A man is talking to his estranged wife. He wants to come back. He wants to heal the marriage. He says this time he really means it, and to make his point, he asks her to look into his eyes. So she does … and starts laughing.

It’s one of the quieter moments in “Uncut Gems,” the story of two days in the life of a degenerate gambler.The gambler is played by Adam Sandler, the wife byIdina Menzel,and what makes the moment so satisfying is that we look into his eyes, too. There’s nothing there. And his effort to look like somethingisthere — that complacent, beneficent smile he fixes on his face — really is ridiculous.

“Uncut Gems” is a good movie from the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, though at timesyou might wish they’d stop trying to impress us. The movie begins, believe it or not, with Ethiopians digging for gems in the bowels of the Earth — and then cuts to a monitor showing us the inside of our protagonist’s colon during a colonoscopy. Rarely has a film ever started so strenuously and so unappetizingly. Within two minutes, they have a whole audience thinking, “Come on, already” and “Yuck.”

This is where having a style is dangerous. This is what overdirection looks like. The characters are energetic to the point of mannerism.People talk over each other. The actors seem to be improvising, or if they’re not, then the screenplay must have been three times the normal length, because everybody’s talking at once. And sometimes synthesizer tones underscore action, if only to add just one more thing into the mix.

Yet almost in spite of themselves, the Safdies get their story across, and they end up telling it well, over a series of scenes, many of them imaginative and well crafted. But here’s the thing about telling stories: You can tell them magnificently. You can strive to max out their potential and even know when you’ve succeeded. But you can’t know if anyone else will care, if the story will add up and mean something to anyone.

Without a doubt, some people will watch this movie and immediately be plunged into the world of Howie (Sandler), a diamond dealer in New York, whose life is a tightrope, and he’s running across it. He owes so much money to the mob that the collectors are not only showing up at his business, but they’re following him around. His wife hates him. His daughter has contempt for him. Every time he places a bet, his life is on the line. If he loses, he will not sleep in his bed that night; he’ll sleep with the fishes.

这里的意图是使电影脉冲智慧h tension, and some viewers will be tense. These are the nice viewers, with an advanced capacity for empathy, even for a total, hopeless idiot. My own reaction was a bit colder. Howie is the man his wife sees. There’s not much there, and anyway, he’s so self-destructive that his fate seems a foregone conclusion. All this, plus the heavy style of the movie — the speed, commotion and noise of it — creates as much distance as empathy. It’s hard to get worked up on behalf of this guy.

But he’s played by Adam Sandler, and that helps. There’s something about Sandler — in general, but especially here — that seems fundamentally decent and vulnerable, so that when we see him taking absurd risks, we wonder what his mother was like. Somewhere along the line, he needed love and didn’t get it. Our perception of Howie is further enhanced by the casting of Julia Fox, who plays his girlfriend with such guilelessness and such affection for him that we start thinking maybe there’s something in him that we can’t see.

This helps, but we still don’t see it. “Uncut Gems” remains, from start to finish, a tale told关于an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the time it’s all over, nothing is exactly what you might feel. But Sandler and Fox give it the humanity the Safdies wanted there. The movie needed it and got it from the actors.

M“Uncut Gems”:Drama. Starring Adam Sandler and Julia Fox. Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie.Theaters and Showtimes.R. 135 minutes.