David O Russell (2013)

American Hustle is peopled by con artists, cops and politicians – and peopled is the operative word:   one of the strengths of the film is that just about everyone is humanised.  The crooks, law enforcers and representatives of the people all belong to the same species – no one is viewed censoriously by David O Russell and his co-writer Eric Warren Singer.  (Singer wrote the original screenplay, which Russell then reworked.)  Professional intentions are complicated by personal attractions and antipathies; the moral of the story – voiced more than once – is that, whoever you are, you need to pretend a bit (or a lot) to get by.  There’s a ‘citation needed’ statement in the Wikipedia article on the movie that Russell wanted to focus on the characters rather than the plot.  Same here:  I couldn’t follow all the double-crossing twists and turns but felt I always wanted more of the people in American Hustle.  Afterwards, though, I wondered if what I’d really wanted was more of (most of) the actors.  Among the five principals, all except Jeremy Renner have worked with Russell before; so has Robert De Niro, who makes an uncredited but incisive brief appearance here as a Mafia boss.   De Niro, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were all at least Oscar-nominated in their previous outings for Russell, and Bale and Lawrence won:  it’s not surprising all were happy to work with the director again.  Russell evidently knows how to get actors to deliver both individually and as an ensemble:  I thoroughly enjoyed watching Renner, De Niro, Lawrence, Adams and Cooper in American Hustle.   But, in retrospect, I realise that I wasn’t keen on the film as a whole.  Writing about it, I have to fight the urge to accentuate the negative.  The only performer I didn’t like watching was Christian Bale.  I think what irritated me about him links to a larger resistance to David O Russell as a director.

The inspiration for the movie and its main characters is the FBI’s ‘Abscam’ public corruption investigation and sting operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s – although the ‘Some of this actually happened’ legend at the start is a fair indicator of Russell’s approach.  All the characters’ names have been changed to give him maximum elbow room.  The protagonist is a Bronx-born con man called Irving Rosenfeld (Bale); he’s married to Rosalyn, an airhead loose cannon (Lawrence), whose son Danny (played by the identical twins Danny and Sonny Corbo) Irving has adopted.  His partner in crime and his main partner in bed, however, is Sydney Prosser (Adams).  Like Irving, she comes from the wrong side of the social tracks but a crucial ingredient of their scamming success is Sydney’s professional alter ego – this ex-stripper from Albuquerque poses as  an English aristocrat by the name of Lady Edith Greensley; and she and Irving do especially well selling fake works of art.  Richie Di Maso (Cooper), an ambitious young FBI agent in New Jersey, catches them out on a loan scam but offers not to press charges if they’ll help the FBI bring others to book; Richie’s problem is that, as he admits to her, he immediately falls for Lady Edith.  He devises a plan to ensnare, with the help of Irving and Sydney/Edith, Carmine Polito (Renner), the mayor of Camden (NJ) – popular with his constituents, trying to revitalise the local gambling economy in Atlantic City and vulnerable because he’s desperate enough not to be too principled about where the money for this project comes from.  Richie is eager to ratchet up the sting and the political seniority of those stung, exasperating his immediate boss (Louis C K – excellent) but getting support from his boss’s boss (Alessandro Nivola) for a plan to film with a hidden video-recorder a collection of members of Congress accepting bribes.   Richie’s vaulting ambition is his downfall:  he’s the victim of a conclusive scam by Irving and Sydney.  The disgraced Richie is removed from the Abscam operation and airbrushed out of its history so that he gets no credit for any of its achievements.   Carmine Polito, with whom Irving has genuinely bonded, gets off with a relatively light prison sentence.  Rosalyn agrees to divorce Irving and is kept in the manner to which she’s become accustomed by a suave mobster (Jack Huston) instead.  Irving and Sydney earn enough from their last big con to go legitimate, buy a gallery with real art in it, and live happily ever after – with Irving even getting shared custody of Rosalyn’s son.   (This is a highly simplified summary of a complicated plot.)

