Adam Sandler Is a Lovable Piece of Trash in 'Uncut Gems'

When you hear the name “Adam Sandler,” there are probably a few character types that spring to mind: the man-child stuck in a state of arrested development; the goofball who loves fart jokes; the ‘everyman’ prone to an angry blow-up, and more rarely, the sensitive nice guy. In Uncut Gems, you might recognize Sandler’s familiar mug hidden underneath a a goatee, a new haircut and some tinted glasses straight out of 2003, but the character he plays is entirely of new creation. As Howard Ratner, Sandler is nothing you’ve seen him play before: he’s a degenerate through and through, a true piece of trash. But by the end of the movie, somehow, you find yourself rooting for this piece of trash; it amounts to the best work the former Saturday Night Live star has ever done.

Directed by the New York City-bred Safdie Brothers (whose last movie, Good Time, similarly served as a breakout character performance for Robert Pattinson), Uncut Gems is as much of an adrenaline shot as it is a movie. It’s runtime is 2 hours and 14 minutes, but there’s not a point in the movie where you’ll think about that number at all; instead, the numbers you’ll be thinking about are on the endless bets, parlays, and money dealings that Howard, a relentless Manhattan jeweler, continues to make, against the better judgment of not only everyone in the audience, but everyone around him in the movie, too.

Sandler enters the movie’s wide release with considerable Oscar Buzz—he joked last week that if he doesn’t win a statue for Gems, that he would make a movie “so bad on purpose”—and though the acting field is crowded with the likes of Robert De Niro, Adam Driver, and a number of notable others, his performance is such a complete, energetic revelation that it would be criminal to leave the Sandman out of the conversation.

Julieta Cervantes

It’s far from the first time Sandler has shown his chops, of course. While obviously he’s more known for lower brow humor like Billy Madison or The Waterboy (we don’t have to get too much into some of these later period works), Sandler has consistently proven to be an adept performer when he feels like putting in the effort.

A moment in Big Daddy led celebrated director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) to cast Sandler in Punch Drunk-Love, where he intertwined the suppressed rage he often displays with an introverted personality for a brilliantly awkward character. Even turns in dramedies like Judd Apatow’s Funny People and Noah Baubach’s The Meyerowitz Stories put Sandler’s talent on display; sure he can fart in someone’s face or make a dumb voice, but if you ask him to portray a real piece of the human condition, he’s more than adept at doing that at a very, very high level.

But Uncut Gems, again, is unlike even these. His character isn’t a villain—we follow him in almost every frame—but from the start we know this character, in essence, is doomed. He never stops talking, and whether he’s schmoozing in his showroom with Kevin Garnett (who is stunningly good playing himself in his acting debut!) or tussling with The Weeknd, he’s constantly in one situation or another. He doesn’t listen to anyone. In fact, within moments of first appearing on screen, he’s slapped in the face; it’s a sign of the many beatings this character will take throughout the course of the movie.

Julieta Cervantes

The Safdies, here, take a page out of the playbook of another NYC-centric filmmaker: Martin Scorsese. In Taxi Driver, it’s hard to not see Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle as similarly doomed from the get-go, but with enough time we end up investing in this character’s bad decisions, and somehow find ourselves rooting against what would probably be our best moral interests. It’s only once you’re walking out of the theater and thinking about what you’ve just seen that you can begin to fully comprehend what’s just transpired on screen.

Still, that Sandler can step into this character’s shoes so easily after primarily putting his “effort” into Netflix movies like The Do-Over and The Ridiculous 6 in the last few years is remarkable. It’s stunning to see him come out with this much energy, this much charisma, this much charm, and this much, really, pure scumbagginess.

Courtesy of A24

In the world of Sandler, many of his characters end up serving as baselines for future characters. Billy Madison led to Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy led to Little Nicky, Big Daddy led to Punch-Drunk love, and so on. For the first time in a while, Uncut Gems is a brand new Sandler, a gear that we’ve never seen the 53-year-old former SNL star get into before.

It might be a while before Sandler enters the waters of putting himself in position to make a movie of this nature again, but just knowing that he’s capable of shifting into this mode as a performer is so appealing. At this point? Well, it’d be a mistake not to bet on him to deliver.

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