"Uncut Gems" and "Monos"

These are two excellent films that, frankly, I found very difficult to watch.

First up is "Uncut Gems" from the Safdie brothers, a pair known for making very intense stories about intense characters who live on the edge. This time their protagonist is Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Jewish jewelry store owner who has an all-consuming gambling addiction. He's already being hounded to pay back a hefty debt when he gets his hands on a rare black opal and parlays that into a deal with basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing himself), and then a series of further bets and gambles. Howard is also on the verge of a divorce with his wife Dinah (Idina Menzel), over Howard's affair with his employee Julia (Julia Fox).

"Uncut Gems" isn't the 2019 film that made me the most uncomfortable (that honor goes to "Give Me Liberty"), but it's pretty close. There are multiple scenes that just consist of people shouting at each other in the midst of escalating chaos. Sequences of unbearable tension go on and on with no end in sight. Howard is absolutely maddening to watch as he keeps torpedoing his life and making bad decisions over and over again. The performance from Adam Sandler is great, the most daring thing I've seen him do in years, but it's also monumentally aggravating and exhausting. The camera puts the viewer right in the middle of his self-destructive spiral, and it's not a pleasant experience. As a character study, it's uncompromising, and occasionally horrific.

I like the way the Safdies keep their work so close to the real world, drawing on the culture of contemporary Jewish New Yorkers, writing in the specific basketball games played in 2012 when the film takes place, and having personalities like Garnett, Wayne Diamond and the Weeknd play themselves. The specificity and the playful venality of the filmmaking gives the film a harshness and a crudeness that we don't see often with actors like Sandler attached. While this is an aesthetic I find oppressive, I'm also very impressed that the Safdies went for it wholeheartedly, from a title sequence that incorporates Howard's colonoscopy footage to the constant digs and hostility between the Jewish and black characters in the film, embodied by the dysfunctional relationship between Howard and a street hustler named Demany (Lakeith Stanfield). And it's always good to know that Adam Sandler is still an excellent actor when he wants to be.

Now on to "Monos," a film about teenage guerilla soldiers in Colombia. Deep in the wilderness, a commando unit dubbed Monos (Spanish for "Monkey") is comprised of Bigfoot (Moisés Arias), Rambo (Sofía Buenaventura), Lady (Karen Quintero), Swede (Laura Castrillón), Smurf (Deiby Rueda), Boom Boom (Esneider Castro), Dog (Paul Cubides), and their leader Wolf (Julian Giraldo). In the opening scene, they are visited by a Messenger (Wilson Salazar) who charges them with looking after a borrowed cow and guarding a prisoner, referred to as "Doctora" (Julianne Nicholson). The Monos members drill and train for war, but most of the time they're a group of bored teenagers who have been left to their own devices. They have their power struggles, fall in love and fall out with each other, and inevitably undergo harrowing trials and tragedies.

Directed by Alejandro Landes, the film takes place in remote mountains and jungles, far from civilization. It's almost Edenic at first, the simplicity of the kids' lives and the way they interact with nature and with each other. However, as we learn more about Doctora, and things start going wrong, it becomes more and more tempting to draw parallels to "Lord of the Flies." Though the Monos members are innocent in some respects, they are also thoughtlessly violent and destructive, often with no apparent regard for the consequences of their actions. Few details are provided as to the individual members' backgrounds and ideology. This isn't a movie that has much interest in the grievances of the Colombian guerillas, but is more interested in the mindset of those who are capable of this particular brand of terror.

Unfortunately, I never really connected to these kids. I found it far too easy to default to rooting for Doctora. It was difficult to distinguish the individual Monos members, and their performances are fairly limited - nearly all of the actors are amateurs. Clearly we're meant to sympathize with at least a few of them in the end, but it's difficult when none of them really emerge as full-fledged characters. We never get much deeper than their most basic traits - Lady is vicious, Smurf is small, and Bigfoot is insecure. The film works better for me as a mood piece, exploring the different environments and listening to Mica Levy's unnerving, unorthodox score. I'm glad to see more films coming out of Colombia, and "Monos" is a film that only the Colombians could have made.

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