Adam Sandler wears an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak

Uncut Gems (2019) is a movie about a man who cannot stop, and it wastes no time telling you so. Within the first seven minutes, before the audience has its bearings, Howard Ratner has a watch pulled off his wrist. Adam Sandler plays Ratner, a Diamond District jeweler and degenerate gambler in 2012 New York who owes about a hundred thousand dollars to his brother-in-law Arno, a loan shark played by Eric Bogosian. The watch is an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Chronograph, reference 25860ST, and two of Arno's men, sent to collect, take it. Howard's response is to scream into Arno's voicemail that the watch was worth twenty thousand dollars, and to demand it be subtracted from what he owes.

There is a real story behind that watch. The film's prop master, Catherine Miller, was handed a brand-new Royal Oak Chronograph and sent it back. A brand-new one was wrong for 2012; a man like Howard would be wearing something a few years old. She sourced the film's watches by carrying a quarter of a million dollars' worth of them through Manhattan in a backpack. And the watches mattered to the Safdie brothers. Ratner was written to wear two. The directors liked the idea of him losing one so much that they wrote in a third, just so it could happen twice.

So the Royal Oak goes first, and it goes almost before the movie has started. It is a stainless-steel sports watch with a dark, grid-textured dial and an octagonal bezel, the kind of piece that signals money without announcing how much. Howard will lose a great deal more before the end. The watch was never really the point. The losing is.