He plans to pay one with money owed to another and winnings that haven’t yet come in, and, if his borrowings and his scams, his debts and his dodges, don’t fit together in exactly the right sequence, the entire house of cards that is his life will come tumbling down. (The movie’s editing, by Benny Safdie and Ronald Bronstein-who co-wrote the script with the brothers-evokes the visual clamor of its clashing urgencies.) Howard tries to sidestep his creditors and their violent enforcers with instantaneously improvised lies that have to be timed with a comedian’s precision to elude their grasp. Howard’s very survival is a matter of precise timing and of his urgent, off-balance storytelling. The Safdie brothers’ movie is desperately timed the forty-eight-year-old Howard measures out his days and nights not in coffee spoons but in the arc of a three-pointer, the slam of a car door, the paired buzzes of his showroom’s double-safe, electrically controlled bulletproof-glass barriers. Oneohtrix Point Never, but the mind-bending score could have been replaced by overlays of multiple out-of-synch ticking clocks, to mark the overwhelming intensity of the drama’s chronological pressure. The soundtrack of “Uncut Gems” is jittery with the hectic electronica of Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. He’s a lot like a director behind a camera. With his grandiose vision of winning, he’s the ultimate fantasist and, in his mortal dependence on what actually happens, the ultimate realist. Howard’s story has to correspond to reality, or, rather, vice versa. Howard isn’t merely risking money on the outcome he’s crafting a story that, for the bet to pay off, has to come out right-who wins the opening tip-off, how many points a particular player will score, whether or not the winning team covers the spread. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s new film, “Uncut Gems,” offers a better, if more elaborate, one, when its protagonist, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Diamond District jewelry dealer who’s also a compulsive gambler, places a bet on a basketball game. Until now, I thought that the best metaphor for filmmaking that I’d ever seen in a movie was found in Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low”: throwing bags of money out of a speeding train.
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