Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett

Directed by Josh & Benny Safdie

Rating; ****(4 stars)

Summary: Subhash K Jha reviews the English film Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler and Kevin Garnett. Read here for details.

Have you had this horribly bad day when everything goes wrong? Well, here is a guy whom you will identify with. Howard is in a wretchedly nightmarish place. Layer by layer his life is falling apart.

We meet him when the process of his ruination is halfway complete, give or take a few misses. Watching Adam Sandler play this high-end loser(what a comeback this comic actor has made in a role which is as funny as testicular cancer) I was reminded of those businessmen who escape accruing debts by jumping to their death.

Howard, I doubt, would be missed. His daughter talks into her phone and sneers when Howard tells her how proud he is of her. We can see he is insincere in his affection. But nonetheless, it is the moment of filial rejection that made me flinch. He had it coming, though. After what he does at her school play, Howard’s daughter’s contempt is well-earned.

Howard’s wife Dinah (Idina Menzel) hates him so intensely there is a sequence where he pleads for her to give their marriage a second chance, and she laughs in his face. Her hatred for the man evokes no pity from us. Because each one of us has a bad day, a day that extends its hours into weeks, like tentacles wrapped around a human heart.

We can’t blame Howard for the misfires in life. After all, the difference between success (Salman) and failure (Akshaye Khanna) is one governed by chance. And Howard is definitely on the wrong side of destiny. Uncut Gems captures his downward spiral in simmering, heated brilliantly-written scenes where Sandler gets to play the guy on the downward spiral with such profound empathy that we are with him all the way down.

The camera captures the desperate sweat of failure in frames that are composed like clumsily arranged flower beds at a horticultural show where the soil is beyond irrigation.

And yes, did I mention, Howard is beyond redemption. The film is set in the pricey constantly-mutating world of precious stones and jewellery. The setting and jargon sound so lived-in it feels like we are trapped with Howard in this world of high-end nihilism. This isn’t a pretty film. It’s not in any way inspiring or elevating. And yet it’s a strangely entertaining film, sweeping us into one monstrously misfired misadventure after another. The catastrophes don’t pile up in an accusing heap. They move across Howard’s doomed existence like planets on the prowl, eating into his progressively vitiated existence.

It is hard to describe the experience of watching Uncut Gems. Its savage treatment of a failing life is not for the weak-hearted. As Howard, Adam Sandler is a portrait of peaked doom. Sandler has a terrific cast to boost his loser’s trail. The more lost he gets the deeper the colours of identifiable feelings in this uncut but polished gem of a film.