American Hustle Bustle

My principle enjoyment while watching the highly praised and multi-Oscar nominated movie American Hustle came from seeing Christian Bale, Amy Adams,  Brandon Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence enjoying themselves so much.  

Christian Bale has played so many dark tormented characters that I expect an on-screen air of gloom or doom to gather around him.  Here, as the hustler Irving Rosenfeld, he is louche and smart and having fun.  Irving knows that he may not be the smartest man in the room,  but he surely isn’t the dumbest or the greediest, and that is important for a con-man who depends on the gullibility and greed of his victims.   

David O. Russell, the Director and co-writer, brings Christopher Bale back together with Amy Adams after their good work in  The Fighter.   Amy,  as Sydney Prosser, Irving’s partner in crime,  is really consolidating her reputation  in these two Russell films after Enchanted and Doubt.  

Bradley Cooper is Richie Dimaso,  an (over) ambitious FBI agent.   Richie is like a Labrador, full of energy and bounce, and not too bright.   He recruits Irving and Sydney in a sting based on the actual Abscam operation that brought down a number of corrupt politicians in the 1970’s and 80’s.   I like it when Bradley shows the panic behind his character’s eyes.  Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence  complete the coming together of the leads from  The Fighter and Russell’s Silver Linings.   Jennifer Lawrence plays Irvin’s wife, Rosalyn.   Jennifer has previously displayed stolid determination (Winter’s Bone) and the kind of toughness that never diminished her femininity (The Hunger Games).   She stepped up in Silver Linings to be smart and sexy and also a little bit crazy.   Here her character is flaky and silly – though not to be underestimated.   

Seeing Bale and Adams, Lawrence and Cooper working so well together again is a joy.   Robert De Niro, also in Silver Linings, plays an (uncredited) cameo here, as a mafia boss, and the most frightening scene in the movie  is when he faces the sting team across a table, weighing them up.   Jeremy Renner, as Carmine Pollito, a Mayor who maybe serves  his people too well,   is charismatic – I  never thought I would say that.   I was also struck by Elizabeth Roem in a small part as Carmine’s wife, Dolly.   

So this movie is funny, smart, engaging – and we are told that some of the things in it actually happened, but who cares?     It is set in the 1970’s and is utterly true to the times in its tone, design and zeitgeist.   The costume and hairstyling departments obviously had a lot of fun, but again, this is not a parody of the time.    So….

American Hustle, can I compare thee to a 70’s movie?  

In 1972 Sam Peckinpah/Walter Hill’s The Getaway was showing in our cinemas.     It was hip and cool and good looking, like Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, it’s criminal romantic leads.   American Hustle is certainly as commercial as that film, but not in any way as cynical.  

In American Hustle  everyone is trying to cheat everyone else, a common trope from the 70’s, as in Walter Hill/Bud Yorkin’s 1973  The Thief Who Came to Dinner.  In such  movies  the most attractive couple  usually win.  But here Irving is undeniably unattractive, at least physically, Bale having either ballooned for the role or donned a fat suit, or a fat belly.

Hoard Zieff gave us Slither  in 1972,  a comedy thriller perhaps closest to American Hustle.    Peter Boyle’s character in that movie had,  as Pauline Kael said,  a glint of indefatigable greed in his eye.   But Irving is not avaricious in such a ruthless way, he is simply doing the best he can with his limited gifts and unlimited confidence.  He is also,  like Boyle character, happy and lucky with the women he loves.   

Don Siegal’s 1973 Charley  Varrik was entertaining enough, but we had no idea why Charley, played by Walter Mattau as a Walter Mattau tribute act, would go robbing banks for a living.    He was essentially the same character we saw as a retired spook in Hopscotch seven years later.   But in American Hustle we do understand exactly why Irving  and Sydney go agrifting.

The Sting (1973) was built on its conmen star’s charisma, but American Hustle is much better plotted and the characters much more sympathetic and alive.

Steelyard Blues (1972)  employed the charms (and anti-establishment reputations) of Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, but the plot was scrawny and what was meant to be amusing turned out to demean the very people it was meant to  be applauding.  American Hustle never does that.   

Bradley Cooper does not exploit his cuteness as say, Ryan O’Neal used to in the 70’s,  and Amy Adams fleshes out the kind of ballsy female we saw in the 1950’s and 60’s but who were too often coarsened or exploited in the 70’s.

The whole tone of American Hustle is different to these movies.   It is not a look back in anger, or even in indulgence.    It is not even a look back in  parody.     I am reminded of  the way Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973)  transplanted the 1950’s of Raymond Chandler’s noir into the brash Hollywood of the 1970’s,  without ever betraying it’s heart.     Noir is essentially romantic,  as it’s bruised but hopeful Private Eye Galahads  show us as they turn up their collars and walk the mean streets.    Altman  underlined this by placing the harsh spotlight of 70’s Tinsel Town’s  heartless chic on his forlorn knight.   Marlowe and all he stood for was now out of time, an anachronism.   It must be said that many critics and  Marlowe fans  hated the movie.  Could it be that it revealed too clearly the saintly sleuth’s essential ineptitude?    Raymond Chandler said of his script for the original  Long Goodbye ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious,   but I cared about the people.’     It feels as Russell and Singer also care about the people in this, much less obvious,  mystery. 

American Hustle does not transpose the 1970 into the 21st century.   But it benefits from the long, affectionate but not over indulgent  perspective that time – and perceptive scriptwriting  and directing can bring.   Russell co-wrote the script with  Eric Warren Singer, who also wrote The International.

 American Hustle  is as deep as a puddle, and made simply to have fun and splash about in.   I think I enjoyed it more than any of the 1970’s films I have mentioned above, and I am glad it has been recognized as a piece of superior entertainment.     But it has done it’s job and I have no reason to see it again.    I simply look forward eagerly to whatever David O. Russell and his friends do next time.

PS. The excellent soundtrack contains a new recording of Grace Slick’s White Rabbit,   commissioned by Russell and sung by the Lebanese American singer Mayssa Karaa in Arabic.    I have loved Slick’s chromium plated voice for forty years, and  this was a huge hit in 1967, from Jefferson Airplane’s second album Surrealistic Pillow.   This radical new reading only adds to the pleasure.   Well done Russell.  I cannot wait to find Mayssa’s  recordings of the poems of the 13^th century Persian mystic/philosopher/poet Rumi.