with the loan shark, so maybe you can chalk this up to desperate measures in desperate times. But eventually KG buys the opal for $175,000, more than enough to get Howard out of the crosshairs. All he has to do is fork over the hundred grand he owes, and he’ll have nearly that much left over to feed his gambling habit. Instead he bets the entire $175,000 on an Eastern Conference semifinal game, risking his life on a seven-to-one parlay that includes a virtual coin flip, a prop bet on which team will win the opening tipoff. There’s not much ambiguity here, right? This is just straight degeneracy. But the thing is, I thought the same thing about Mike, the guy in Rounders, and that movie portrayed its irredeemable gambling addict as a ballsy and brilliant hero—and its legion of fans agreed. I was absolutely watching that film against the grain in considering its protagonist a degenerate. So was I doing the same here?
“I think you are the most annoying person I have ever met,” Howard’s wife tells him. “I hate being with you, I hate looking at you, and if I had my way, I would never see you again.” That seems like a pretty clear signal that Howard isn’t supposed to be the hero—except that Jo, Mike’s significant other in Rounders, isn’t nearly so harsh, yet for voicing eminently justified concerns about his gambling, she was deemed the “insufferably whiny”, “heinously unlikable” “wet blanket girlfriend from hell” by that film’s fans. So maybe Howard’s wife’s excoriation of him is meant to make him that much more of a hero?
There’s also this, since I suppose I’ve been burying the lede here: the protagonist of Uncut Gems is played by Adam Sandler. He’s well into middle age now, but still it’s Adam Sandler, the insufferable “do silly voices while sniggering at how silly his voices are” guy from a dire era of Saturday Night Live. To me, that casting signals that of course this guy is supposed to be the fucking worst. But perhaps not to the fanbase that has turned this guy into, as of this writing, the highest-paid actor in the world. Kevin Garnett made a third of a billion dollars in his basketball career, and Adam Sandler clears him by nine figures. So I imagine that to most people watching this movie, the casting here signals the opposite: that Howard is meant to be, if not a hero, then a comfortingly familiar man-child that somehow you just can’t help but pull for. And despite my skeptical “somehow”, it is well attested that audiences will root for a protagonist simply for being a protagonist, even for being the protagonist of a scene: wanting Dorothy to get back home because that’s what she wants, even as they themselves prefer Oz to Kansas, or wanting villain Harry Lime to escape the police, just because the camera’s tracking his attempted getaway. So maybe a lot of viewers were cheering on Howard as the Celtics sweated out a Game 7 victory, as if the sports bettor were, by reflected light, a sports star.
However, the fact that things do not work out for Howard in exactly the same way they work out for Mike in Rounders suggests to me that I was not in fact watching against the grain—that Uncut Gems is, in a way, a repudiation of the gambler as hero. So while watching the movie was an unpleasant experience—I had to look at Adam Sandler while having rap music blasted at me—as a member of Team Jo I appreciated the sentiment. Assuming I read it right.
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