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.

And There Came a Look at Select Academy Awards Nominations – Predicted Winner Best Director: David O. Russell

Somehow, the director who should win this award, in my opinion, wasn’t even nominated. In fact, three directors that most Oscar watchers thought were shoe-ins for nominations were left off the ballot. Kathryn Bigelow (for Zero Dark Thirty), Tom Hooper (for Les Miserables) and most egregiously Ben Affleck (for Argo) did not hear their names called when nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were announced. Bigelow has won the award. She captured it for The Hurt Locker in 2008 in what must have been victory made all the sweeter as she triumphed over her ex-husband James Cameron who was up for Avatar. Those folks voting for Best Director nominations could have had this fact in the backs of their minds when they chose to pass her over. Tom Hooper was the toast of the television awards season the same year for his brilliant John Adams. Then in 2010, his The King’s Speech was the most highly nominated film with 12 nods. It took home Best Picture and Hooper himself was named Best Director. Again, the voters remembered and shut Hooper out this year for a nomination for Les Miserables. As surprising as this omission was, it doesn’t come close to the shock that Ben Affleck’s lack of a nomination for Argo has inspired in industry watchers. Argo has secured most of the major awards – including Best Director awards for Affleck – this season leading up to the big night. And yet, no Academy Award nomination for Affleck. It’s inexplicable.

So, with these players off the table, this category comes down to two choices, and it’s going to be close. Steven Spielberg for Lincoln and David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook.

I’m going with Russell.

That his cast (Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jacki Weaver and Robert DeNiro) were all nominated for acting awards (a feat not seen since Warren Beatty’s Reds in 1981) says quite a lot about the direction Russell provided. So does the fact that Beatty won the 1981 Best Director statue. The Academy likes Russell, having nominated him for Best Director for 2010’s The Fighter. He’s got a great chance to win.

Silver Linings Playbook is the kind of movie that sometimes rubs me the wrong way. Billed as a complex romantic comedy and something of an independent project, it could have turned me off had Russell decided to take it in a darker direction that is implied as a possibility throughout the film. Word is that Russell, in point of fact, shot many key scenes multiple times with different shading and outcomes so that he could cut together the movie he wanted in post production. I loved the movie he came up with for its realism, its sharp characterizations and its heart.

He gets all that he can out of his actors, and their nominations are proof of this. He creates a version of Philadelphia that makes one feel like they took a trip to the city as they watched the film and the city itself – and its storied football team – become characters in their own right. Russell somehow manages to corral wacky comedian Chris Tucker into an affecting role (great choice for Tucker’s career) and keeps all the various plot elements (a ballroom dance competition, the Eagles 2008 season, mental illness and visits to therapists, book making, father and son dynamics, hopeless pursuit of lost love, etc) distinct and clear. Silver Linings Playbook is a movie that unfolds from early tension to conclude with pure joy. That’s something of an impressive arc.

Can Russell beat Spielberg, his only real competition for the Academy Award? I don’t know, but I think he deserves to!