After the first fifteen minutes or so of ‘Uncut Gems’ I was thinking this is great but there’s no way that directors Benny and Josh Safdie can keep up the film’s manic intensity and tempo. But they do.

The invasive music is set at a higher than normal level in relation to the spoken dialogue, which adds to the film’s maelstrom effect and transports us very effectively into the frazzled mind of Howard Ratner, Adam Sandler’s character.

At two and a quarter hours, ‘Uncut Gems’ is longer than most, but it is gripping from start to finish and never sags.

There are just enough quiet moments punctuating the mayhem to make watching the film an enjoyable experience rather than an unrelenting ordeal.

Adam Sandler is a revelation in this film: he plays his character Howard Ratner as brash, charismatic, at times totally in control and at other times floundering helplessly, a deeply flawed but nonetheless sympathetic figure.

Sandler is very much the star of the show but there are other good performances here from Lakeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Julia Fox, and the rest of the cast.

The grounded presence and reassuring solidity of former basketball player Kevin Garnett plays particularly well against Sandler’s character’s anarchic machinations and scheming.

Though set in New York’s Diamond District, there are few external shots of the city so the New York feel comes from the brash, driven characters rather than the city’s streets or architecture.

At one point during this showing of ‘Uncut Gems’ here at DCA there was a bizarre moment when the line between the film on screen and the audience in the auditorium became blurred. It was during the scene where Ratner is hiding in the closet so that his girlfriend Julia can’t see him. They are texting each other, with Julia completely unaware that Ratner is there in the apartment watching her. This is one of the film’s quieter scenes, a break from the manic music soundtrack. In the silence of the scene, there is a cough.

I assumed it was Ratner coughing and that Julia would be startled by it and realise that he was hiding there in the apartment. But surprisingly Julia makes no response, doesn’t seem to notice. It took a couple of seconds for me to realise that the cough had come from someone in the audience, not from Adam Sandler.  

Related Post: ‘The Post’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)

The post ‘Uncut Gems’, DCA, Dundee appeared first on Silver Screen Cities: Celebrating city cinema-going.