Not even the fear when Arno’s henchmen turn up at his daughter’s school play, or the humiliation of his estranged wife having to release him from his own car boot after he’s been shut in naked, is enough to give him pause. This life of glittering jewels, gambling and violence isn’t glamourised as Sandler paints a picture of a man who couldn’t live any other way and can only escape by running forwards. While success would mean a massive victory and a huge payday and failure would mean the loss of everything, I don’t think that’s why he’s doing it. It’s a fine line he draws for himself, careering along a high wire with no safety net. Meanwhile he continues to place huge bets on sports games, while having an affair with his young assistant Julia (Julia Fox). This should be the big payday that will finally set Howard free from loan shark Arno to whom he owes one hundred thousand dollars. He even tries to buy it but Howard has had a valuation for over a million dollars, and sends it to auction. Kevin refuses to give back the opal straight away as he loves it so much. And this is Howard all over, pawning, paying, and playing people off against one another. Howard takes Kevin’s elaborate ring as collateral, immediately pawning it so he can place a bet. The opal is still uncut when it arrives at his jewellery shop, where he delightedly shows it to Boston Celtics basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing himself), and allows Kevin to borrow it for one night to hopefully bring good luck in the game. His latest purchase is a rare black opal, mined by Ethiopian Jews it’s a historical and cultural link for Howard that makes it even more attractive to him. Howard’s reverence for risk is matched only by his reverence for gemstones. Their divorce is planned for after Passover, and until then they go through the motions of family life. ![]() Sandler is glorious as a man whose addiction to massive bets has already destroyed his marriage to wife Dinah (Idina Menzel) to the extent that she calmly tells him “I hate looking at you, I hate being with you and if I had my way I would never see you again”. In the Safdie brothers’ hugely enjoyable if agitatingly tense tragicomedy, Howard’s tendency to always have his eye on the next prize, and refusal to call it quits when he’s ahead, could literally be the end of him. Though Howard, it must be said, always takes high stakes to a new and elevated level. (A decanter and glasses for under a fiver was “total crap”, some earrings were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.”)Īpparently it isn’t, but it could be. The quality of the product is entirely different – Howard may sell Furbys but they’re gold, diamond-encrusted ones – though there’s a parallel between both men, in that both seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, sabotaging their own lives in the process. ![]() Hearing the surname of Howard Ratner, the high-stakes, high-stress Diamond District dealer in Uncut Gems, immediately had me wondering if it was a reference to Gerald Ratner, the British businessman who in the 1980s helped wipe £500 million off the value of his family’s jewellery business with ill-judged comments about his products. Look closely at the start of the film and that universe turns before our eyes from the sparkling multicolours of the gemstone into Howard’s colon as he undergoes a medical procedure and throughout the film his tunnel vision means he misses much of what’s around him, as we follow him on an adrenalin-fuelled snakes and ladders game across the city. ![]() “They say you can see the whole universe in opals” says New York jeweller and gambler Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler).
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