Overview
I first watched Uncut Gems years ago and remember it being one of the most enjoyable yet stressful movies I’d ever seen, which is the last thing I’d expected from an Adam Sandler movie. It starts off chaotic and tense, and each scene only compounds it. I mean, it starts with a mining accident to a crew of Ethiopian Jew, a zoom-in through multicolored black opals, a zoom-out from Adam Sandler’s colonoscopy, and Kevin Garnett playing himself. That’s the quietest the movie gets, because Howard and his friends speak at 100 decibels all the time, and always over each other. I don’t know the first thing about sports gambling, but every time he discussed a bet, I got an uneasy feeling. I appreciate the emphasis on overlapping dialogue in the film, as if every person is impatiently rushing to get their personal needs met or their point of view out without waiting to hear what anyone else is expressing. Ironically, this only makes it take longer for anyone to actually communicate their point, leaving us with plenty of space in conversations to feel the tension of their escalation.
Howard is a hustler, and if there’s any sympathy to be found for him for us in the audience, it’s in the way he always markets himself as a well-meaning expressive underdog on the cusp of a big break, if only people would cut him a little bit of slack to work his entrepreneurial side. But underneath that, he’s decidedly greedy and self-centered, not just a gambling addict. The two are important to separate. He doesn’t just suffer from a compulsion to throw money out on bets as soon as some lands in his hands. We see early on in the film that he’s neglectful to his kids, manipulative to his wife (who he’s replaced with a younger girlfriend who works at his store prior to finalizing a divorce), pads everything he says with a couple lies to make a deal or an excuse seem more plausible, and is always single-mindedly focused on chasing the next big deal for himself - or running from the next biggest threat, usually his loan shark of a brother-in-law. We get plenty of scenes where he’s around his family but almost entirely uninterested in how they’re doing or feeling.
These are not, in and of themselves, characteristic of gambling addictions, but moreso the result of a gambling addiction growing in a pathological liar who justifies selfish behavior without a second thought. After all, you can’t really make a thriller movie based on an average working-class young man who spends their paycheck on fantasy football instead of paying off credit card debt. For many, addictions develop as the result of choosing the addictive process or substance as a means of relief or self-medication from other problems in their life, like a caregiver for a family member who drinks to handle the stress of being always needed and isolated from a life outside their responsibilities. They may be conscious of their habit being unhealthy, but their brains are struggling with a divergence in what feels rewarding and what they consciously value. For others like Howard, they may have always been selfish in prioritizing their needs over others, so resisting a compulsion isn’t something they struggle with. When their brain says to chase the reward, they don’t attempt to push back. I think these distinctions are critical to draw in the way addiction is portrayed to delineate the moments to sympathize from the moments to criticize.
Overall though, there’s not a whole lot to dissect for me in the movie. Narratively, we just see a character double down again and again on the same responses to consequences that escalate while the tension rises and we wait for the explosive culmination of his decisions. It’s a great watch, but it’s neither a cautionary tale of addiction like The Lost Weekend nor a belated coming-of-age growth story like 28 days. Perhaps that’s a result of me never entering the gambling space myself, save for a couple obligatory lever pulls at casinos in Reno and a few all-nighters with Teamfight Tactics, so I can’t pinpoint any details particular to gambling.
The most I could talk about is the difference between addiction to substances and addiction to gambling. Studies have shown that while substances induce spikes in dopamine through guaranteed chemimcal reactions, gamblers experience dopamine spikes in the anticipation before a result, when the brain needs to pay attention in order to secure a reward. A 100% guaranteed reward doesn’t engage the brain because there’s nothing to pay attention to, but the anticipation of a 50% chance of winning lures the brain into seeking any possible way to tilt the scales into its favor. While someone who doesn’t struggle with gambling can feel demotivated by a loss from trying again, a gambling addict’s brain interprets losses as near-misses, with the actual reward being imminent if they just keep betting. That’s often why you’ll hear gamblers talk about the losses being more satisfying than the wins, because the loss builds more anticipation for how great the next win will feel that makes it all back. In Howard’s case, he’s not chasing the reward of the money itself, but the reward of the anticipation from making crazy bets and pawning insanely valuable items to make more bets. His internal method of calculating risks is a rewarding end in and of itself because it continually engages his brain in ways that the winnings themselves do not. The final scene where Howard locks his brother-in-law in his jewelry store’s security system and forces them all to watch the game he bet six figures on is perfectly illustrative of how his high works and divorces him from reality. He’s essentially guaranteed his death by refusing to pay his due to violent criminals and trapping them in a box, but he’s entirely obsessed with seeing the gamble he made play out on the screen, as if they’re all friends in a living room: “This is the beauty of betting. This is the beauty of betting, you know?” As the audience members, there’s even a part of us that might root for him to win the bet and survive, showing the gangsters that it was all worth it in the end because there was a method to his madness. But reality hits, and he and Arno are both shot dead. The movie ends with a zoom into Howard’s body through the bullet wound, paralleling both our zoom out from his colonoscopy and the black opal that one could supposedly see the universe inside.
I also can’t pinpoint too much on the specifics of Jewish culture. The show features Howard as an Ashkenazi Jew, Howard’s wife’s family are Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, the miners at the start of the film are Ethiopian, and there are a sprinkling of Russian Jews surrounding our main characters. I don’t have any insight or background to comment meaningfully on its depictions, so I’ll pull from an article about the movie published in Jewish Currents:
In The End of Jewish Modernity, Enzo Traverso argues that there are two paths for contemporary Judaism, represented by two archetypes: Leon Trotsky and Henry Kissinger. But Ratner is neither Trotsky nor Kissinger. This film is not remarking on the mid-20th-century Jewish position as the archetype of history. Ratner is nowhere near that. He’s a shlimazel trying to make money, which to me represents a closer, more intimate critique of how many Jews actually are—which is to say, pretty normal, average, shitty people.
Wait, that makes it sound like Ratner’s been deracinated by his shittiness. But there are plenty of stories about Ratner-like Jews. It’s the whole history of European antisemitism—Fagin and Shylock. And now here are the Safdie brothers—who are Jewish—telling this story, and a lot of Jews who watched it are like, “Maybe this is antisemitic?”, but also, “I know that guy.” Which is a really uncomfortable feeling to have.
I think part of what’s interesting about what the film is doing is the way it transforms the caricature that Arielle’s talking about into the modern literary archetype that Jacob’s talking about. Because it’s not just like a flatly realistic depiction of this Jewish asshole. It makes a whole world out of him. The film is sort of parable-like—it has a metaphysical undertone. The fact that we enter and exit Ratner, through the opal and through his body—speaking of assholes, through his colon—does make him a kind of archetypal figure.
Evidently, there are nuanced discussions to have surrounding Ratner’s position within the broader Jewish community depicted in the film, especially since there’s a globalized element to it through the precious gems trade, but I defer entirely to other commentators.