American Hustle

Director: David O. Russell
Screenplay: Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
Stars: Christian Bale (Irving Rosenfeld), Bradley Cooper (Richie DiMaso), Amy Adams (Sydney Prosser), Jeremy Renner (Mayor Carmine Polito), Jennifer Lawrence (Rosalyn Rosenfeld), Louis C.K. (Stoddard Thorsen), Jack Huston (Pete Musane), Michael Peña (Paco Hernandez / Sheik Abdullah), Shea Whigham (Carl Elway), Alessandro Nivola (Anthony Amado), Elisabeth Röhm (Dolly Polito), Paul Herman (Alfonse Simone), Saïd Taghmaoui (Irv’s Sheik Plant)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2013
Country: U.S.
American Hustle
American HustleA largely improvised riff on the “Abscam” FBI sting operation in the late 1970s that nabbed half a dozen corrupt politicians, David O. Russell’s American Hustle plays fast and loose with just about everything—plot, performances, period trappings, and, of course, the facts, about which the movie is humorously honest in its opening title card: “Some of this actually happened.” Indeed. If you’d like to consult Wikipedia, you’ll find that some of it did, but that’s largely beside the point. Russell isn’t all that interested in plot structure, much less historical accuracy; rather, the Abscam story is just context, a background of intrigue, greed, and manipulation against which he can set his characters in motion and let his actors do their thing, which results in a largely shapeless, slightly bloated, but consistently entertaining film punctuated by moments of greatness but otherwise filled with too much of everything else.

An actors’ director who loves to let his performers run with the material, Russell wisely stacks the deck by combining the casts from his previous two films: Christian Bale and Amy Adams (who appeared together in his 2010 comeback film The Fighter, with Bale winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence (who starred in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, with the latter winning a Best Actress Oscar). Joined by Russell neophytes Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., Shea Whigham, and Michael Peña, the cast alone makes the film worth a trip, although those looking for a tightly constructed thriller or a sharply etched satire might feel betrayed by the film’s willfully ragged edges and indulgences.

In another one of his chameleonic disappearing acts, Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld, the Bronx-born owner of a chain of Long Island dry cleaners, although his real occupation is dealing in forged and stolen art and scamming desperate people with nonexistent loans that still net him a $5,000 upfront fee. He meets his soul mate in Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a determined young woman who joins Irving’s scams by playing the role of Lady Edith, a tony Brit with banking connections. Irving and Sydney keep their operation relatively small, but it still gets busted by Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an overzealous FBI agent who is all too eager to join the post-Watergate big time by nabbing high-profile criminals and corrupt politicians. His clear lack of ethics and boundaries underscores the film’s moral gray zone: Everyone is, on some level, a crook. Richie enlists Irving and Sydney in a complicated sting operation involving a fake Middle Eastern sheik (played by Michael Peña) who is looking to invest millions of dollars. This draws the attention of Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the long-time mayor of Camden, New Jersey, who genuinely wants to help his constituency, especially by rebuilding Atlantic City, and is willing to take money from questionable sources to do so.

What draws all of these characters together is their desire to escape their roots and be something more. Russell, who reworked a famously unproduced screenplay by Eric Warren Singer (The International), spells this out explicitly in the case of Irving and Sydney, who get lengthy voice-overs that explain their blue-collar childhoods and subsequent urge to transcend the socioeconomic doldrums of their past (Sydney says at one point “My dream is to become anyone else than who I was”). Richie, on the other hand, wears his desperation so plainly that it doesn’t need elaboration, which is why Cooper, who played a man suffering from bipolar disorder in Silver Linings Playbook, is so perfectly cast: He nails the character’s intensity and mania, which turns his professional drive into outright lunacy (his chief victim is not a criminal, but rather his uptight boss, played by Louis C.K.).

Russell uses the film’s ’70s kitsch to his advantage, as the details of period style are inherently amusing while also elaborating on the characters’ desires and flaws. Watching Christian Bale in the film’s opening scene going through the lengthy process of weaving together his intricate comb-over with fake hair and glue tells us everything we need to know about a man whose life is built around chicanery and upward mobility, but is at heart deeply insecure. Similarly, Sydney’s penchant for revealing dresses split down the front emphasizes her willingness to use everything at her disposal, including her sex appeal, to get what she wants. Every character is hiding behind a ruse both emotional and physical, which makes the eventual love triangle among Irving, Sydney, and Richie so confounding: We’re never sure who is playing and who is being honest, and they probably don’t either. People who wear masks this often are always in danger of forgetting that they’re wearing one.

The film’s most honest characters, then, are the ones who don’t pretend while pursuing their ambitions. Renner’s mayor may sport a silly pompadour, but he is upfront about what he wants and why he wants it. His integrity is that he is a rare politician whose first thought is for the people’s he’s serving, rather than his own enrichment, which is why his being the center point of the sting operation is fundamentally tragic. He’s a good man brought low by the necessities of the corrupt system in which he’s working. The same cannot be said of Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Jennifer Lawrence), Irving’s big-haired, brassy wife who spends all of her time in their suburban home resenting her husband’s absence but refusing to let go of him because of the security he provides. Lawrence’s performance is appropriately unhinged, and she turns her squawking East Coast accent into a weapon that coats her nonsense with absurd flair (the high point is when she explains that her nearly getting Irving killed by spilling information to the mafia was actually a gracious favor on her part).

American Hustle is never anything less than entertaining, but it doesn’t become much more. Russell’s aspiration appears to be a grand-scale satire of the very notion of financial and social desire, as the title suggests that the “American Way,” the very notion that anyone at any time can “make it,” is the real hustle, the ultimate scam, the greatest con job of all time. Situating these grandiose themes among squabbling small-time hustlers and government operatives working out of their league turns the whole thing into a kind of trenchant joke that all the Carter-era kitsch in the world can’t quite soften. Russell’s willingness to let his actors run wild in their parts adds to the entertainment, but like Silver Linings Playbook, also adds a veneer of artificiality that keeps us at a remove. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), a film to which American Hustle is being compared, Russell’s film never breaks through the razzle-dazzle of the surface. The actors act up a storm (Russell loves conflict, and it’s not surprising that characters are yelling at each other in the first five minutes) and the tacky period detail, from hideous sofas to men in curlers, fills the screen, but in the end it all feels too staged, too played, too self-aware to fully work.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Columbia Pictures

Overall Rating: (2.5)




James Kendrick

James Kendrick offers, exclusively on Qnetwork, over 2,500 reviews on a wide range of films. All films have a star rating and you can search in a variety of ways for the type of movie you want. If you're just looking for a good movie, then feel free to browse our library of Movie Reviews.


© 1998 - 2024 Qnetwork.com - All logos and trademarks in this site are the property of their respective owner.