There are basically three women in Howard’s life whom we know of, two of whom (wife, daughter) see him as an embarrassing slug, and the other of which is his mistress. He exclusively calls Garnett “KG,” like I did when I played Jewish Community Center basketball at age 17, except that he’s doing it to Garnett’s face, before reminding him to me at Howie Bling” on Instagram. He wears transition lenses on Cartier frames, and his youngest son’s bedroom in his suburban Long Island home features a glowing race car bed. But as the viewer knows by now, Howard owes money to various people, not the least of whom is an aggrieved Armenian named Arno whom we eventually learn is Howard’s brother-in-law.Įverything about Howard’s life is deliriously tacky. Howard relents, but not before insisting that Garnett give him his championship ring as collateral. After bragging to Garnett (and, by extension, the audience) about how he’s acquired the valuable black opal, Garnett senses a personal connection with the stone and, failing to buy it outright, succeeds in convincing Howard to let him borrow it. The basic plot elements of Uncut Gems are thus: Around the time of Passover in the spring of 2012, the gambling addict Howard places a series of large bets on the performance of Kevin Garnett and the Boston Celtics against the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA playoffs. It’s a key part of what makes Adam Sandler so well-suited to the role, given the gross-out nature of his oeuvre, and his portrayal revives a variety of Jewish stereotype that’s gotten, to my mind, an excessively bad rap. Ratner is the latest in a long line of sympathetic Jewish pervs and idiots, men whose fundamentally crude nature can overpower nearly all other parts of their personality. It’s a line that puts Ratner in a pantheon of ribald Jewish heroes, ranging from Alexander Portnoy (New Jersey liver masturbator) to Duddy Kravitz (horny Montreal geek). As Howard holds the stone, mesmerized, he blurts out: “Holy shit, I’m gonna come.” Sandler, who plays Howard Ratner, the perpetually overleveraged Manhattan diamond dealer who dominates nearly every frame of the 135-minute movie, has hinted at the stone’s existence and its accompanying financial windfall since we first encountered him on a colonoscopy table at the movie’s open. And like Daedalus, Howard is able to escape using the same thing that got him in trouble in the first place: gambling.One of the many small pleasures I took from Uncut Gems comes fairly early in the movie, when Adam Sandler receives delivery of the movie’s titular stone, a large black opal harvested from Ethiopia. In other words, Sandler's character is trapped in a prison of his own creation, his gambling problem. Meanwhile, in Uncut Gems, Howard is thousands of dollars in debt to his brother-in-law, Arno. He escapes by remembering the path out, luckily. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus begins with Daedalus, the designer of the famed Labyrinth, trapped inside his own creation by King Minos. Redditor u/Luxray_15 spotted the comparison, and it seems to line up really well. On Reddit, one fan drew a connection between the movie and another story of escape: the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Uncut Gems stars a surprisingly dramatic Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a jeweler who falls deep into a gambling habit and must scheme and manage his way out of debt. But a closer look at this new cult classic could reveal a deeper meaning behind the story of its tragic protagonist. The Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems was a sleeper hit, and now that it's available on Netflix, millions of Adam Sandler fans ca experience the two hours of delightfully stressful action themselves.
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