Christian Bale, well known for losing weight for his movie roles, has piled it on to play Irving:  his paunch and his histrionics make him doubly unrecognisable here as the actor who made such a hollow, introverted Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  Bale’s performance is self-approving and certainly self-indulgent:  he and Russell seem keen to show off Bale’s weight gain for maximum garish effect.  Even allowing for the fact that the beautiful Sydney’s attachment to Irving is meant to be in spite of his appearance, Bale overdoes things – he makes Irving too gross.  It’s obvious that a good deal of what he says is improvised; while the same goes for Bradley Cooper as Richie, the effect is very different.  Bale’s showoff quality makes it harder to like the man he’s playing, as Russell seems to expect you to do.  Irving’s most engaging feature is his hair, or the lack of it – what Sydney describes in voiceover narrative as ‘a very involved comb-over’ – and Bale’s best moments come when Irving has to stand and suffer, or try to conceal, the indignity of his precarious coiffure coming unstuck. The action is set in 1978 so perhaps it’s not surprising that the male hairdos are an unusually prominent feature:  Bradley Cooper’s perm is as grimly determined – Richie wears curlers at home – as Irving’s hairpieces; Jeremy Renner wears a worrying pompadour.  (Renner plays Carmine Polito empathically and highly effectively:  he makes the mayor’s gift of a microwave to Irving bizarrely touching.)

Otherwise, though, it’s the physical and tonal contrasts between the two women that are the spectacle in American Hustle, consummated in Sydney’s and Rosalyn’s powder room confrontation – which is up there with Celeste Holm’s and Anne Baxter’s head-to-head in All About Eve.  As Rosalyn, Jennifer Lawrence is, to borrow a phrase Pauline Kael used of the young Debra Winger, ‘incredibly vivid’, and Lawrence’s characterisation is both rich and precise.  Rosalyn is ludicrously self-absorbed and small-brained but Lawrence also gets across her capacity for hurt and frustration; she’s so natural but also so comically spot on (for example, when the Rosenfelds are out for dinner with the Politos and Rosalyn, who’s had plenty to drink, is rattling on to Carmine’s wife (Elisabeth Rohm), then to the husbands, about nail varnish) that it’s easy to see why Lawrence has, at the age of only twenty-three, achieved such phenomenal success and kudos.  The choice of songs on the soundtrack is consistently effective but the highlight is ‘Live and Let Die’ with Rosalyn vengefully acting out the lyric.   (If Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for American Hustle it will only be because she won Best Actress last year.)  While Rosalyn is bursting out of her tight, low-cut dresses, the slender Sydney goes in for even more startling décolletage.  Otherwise, Amy Adams gives a performance that’s less triumphantly showy than Lawrence’s but which is impressively sophisticated.  Adams has the ability to express an unusual range of sexual temperatures and, as Sydney, she’s both rarefied and sultry, both ladylike and dirty.  An American playing an American pretending to be a posh Englishwoman, she manages Lady Edith’s ever-so-slightly-wavering accent superbly.

The production design team, headed by Judy Becker, has done a fine job – the interiors of Irving’s dry cleaning shop are particularly atmospheric – and the screenplay has lots of good dialogue.  It’s clear that American critics have found the film exceptionally entertaining; some of the praise being heaped on it almost suggests that reviewers think David O Russell, by realising the decade with verve, has emulated the glories of American cinema of the 1970s.  I can’t share this level of enthusiasm.  I don’t want to be a killjoy but, like Russell’s earlier films, American Hustle would benefit from more discipline:  if it were twenty minutes shorter – perhaps shorn of some of the improvised bits – it would be more sustainedly enjoyable.  And the denouement rather undermines the democracy of the movie.  This isn’t only because Irving and Sydney come out on top and it’s a disappointingly familiar outcome to a crime comedy to see the professional lawbreakers prevail.  It’s also because Bradley Cooper’s Richie, with his simmering mania and eagerness to please and succeed, is especially engaging:  you feel sorry he ends up utterly thwarted.

2 January 2014