I recently watched the movie Uncut Gems (2019). Supposedly, it showcases Adam Sandler’s best acting. I completely accidentally came across it, and I watched it for two reasons. One, it was mentioned in one of the disreputable corners of the Internet I like to frequent and, two, it is made by A24, a studio I recall a lot of people, so-called artfags, wax lyrical over. As I had not watched an A24 movie before, this was reason enough. The other was that supposedly, this movie depicts Jewish behavior very realistically. To quickly get the A24 angle out of the way: their visual style is pretentious. The movie is still good and it may be the most unabashedly Jewish film to come out of Hollywood in decades.

The protagonist of Uncut Gems is Howard Ratner, which gave me a chuckle as I was expecting a somewhat more neutral name. Anyway, Ratner is a Jew, owner of a jewelry store, gambler, and adulterer. Wherever he goes there is complete chaos. Somehow, he is not able to get his life in order, yet he seems to be a multimillionaire, judging from his business activities and the luxurious house his ex-wife lives in. He can also afford to put up his mistress in a fancy apartment in Manhattan.

Ratner is untrustworthy and so is, amazingly, everybody else in this movie. Absolutely everyone tries to fuck over everyone else. His mistress has sex with some black rapper — The Weeknd playing himself — in a bathroom stall. The Jews he is dealing with want to screw him out of money. The black rapper, from which he expects a six-figure transaction, and his black handler, are highly unreliable. On top, there are some mobsters he is owning money to, and these guys are not joking around. Throughout the movie, because they do not get the money Ratner owes them, they ramp up the threats quite significantly. Ratner does not seem to ever learn.

Obviously, it is not the case that Ratner is in any way innocent. He engages in smuggling and other shady business dealings, for instance by selling fake Rolex watches. Then, he has a bizarre gambling habit, making bets to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars on basketball games. He is betting big because he needs money. The movie is not explicit on whether he really needs the money or whether he simply believes that he can get out of any bad spot he finds himself in. Indeed, he gets out of a lot of bad situations, sometimes quite accidentally. As he is otherwise depicted as being financially very well off, he surely could have gotten the $100k he owed to some mobster without the detour of degenerate gambling.

There is the sense that Ratner likes the thrill of getting out of a bad situation at the last minute. He tries to arrange business deals at the last minute, makes snap decisions that are not always the best, and there are also several tightrope acts were some bad people are chasing after him. He does not always get away so easily and the further the movie progresses, the worse his situation becomes.

Ratner lies a lot, and he is being lied to a lot, too. You cannot trust him at all, but neither can you trust anyone else. As he is in a financial hole and likes to push his luck, he does not want to simply sell some rough gemstone for $200k and pay off his debts. That would be too easy. Instead, he puts that item up for auction, uses a mole to spike the bids, but ends up having to pay a cut to the mole as he outbid the only person, the aforementioned black basketball player, who was seriously interested in it. This costs Ratner tens of thousands in needless expenses. Then he sells the rough gemstone to that black guy, but for less. He still makes $165 minus the fee for the guy’s handler. At that point, Ratner has enough money to pay off the debts. Yet, what does he do? He comes up with a bizarre bet in some basketball game the black dude he sold the item to plays in.

The movie is a wild crescendo of Ratner messing up his life more and more. If he realizes that he has made a bad decision, he tries to solve his issues, but this comes across as pathetic and calculating. For instance, after he catches his mistress fucking a rapper, he kicks her out of his apartment and tries crawling back to his wife, realizing he has made a “big mistake”. Yet, after this fails, it takes just a few more scenes until he tells his mistress how much he loves her. Rarely have I seen a protagonist who is as unlikable as Ratner.

Throughout the movie, the main theme is that Ratner acts like a total asshole and no matter what happens, he somehow always gets out of any bad spot he is in. He is exposed to a lot of threats, including some quite serious ones, but it is not clear if he takes them seriously at all, seeing how quickly he falls back into his old behavioral patterns. He does not only do that. Instead, he also ups the ante every time. His thinking seems to be that because he got away with his deceptions last time, he will succeed the next time as well. This goes well until it does not.

The rest of the article contains major spoilers. If you want to watch the movie yourself, better do that first before you continue reading.

Uncut Gems could easily have turned into a pretty bad movie. The last big bet Ratner places pays off. He wins over one million dollars. When this happened, my first thought was that this is a great way to ruin an otherwise pretty good movie as the message seems to be that if you are a shifty, deceptive Jew, you will somehow always prevail. I was expecting Ratner to lose the $150k or however much it was, and the movie ending, perhaps implying that the mobsters would kill him or his family, or both. In fact, the movie implies that at some point and Ratner even expects the mobsters to do that. At that point, I was also wondering whether there will be an unsatisfying ending in which we see Ratner placing even bigger and more outlandish bets.

Instead, something else happens: the mobsters he is dealing with and who he owes the money to are so fed up with Ratner and his behavior that they kill him on the spot. They no longer care about him winning the bet he placed. It is quite possible that they thought that he was only bullshitting to buy himself some more time, as he has done in the past. Then, the mobsters plunder his store and the movie ends.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I wonder if there is a parallel between Ratner and present-day Israel. Somehow, I also get the impression that Israel keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. They are fully aware that large parts of the world are upset with their current behavior. Yet, because nothing serious ever happens, or because they can always drag the United States into their wars, they feel invincible. This works until it no longer does. Iran seems to be pretty fed up with Israel at the moment, for instance. As the history of the Jews seems to show, there seems to be a pattern of this kind of behavior, leading to expulsion, but this is surely only an anti-semitic dog whistle.