“This is how I win” – The Anti-Sandler Role

It is 2020, and the unthinkable is happening: Adam Sandler has won Best Actor. No, this isn’t the Oscars. The illustrious Academy Awards have yet to appreciate the genius of the Sandman, it seems, as they had just a week earlier snubbed him from its nominees. Instead, this is the American Spirit Awards, a more low-key, boozy affair, but nonetheless Sandler has gotten dressed up in his nicest suit jacket in preparation for his finest moment. The crowd cheers as he saunters to the stage to accept his award for “Best Male Lead” for the Safdie brothers picture, Uncut Gems. Sandler has a big speech to read; he pulls out a crumple of paper and after getting the necessary pleasantries out of the way, puts on a goofy voice and airs his grievances. He thinks back to the last time “critics pretended not to hate me for five fucking minutes”, which was 11 long years ago, with his role in the semi-serious Apatow comedy Funny People. He apologizes to his fellow nominees for granting them the honor of being guys “who lost to fucking Adam Sandler”. Mixing in some silly names and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, Sandler exudes pride for his win and also total confusion that he is even in this position. The king of low-brow was now the indie darling. It took the madcap, exhilarating Uncut Gems to make it happen, a self-aware odyssey featuring a typical Sandler protagonist updated for the real world, complete with real-life consequences.

Howie Ratner, the protagonist of Uncut Gems and the man we are stuck with in nearly every scene, is an exhausting guy. The only consistent element of his day appears to be chaos; he juggles management of his jewelry shop in New York City’s Diamond District with payouts to the numerous bookies he owes around town, taking out new loans and exchanging borrowed memorabilia to temporarily pay off his exponentially growing gambling debts. At the store, he’s always in search of the newest hustle, entertaining celebrity clients and searching the globe (via YouTube videos, of course) for the finest diamonds money can buy, taking him all the way to the mines of Ethiopia. He balances a failing marriage out in the posh suburbs with an affair with a young coworker, Julia, back in the city. And in between all this? A whole lot of screaming and pacing. The Safdie brothers’ already arresting filmmaking style, featuring a hyperactive camera and uncomfortably tight closeups, is a perfect fit in ratcheting up the stress level to match Howie’s haywire vibe. The defining trait of their movies thus far has been authenticity, and whether it is in the charisma of the bit side characters or in the vivid depiction of Diamond District glitz, the film oozes a guerilla-documentary feel. 

The Safdie brothers aren’t keen on giving you quiet moments to soak in detail; instead, they throw much more than you could possibly handle in each second of the movie’s runtime, making each conversation a puzzle and every scene a conflict simmering to a boil. We are captive visitors in Howie’s daily life, and that proves to be a purposefully dizzying experience. These aesthetic choices make it all the more important that we buy that same authenticity in our main character, and Sandler knocks it out of the park. Sandler re-employs some of his old comedic tropes to give us a fully realized character, one who we can’t help but find charismatic despite his rougher features.

The idea of Sandler as the “serious” actor is not a completely new one, even though he is undisputedly most famous for his reliance on the tried-and-true “manchild” comedic role. Sandler became a comedy icon in the 90s through SNL, leveraging his goofy sensibilities to a huge big-screen career that featured such comedy hits as Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Big Daddy. In these movies, he typically portrays a well-meaning but immature young doofus who comes to realize an important life lesson after overcoming a challenge in his life. By the end of these movies, the Sandler character has typically turned his life around and realized his own self-worth, defying the challenges (and the jerks) that had brought him down, and usually helps his family to boot. Again, I have to emphasize: these dudes are idiots. It’s very much part of the formula. But Sandler is a likable guy, and there’s a reason people have been piling into cinemas for decades to root him on in his newest journey. No amount of bad writing (and there has been plenty) can totally erase Sandler’s charm, and it’s the reason that anyone that grew up with 90s Sandler movies holds a soft spot for him even if the movies themselves may not hold up great. For as much shit as he gets, he’s clearly influential: Sandler walked so Will Ferrell could run, at least when it comes to playing lovable idiots. In her NY Times profile of Sandler, Jamie Lauren Keiles describes his plots as “stories of redemption,” where “villains are defeated [and] unworthy bachelors shape up to get the girl”, feel-good stories in every sense. 

