Uncut gems howard movie#

All of these technical touches recreate Howard’s reality for audiences. Daniel Lopatin’s synth-heavy score rarely eases up Darius Khondji’s camerawork spins and hurtles through the small spaces of the diamond district and whips around the vast exteriors of New York City and all of it is bathed in pulsating blues and greens that leave audiences stumbling into the sunlight, searching frantically for Tylenol. Where the Safdies’ Good Time puts audiences through an anxiety-fueled ringer seemingly just to show they could, Uncut Gems does it for a purpose. And like any addiction, the bets have to get bigger and bigger, riskier and riskier, for Howard to find that high. When Howard wins, his happiness comes not from the relief that extra money will help him pay down his debts, but from the assurance that he has a bankroll for his next gambit, his next adrenaline rush.

Uncut gems howard movie#

It’s the rush of the risk – the very stress and anxiety that turn many viewers off from their movie – that serves as the life-blood of a gambling addict like Howard. The inclusion of these bets is a subtle but crucial example of how the Safdie brothers understand the internal life of a compulsive gambler. Or as he puts it: “would’ve been fucked if I didn’t get that.” And because of how parlay bets work, if the opening tip falls the wrong way, Howard loses everything. Even if the opal helps Garnett and his team’s performance, it does nothing for a fairly random jump ball to kick off the game. In both cases, despite knowing (or thinking he knows) something about KG’s performance that gives him an advantage, Howard does something stupid: he adds a bet on the opening tip to the parlay. After lending his black opal to the superstitious Kevin Garnett before two different playoff games, Howard places two big-money parlay bets – multi-pronged bets that require each prong to hit in order for the bettor to make any money, but pay out big when they do. Laced throughout the movie's toxic tonic is a sobering reality: Howard does not really care about winning, does not really want to win. Howard views the opal’s arrival as a panacea to his problems, but his ego, compulsions, and bad luck inevitably get in the way. The story zooms in on a one-week period in the opal’s millennia-long journey, when it is delivered to Howard Ratner, a Jewish jeweler and gambling addict who can’t turn a corner without running into someone to whom he owes money, an apology, or both.

Uncut Gems is powered by a gorgeous but destructive black opal, uncovered in a disaster at an Ethiopian mine and shipped in a dead fish to the seedy underbelly of New York. An addling Odyssey and an unrelenting tragedy rolled into one, Uncut Gems transcends its genre thrills by understanding that addiction lives and breathes on the razor’s edge, and that for Howard Ratner, winning is the beginning of the end. But in a movie that is more empathetic than the Safdie brothers’ past efforts, this is, perhaps above all, a moment of recognition between two addicts, one obsessive-compulsive, the other a staggering ball of unrestrained id. It’s meant as a contrast: Howard’s grimy, sleazy, blood-soaked Diamond District contrasted against the sparkling parquet of Garnett’s kingdom. “This is how I win,” Adam Sandler’s diamond-dealing, scene-stealing Howard Ratner tells Kevin Garnett late in Uncut Gems. Warning: This review contains important plot details from Uncut Gems.