American Hustle - film review

An FBI sting, Bradley Cooper and cool Seventies style — there’s plenty to dig in director David O Russell’s retelling of a fake sheikh scam
12 March 2014

David O Russell is on a roll. American Hustle follows closely on from his great boxing picture of 2010, The Fighter, and last year’s electrifying screwball comedy, Silver Linings Playbook. The films not only use many of the same actors — Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence — they express such a consistent view of life, seen as a struggle against the odds by “strivers, survivors, scrappers”, that to all intents and purposes they amount to a trilogy.

American Hustle is based, more or less — we’re teased at the start that “some of this really happened” — on the “Abscam scandal”, an FBI sting operation in the late Seventies in which a fake Arab sheikh offered bribes to politicians, leading to corruption convictions for a senator and six congressmen. Though the convictions stood up on appeal, the operation was highly controversial, not only because it appeared to verge on entrapment but because the FBI had hired a convicted conman called Melvin Weinberg to run it, cancelling his own prison sentence and paying him $150,000.

The film takes us straight into the mess. In the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1978, we see conman Irving Rosenfeld, fat and balding, making himself up literally, gluing on a toupee and a terrible comb-over. So he’s a fake, we see. (Irv is played by lithe, good-looking Christian Bale but you would not know it, so much does he become the role, repulsive belly and all.)

Irv sallies forth to meet his partner, Sydney (Amy Adams, bright-eyed, wearing the first of a series of dresses that are mainly cleavage), and the ambitious FBI agent she appears to have fallen for, Richie (Bradley Cooper, his tightly curled hair just as artificial as Irv’s wig, it turns out).

The three of them then try to lure a New Jersey politician, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, coming on like a mini-Kennedy) into accepting, on camera, a briefcase stuffed with cash. The sting doesn’t work, though — until Irv begins to weave a little of his confidence trickster magic, establishing a rapport with Carmine, luring him in.

From this midpoint in the story, the film turns back to show us how Irv got there — how he became a hustler, how he connected with Sydney. Also on the make, she has reinvented herself even more comprehensively than he has — and they share an understanding that the world can be what you make it be or seem to be.

At one point Sydney, a former stripper, even says: “My dream was to become anyone else other than who I was.” For now, she’s pretending to be an English aristocrat, “Lady Edith”. “We’re all conning ourselves in one way or another, just to get through life,” says Irv. She gets it: “The key to people is what they believe is what they want to believe.”

Unfortunately, Irv already has a wife who won’t let him go — Rosalyn, a crazy-haired, badly dressed Jennifer Lawrence, taking her nuttiness in Silver Linings up a gear. Angry and unpredictable, she’s “the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate”, as Irving puts it — and he’s her mark.

Lawrence’s vitality shines through every scene she’s in but this is a coarser performance than Tiffany; there’s a really showboat sequence when, having thoroughly messed things up for her husband, she wildly sings and dances to Live and Let Die while doing the cleaning. “I’m the life of the party!” she proclaims.

Only in the most disastrous way — for as the sting develops, the Mafia in the form of Robert De Niro (coasting this time) becomes involved and the threat turns real. But Fed agent Richie is desperate to drive the project on — to the point of conning himself too.

Russell’s filming style is incredibly pugnacious — taking the camera right in there among his brawling people, pushing them at each other, never resting anywhere. It’s apparently also how he directs, not standing back but physically participating in the mêlée.

You can sense that involvement in every scene — they’re dynamic, swirling, there’s no repose. He draws great performances out of his trusted actors — it’s a heck of an actors’ film, conmen being actors too — and moreover it’s fabulously furnished, in period, in terms of its clothes, the interiors, the music, the colour palette even. It’s like a sly addition to the Scorsese canon from that time. If you like that sleazy Seventies vibe, it’s blissy.

But though American Hustle looks a cert for plenty of awards noms, I have to say I enjoyed it less than either The Fighter or Silver Linings Playbook. It’s too long (137 minutes) and, funny though it is, too pleased with itself. It never feels tightly edited — as though assuming you’ll relish the scenes for themselves rather than want the story to move forward. And it announces itself too much, too. If you have a good story about people conning each other, you don’t need also to keep explicitly telling us, as this film does, that life itself is about conning and being conned and conning yourself. We noticed already.

That said, don’t miss this. Russell is an original, as good as we’ve got.

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