In the Flesh: Uncut Gems

Like its protagonist, jeweler and gambling addict Howard “Howie Bling” Ratner, Uncut Gems is an opaque, abrasive, overwhelming experience. Its fairytale synth score and manic, scrabbling camera sketch a world defined by Howie’s addictive magical thinking. The high of winning, the thrill of spinning a dream out of bullshit and adrenaline and feeling, when it inexplicably manifests itself, that you made it happen, pumps tangibly through the movie's veins. As Howie scuttles around New York pawning his and other people’s jewelry to buy back more pawned jewelry so he can wheedle his way into enough cash not to pay back his increasingly violent creditors but to place a ludicrously large and, to me, incomprehensible bet on a Celtics game the whole thing starts to feel more and more like a panic attack in a public bathroom.

The film begins and ends with 2001-esque voyages through the atomic structure of the titular black opal. The first of these transitions from wild neon colors and scintillating fractals to the mucus-slick interior of Howie’s colon during his prostate exam. The second sinks into the fatal bullet wound in his cheek, just under his eye, before whirling again through technicolor chaos and then out into a starlit sky. But it’s not a cosmic connection Uncut Gems is making here. Rather it’s the lack of connection, the unfeeling molecular chaos of every force and object in the universe. Also, Howie’s literally pulling all of this out of his ass.

The movie’s soundscape is enough to make your brain feel gnawed on, a smear of overlapping, endless dialogue as dozens of emotionally undeveloped people shout over one another. The fuckups and hair-trigger tantrums come so thick and so fast that even when the movie stops to breathe it still crackles with a kind of fried, acrid intensity. For all its nails-on-a-chalkboard freneticism, though, it still finds time to watch Howie playing a surprisingly tender voyeuristic game with his mistress Julia (Julia Fox), to map without sentimentality or excuse the feeling of enduring others’ undisguised contempt, and to touch on truly pitiful images of loss. 

Uncut Gems is a frantic movie, close to the ground and running for its life, and it succeeds by dint of sheer animal tenacity at clawing its way into something truly special. It shreds itself again and again, hammering home just how much of what we’re told is a product of Howie’s wishful thinking and self-deception as its plot unravels and we’re confronted by the obvious truth. Howie isn’t in danger; he’s already been eaten. All we’re seeing is digestion.