Adam Sandler nails it in ‘Uncut Gems’

TORONTO (AP):

Adam Sandler was waiting to be thrown into a midtown fountain on Sixth Avenue for a scene in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems when he noticed a familiar face on the sidewalk.

The Safdies like to capture as much authentic New York energy as possible in their films and frequently plant their cameras across the bloc for scenes like the one Sandler was about to shoot. So Sandler was hiding in a parked car, trying not to arouse any attention, when he called out to the passer-by.

“I say, ‘Lorne!’ He looks in the car and gets in and talked to me for a minute,” recalls Sandler of spotting his old ‘Saturday Night Live’ boss, Lorne Michaels.

“I said I’m doing this movie – I’m going to fill you in on the young and the hip – with the Safdie brothers.’”

“He goes, (here Sandler dons the requisite Michaels impression) ‘I know the Safdie brothers. They grew up in my building,’” Sandler says, laughing and shaking his head. “I can never get anything over on Lorne. I thought I had one cool thing.”

The central setting of Uncut Gems – the 47th St diamond district – is just a short walk from the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Center where Sandler broke through in the early 1990s on ‘Saturday Night Live’. As far as Sandler has travelled since then – and his latest will strike many as his greatest departure yet – the wild, chaotic, unhinged Uncut Gems is just a stone’s throw from Sandler’s beginnings.

It’s not that Sandler hasn’t since proven his considerable dramatic range. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love revealed the sensitivity beneath the genial man-child persona of his comedies.

And while Sandler has never strayed from stand-up or the broader comedies he’s currently churning out for Netflix, he has consistently dipped his toe into drama every few year, including the James L. Brooks romantic comedy Spanglish (2004), Judd Apatow’s meat comedy Funny People (2009), and Noah Baumbach’s family drama The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017).

But the scuzzy, frenetic neo­realism of the Safdie brothers is something else entirely. In it, Sandler stars as Howard Ratner, a gemstone merchant and compulsive gambler whose wide web of debts, betrayals and schemes render his life a mad scramble. He’s like a plate-spinner who drops every plate but keeps throwing up five more. His downfall, and perhaps his destiny, is perpetually and harrowingly close at hand.

The Safdies first sent Sandler their script in 2012.

“I kept hearing about the Safdie brothers and that they wanted to talk to me about a movie,” says Sandler. “I didn’t know their work, so I started with Good Time (the Safdies’ previous film, starring Robert Pattinson as a small-time hustler). I watched them all and I loved them. We would talk on the phone and then we met each other. I mean, we are very close. We talk all day, all night about everything. I love these guys.

“When I was making the movie, I just gave them 100 per cent trust. I just felt like I wanted to be in their world.”

For years, if not decades, Sandler has consistently declined interviews with print journalists. But on the morning after Uncut Gems made its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, he sat for an interview with The Associated Press alongside Josh and Benny. They had spent a late evening partying together and Sandler was regretting not eating after the premiere. “What a mistake,” he said while the Safdies laughed.

Moments before the premiere of Uncut Gems, one audience member hollered “An Oscar for the Sandman!” By the end of the movie, most in attendance agreed, too. Sandler’s performance has arguably the most acclaimed of the 53-year-old’s career.

Uncut Gems is an especially intense experience. If you remember the loud, discombobulating drug-dealer scene in Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Uncut Gems runs at that high-pitched frenzy for pretty much its entire length. For the Safdies, it’s long an obsession. Howard is based loosely on a boss of their father. Though Pattinson once pursued the part and Jonah Hill was momentarily attached, the directors felt strongly about Sandler being right for it.

“We wanted Howard to be loveable. Likeable is another question, but loveable is something real,” Josh says. “We grew up idolising him. The records, the movies. I just recently told Sandler I was crying watching The Wedding Singer on a plane. You can just feel it in the actors opposite him. People just feel like they’re involved in something ineffable.”