Quick, name the greatest sports movie of all time. The Natural? Field of Dreams? Hoosiers? Rocky? Raging Bull? Cool Runnings? (Just kidding about the last one, although it is far and away the best movie ever made about Jamaican Olympic bobsledding.) Now, name the greatest sports fan movie of all time. Celtic Pride? Laughing at the thought. The Fan? Shuddering at the thought. Fever Pitch? Throwing up a little in my mouth at the thought.
Consider a few figures for a moment. About 110 million people watch the Super Bowl each year, about 70 million attend Major League Baseball games every season, and about 20 million watch the NBA Finals every year. Nineteen of the top 20 highest-rated TV broadcasts of all time have been Super Bowls, and 18 of the top 20 highest-rated telecasts of 2018 were broadcasts of live sports. The most-watched television program for the past eight years has been NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Sports fandom is such a giant part of American culture that it’s a mystery why there has never been a great movie made about a sports fan. There have been better movies about sports agents (Jerry Maguire), sports referees (Forget Paris), sports moms (The Blind Side), and, for crying out loud, sports statistics (Moneyball) than there have been about sports fans. (Also, still no great movie about sportswriters. Just saying, Hollywood … )
Into this void steps Uncut Gems, which has instantly become not only the greatest sports fan movie of all time but also perhaps the greatest Adam Sandler movie of all time. Sandler has been getting a lot of acclaim, and even some Oscar buzz, for his performance in this movie — and deservedly so. He seems to be channeling 1970s-era Al Pacino in his depiction of Howard Ratner, a New York City diamond district jeweler who gets in over his head with some thuggish debt collectors after several sports bets go bad. His bookies’ goons hound him day and night at his office, on the street, even at his daughter’s school play seeking the large sum he owes them. The situation looks very bleak, and very dangerous, until Ratner gets what appears to be his first big break: a prize Ethiopian opal he has been working to attain for 17 months, and which he believes to be worth about $1 million, arrives at his Manhattan office. The only problem is that Boston Celtics star forward Kevin Garnett, who is one of Ratner’s favorite basketball players as well as one of his most important clients, has his eyes set on the opal. Ratner needs the opal to pay off his gambling debts, but Garnett, who is mesmerized by it, wants to borrow it as a kind of good-luck charm for Game 5 of the Celtics’ 2012 Eastern Conference semifinal against the Philadelphia 76ers. Garnett has a great game that night, leading the Celtics to victory, but then plays poorly in Game 6 — because, he says, he didn’t have the opal. He needs it for Game 7. But Ratner needs to sell it and pay off his gambling debts before the goons rip his throat out.
Uncut Gems, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, is a tense thriller with an almost oppressive atmosphere of impending catastrophe, with claustrophobic camera work and a menacing soundtrack to match. The movie’s few light moments, and its even fewer moments of joy, occur mostly when Ratner is watching Garnett play. These scenes remind us of just how great Garnett was during his career — perhaps no other athletes save Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Ray Lewis, and Rafael Nadal were as intensely competitive — and make us believe that he would have matched his fellow 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame inductees Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan with five championship rings had he teamed up with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen earlier in his career. Watching his contagious charisma carry over from the court to the camera makes me hope this is not the last time we see Garnett on screen.
Uncut Gems also tackles another unsavory aspect of sports culture that tends to be closely tied to fandom: gambling. More and more states are legalizing sports gambling, but this movie may lead viewers to question the wisdom of this trend. In the United States, an estimated $90 billion is wagered each year on the NFL alone, and global sports betting is estimated to be a $3 trillion industry. Uncut Gems portrays sports gambling in all of its ugliness and glory. Mike Francesa, who with his radio co-host Chris Russo helped make sports betting a bit more visible to the public eye, has a great, brief turn as Ratner’s bookmaker, berating him the way he’d tear into a caller on his show. I was half-expecting Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal, of the Ringer’s “Guess the Lines” sports betting podcast, to make cameos as well.
As polished as Uncut Gems is, it does have a few nicks on it. Some are minor, such as Ratner telling his wife to turn the channel back to the Celtics playoff game on ESPN when the theme music clearly indicates the game is on TNT, or the way Ratner’s mother says “Makat Bechorim” instead of “Makat Bechorot” (Plague of the Firstborn) during the Passover seder scene. Some are major, such as the character of Ratner’s mistress, Julia, played by Julia Fox. It is frankly unbelievable that this intelligent, attractive young woman would stick with this out-of-shape, middle-aged screw-up no matter what. Her behavior is at times so risible that scenes between her and Ratner that are meant to be tender ended up provoking laughter in my theater. The behavior of Howard’s wife, who is preparing to leave him, is far more believable. No one was laughing during the Passover seder scene in which he begs her for a second chance; it was she, instead, who was laughing at him.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema. He currently lives in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
