American Hustle – A Movie Review

Photo from IMDB.com

American Hustle, the new film by David O. Russell, director of last year’s awards darling Silver Linings Playbook, sounds incredible! Literally, it sounds so very good. The music is at once cheesy and cool and plays the nostalgia card early and often, evoking in anyone who lived through the late 70s and early 80s a kind of emotional resonance with the movie’s characters.

This is precisely what Russell wants.

American Hustle is a complex movie. The twists of its plot are intentionally delivered in an unclear fashion as they unfold and the movie is turny enough to require voice-overs from multiple characters – a device which can weigh a movie down and break up its pacing. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen here and the voice-overs result in the audience gaining a deeper understanding of the film’s characters. Only during these voice-overs can the audience believe what the characters are saying. At all other times, they are not to be trusted.

That’s part of the fun of American Hustle. The audience can never be sure who is hustling whom.

People expecting a more grounded version of the Oceans movies are going to be disappointed, however. Those movies were built almost entirely around their labyrinthine plots. David O. Russell’s movies are built entirely upon characters and the actors who embody them. Russell has assembled a stunning cast for this one.

If you have seen a frame from previews for American Hustle you know that Christian Bale has undertaken another ridiculous transformation to play Irving Rosenfeld, a con artist who is the hub around which the other spokes of the movie spin. Bale is such a good actor, one wonders if it was necessary for him to put on a reported 45 pounds to inhabit the Rosenfeld, but who can argue with the process when it yields such amazing results? There isn’t a trace of Bruce Wayne in Bale’s performance. He is commanding as a man suddenly in over his head who is used to holding all the cards. I believed every moment Bale was onscreen. He made each of the other cast members better and when Irving is forced face-to-face with the human cost of his latest scheme, Bale makes us feel the character’s devastation. He should be nominated for his work here.

Amy Adams should, too. It may well work against her that she is ubiquitous these days, but Adams’ role as Rosenfeld’s partner and lover Sydney Prosser is every bit as arresting as Bale’s and, while Adams didn’t have to physically alter her appearance in the film, my bet is many men (and women for that matter) will never look at her the same way again. Adams’ Prosser can manipulate. She can cry. She can smolder in a manner we’ve not come to expect from Amy Adams. It’s a great part.

In fact, Adams and Bale are so great that Bradley Cooper’s performance as unbalance FBI agent Richie DiMaso never quite emerges from their shadows. Cooper is good, but, perhaps owning to the fact that the character he’s playing is fairly reprehensible, he doesn’t stand out here the way he did in last year’s Silver Linings Playbook. He’s engaging, but Bale and Adams seem to be in another class in this one. (So does Cooper’s Silver Linings co-star Jennifer Lawrence, by-the-way. I begin to wonder if there is any role she cannot play. As a supporting actress to Bale’s leading man, she is more than up to the task)

Jeremy Renner is strong. It’s his best performance since The Hurt Locker. Louis CK shows up and is nothing like one would expect, playing against type and drawing big laughs. There is also a powerful cameo which I won’t spoil, but I will say fits right into the tenor of the movie.

The character work – the masterful performances by the entire cast – is amazing. It’s so good that, at points in the film, one can fool oneself into thinking that these people are not actors, but real individuals that the camera has caught in some of the most terrible circumstances they could imagine. It’s pretty clear that’s what Russell wants the audience to feel.

That’s why the movie feels more character than plot driven. That’s why the resolution feels less than completely satisfying. This movie is a reflection of real life – a stylized, beautifully realized, not-at-all sentimentalized, 1970’s-sized reflection of real life. If that’s a disco to which you can dance, American Hustle is a terrific partner.

American Hustle receives 4 and a half pink foam hair rollers out of a possible five.