It’s this relatable charm that makes Sandler an intriguing fit for more dramatic roles, and the great Paul Thomas Anderson gets credit for taking the first stab at it in Punch-Drunk Love. While I adore PTA’s movies in general, I view Punch-Drunk as a bit of a misstep - a curiously absurdist love story that pits the Sandler manchild as a depressed romantic with serious rage issues. It’s bizarre on paper and even more so on the screen, and I have to confess it didn’t hit with me like it seems to for many others. But it does get props for introducing a darker edge to Sandler’s cavalcade of morons. Sandler’s Barry has a sadness that his previous characters don’t, and it’s played with enough subtlety to catch us off guard, even with his more typical moments of yelling and schlubbyness interspersed. Sandler deserves credit for going out of his comfort zone and delivering a good performance. There is a sprinkling of other dramatic roles too, like in Funny People and 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, where Sandler plays a single dad struggling for his own dad’s affection. But Uncut Gems represents Sandler’s biggest risk.

Uncut Gems dares us to root for a protagonist that does everything he can to alienate the audience. Howie wields the goofiness and charisma of Sandler’s typical characters, but the key difference here is a lack of empathy. Instead of working towards self improvement or to help out a friend or family in need, a crucial element of the Sandman formula, here Howie chases his own happiness. Since Howie is a spiraling gambling addict, that pursuit is particularly destructive to everyone in his orbit. We see him crack wise with friends and play the role of a loving father at his home in Long Island, but for Howie it all plays second fiddle to chasing the high of the next win. For him, other people’s desires are background noise behind a cacophony of his own dangerous impulses. Friendship is part of the Sandler brand; it’s a running joke at this point that Sandler’s movies are just excuses for him and his buddies to take expensive vacations. It’s so jarring, then, to see Howie as a man only in it for himself.

When he celebrates moments of great joy with other characters, they are almost all preceded by a big “hit” on a bet. He seems annoyed with his mistress Julia’s presence, until he wins big on a risky basketball parlay and needs someone to celebrate with, and then gets cool to her again when he spirals on a losing streak, treating each of her “I love you”’s with indifference. He evades bookies as part of his routine, only to expect them to accommodate him when he is ready to take on another big risk that could leave them with nothing. He sparks small talk with his teenage daughter, only to evade her questions on what he does when he goes to the city for “business” at night. Even his conversations with his own sons are about how much money he has on that night’s game. His employees might as well be invisible to him unless they are helping him get his prized opals. The script is full of hilarious quotables and Sandler’s volatile physical comedy is as funny as ever, but the guy they are attributed to is not the harmless schlub that we are used to seeing. Howie can’t see beyond his next risky hit, and although he’s not an actively vengeful guy, his selfishness draws others into the destruction. 

