Adam Sandler wears a Rolex Day-Date

By the time Howard Ratner puts on the Rolex, he has already lost one watch to Arno's men, and his instinct is not to play it safe. It is to put on a louder one. Adam Sandler plays Howard in Uncut Gems (2019), a Diamond District jeweler whose every decision is the wrong one. The Rolex is a Day-Date, eighteen-karat yellow gold, but almost nothing about it is as Rolex made it. The bezel has been ringed with diamonds, the bright red dial set with more, and the President bracelet covered wrist to clasp in stones. Rolex would never build a Day-Date like this. Howard does, and wears it like a dare.

The watch on screen was real, sort of. A jeweler in the Diamond District loaned the production around fifteen iced-out Rolexes to try on Sandler, and the prop master, the Safdies, and the actor all settled on the red-dial one. It became the watch on the movie's poster, Sandler's face above it, the diamonds catching the light at his wrist. And then Howard loses it the way he loses everything. At his kids' school concert, Arno's men march him out to his own Mercedes, strip him of his clothes, peel the Day-Date off his wrist, and fold him into the trunk.

It is the most Howard Ratner thing in the movie, that watch. Expensive, borrowed, gaudy past the point of taste, and gone before the night is out. He never owned it. He just wore it loud for a while.