#wayne diamond

(Josh & Benny Safdie, 2019)

Like their break out effort Good Time, Josh and Benny Safdie’s latest is another balls to the wall thrill ride. Unlike Good Time, this thrill ride lasts for over two hours, like Good Time it doesn’t feature particularly strong writing. Character arcs, nor strong plotting of much interest to the Safdie’s in their screenplay, penned in collaboration with their regular writing/editing partner Ronald Bronstein. 

Thankfully, that doesn’t really matter, because as middling as they might be at the writing, they are mighty filmmakers. Having born witness to one too many movies recently that just shift from scene to scene without a lick of pace, their immobility exposing whatever weaknesses lie within them, or betraying whatever of interest they capture on account of their debilitating crawl, watching this movie that hurtles along for 2 hours, that on even the one or two occasions when it does slow down feels only like momentary respite, a chance to catch your breath, before it sends you hurtling headlong down a new rabbit hole is a pleasure.

Leading us on that journey is Adam Sandler. To say this is Sandler in serious mode would be misleading, the performance is not a million miles away in the way it captures the man child tendencies seen in his most famous turns down the years, the way he takes nothing seriously, plays almost everything for laughs, the way in which he makes his character, so abrasive, so obnoxious, so downright self destructive through his natural movie star charms... Bearable. It’s a tremendous turn from a true star, a sort of cross between Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo and Warner Bros. Road Runner. His performance is absolutely key to the movie working, through all the screaming, and the constant chatter, and the thunderous pace, and the bewilderingly stupid decisions, he carries you through with his presence, with his making light of every situation he finds himself in. 

That irreverence for each predicament is the movies point, Uncut Gems is a staggering and relentless portrait of addiction, of vice, it’s a movie about self destruction that looks into a mirror and sees undying optimism. We don’t need monologues (though we get minor declaration in the final act), everything we need to know about what this movie wants to say is there in the central character. He’s ably supported by a cast of faces so vivid, and real, and unforgettably true to life - from larger names like the great Judd Hirsch, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, and Kevin freakin’ Garnett, to the lesser known Keith Williams Richards, and Julia Fox, Noa Fisher, Wayne Diamond, and on the telephone Tilda Swinton. They’re the ones with larger roles, but literally every role is filled out pretty vividly, sickly true to life and free of glamour that the person I watched the movie with turned to me early on and asked “Is this a movie or a documentary?”