A couple scenes play directly with our expectations with how a Sandler protagonist typically acts. Towards the middle of the movie, Howie and his wife Dinah have a tense conversation at home about separating. It’s implied that Dinah has put up with Howie’s philandering and gambling for years, and their marriage has reached a point of no return. And yet, when Sandler turns on the charm with sympathetic eyes and pleads for her to “give him another shot”, it seems almost sincere enough to work. Even though we’ve seen Howie’s destructive tendencies firsthand, he’s got to be a good guy at heart, right? Decades of Sandler conditioning tell us so! Well, Dinah laughs in his face and brings back the audience to reality. “I think you are the most annoying person I have ever met” she tells him with cruel efficiency. Is this Howie’s wife, or a critic’s review of Sandler’s latest movie? There will be no sappy feel-good moment. This is not Happy Gilmore playing for his grandma - this is a guy who is out of control and hurting himself. Even the film’s main antagonist is another reminder of Howie’s dysfunction. Arno, the bookie who Howie has owed money to seemingly forever, is first presented as a mysterious figure with a posse of intimidating henchmen. He threatens Howie with the impunity of a powerful mob boss, even stripping him and locking him in a car trunk when Howie gives his usual excuses for late payment. Here is our Shooter McGavin, we think, a diabolical villain for Howie to overcome. But about halfway through the film we get the comical reveal that this is actually Howie’s brother-in-law. They make silent eyes at each other across the dinner table at a family Passover gathering, proving there is still an original (and awkward) way to do the old Mexican standoff. The moment emasculates Arno while also making Howie seem even more sleazy; “don’t shit where you eat” is apparently not part of his vocab. Unlike most Sandler movies where family is the main reminder of humanity, here it is just a reminder of Howie’s fatal flaws. The damage he can do hits closer to home to more than anywhere else. The whole “manchild” schtick doesn’t seem nearly as cute when actual people are getting hurt.

But there is no piece of the film that subverts expectations more than the explosive ending. The happy ending is maybe the most crucial element of a Sandler movie beyond goofy voices, and even though Uncut Gems is a different animal from the opening frame, the kinetic energy of Sandler’s performance still convinces us that we might see a clean resolution after all. The movie’s pace is so unforgivingly quick that the audience doesn’t have time to consider whether Howie is really learning any lessons; rather, it is easier just to root for him to make it out in one piece. With nearly the entire film taking place from Howie’s POV, the audience takes on the gambler mentality that makes Howie so engaging. There’s no time to worry about consequences, we just want to see our guy win. And as we close in on the climactic scene at Howie’s jewelry store, it sure seems that he will - with an assist from Julia and NBA legend Kevin Garnett, Howie has hit his biggest win yet, giving him what he needs to finally pay off Arno and free himself from overwhelming debt. The soundtrack swells to match Howie’s elation, and he composes himself enough to finally return an “I love you” to Julia over the phone - yet another case where it took victory for him to show some compassion. Even Arno lets out a wry smile - like the audience, he got caught up in all the excitement, and he drops the tough guy act for a second to admire Howie’s sheer magnetism. Howie has stumbled into this win after a comedy of errors, but we’re still happy to see him succeed. But it’s only a minute of joy before Arno’s goon confidently struts right up to Howie and shoots him in the face, splattering blood all over the glass display. Howie lies dead in a pool of blood, shit-eating grin still across his face. It is the only way this story could end.

Howie is a character trapped in an endless cycle of addiction, and even if this big win could’ve bought him some more time, everything the audience has seen from the character in the course of the movie says that this was inevitable. Howie made no effort to change his ways during the course of the film, and doesn’t take any time to reflect on how his actions have hurt those around him. Even his win during the climax was only going to be a temporary salvo - it just isn’t in Howie’s nature to give up the chase. This is the “manchild” taken to its most cynical extreme: Howie not only has no interest in growth, he’s not physically capable of it. The real world, the ending suggests, is not compatible with the cozy neatness of the Sandler-verse. In a self-aware twist, Sandler and the Safdie brothers have crafted a narrative that is nearly the opposite of the feel-good comedy, and yet because of Sandler’s sterling reputation as our resident feel-good guy, it takes a sadistic ending to drive that point home. The true villain in Uncut Gems is Howie’s self-destructive psyche - Howie’s external conflict is all of an internal origin. As the camera pans in and Sandler’s lifeless grin envelops the screen, we realize Sandler has told his most elaborate joke yet. By subverting nearly every element of his career highlights, Sandler and the Safdies grant a realization that America’s most famous comedian is also one of its most self-aware.

Sandler is already back to his usual antics, and his cushy production deal with Netflix ensures that both his fans and Rob Schneider will be kept busy for years to come. But we will always have Howie Ratner, a fascinatingly broken man that made us feel guilty for thinking every Sandler story deserves a happy ending.