I watched the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time in awe of the brilliant stupidity of its main character, Connie (Robert Pattinson). It didn’t take very long to realize the film would end with him either in jail or dead, but it was fascinating to see him conjure up impermanent solutions, to see how deep he’d dig that hole.
Uncut Gems has a similarly impulsive and idiotic protagonist in Howard (Adam Sandler). But unlike Good Time, it had me begging for it all to end.
No, not because it’s bad (it’s fantastic). It’s because I wanted this poor, stupid man’s self inflicted misery to be done with. While 1917 had moments where I nearly yelled at the screen to keep the characters going, I spent the entirety of Uncut Gems begging for Howard to just stop.
Amidst a scene where Howard is dealing with debt, business, and working on a problem with his secured door for his jewelry store (there’s a lot of buzzing and yelling in this scene, as there is in much of the movie), he gets a call back from his doctor about a colonoscopy. When this happened, I actually thought “please, God, just give this man cancer so that it all might end.”
There’s another point (that’s probably only halfway through the movie) where Howard is taking his trash and recycling out after a failed night out with his family. The man is still in plenty of his own stupid debt, but even here I thought “you know what? It’ll end here. Because ending it on this scene of him taking the recycling out would…reflect on it being a cautionary tale…about him ruining his family with his debt, how he didn’t put his family first…yeah, that’s it! That’s why it’ll end for Howard now!”
Ending the story there wouldn’t have done anything for Howard’s plight, but our place in viewing his plight would have ended.
And at this point, I would have taken that. But no, on the movie went.
Towards the actual end of the movie, this process of clinging onto certain thematic and narrative devices as “yeah, the movie can end on this scene” only continued. This is, again, not a knock against the quality of the movie, just wanting it to end in some way for this poor moron.
He’s making amends with his girlfriend that he got in a fight with? Ending it here would reflect on the cyclical nature of their relationship, and thus the cyclical nature of his life.
He has a win? Ending it here would reflect on how this is going to motivate his gambling.
Without getting into spoilers, the movie ends precisely when it needs to. But one thing becomes very clear; no matter what happens in his life, good or bad, he’ll be the same old Howard. If things are bad, he’ll get into debt to keep it afloat. And if things are good, he’ll get into debt out of enthusiasm.
Which is to say that it doesn’t matter how the movie ends. Because it’s all bad.
See it immediately.
devilsadvocritic 