Runtime: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Rating: R
Director: David O. Russell
Quick Impressions:
Christian Bale deserves an Oscar nomination for his role in American Hustle, and that’s a problem because at this point like twenty-five other guys also deserve one, and there are only five to go around. I feel like Bale is probably going to get shafted because they know he can do it again…kind of like Bank of America cut my credit card limit in half several years ago because I responsibly paid off the balance every month. (Maybe that’s not exactly the same thing, but I’ll never forgive Bank of America, so I mention that injustice whenever I can.)
Everyone’s raving about Jennifer Lawrence (and don’t get me wrong, they should be! In my expert opinion, it is never wrong to rave about Jennifer Lawrence. We should give her a national holiday—why not Columbus Day? Nobody likes him anymore, anyway—and put her face on a stamp that interacts with you like one of those pictures at Hogwarts).
Lawrence is great. Honestly at this point, I could see her winning Best Supporting Actress. (She’d have to overcome superb performances by contenders like Lupita Nyong’o and Oprah Winfrey, but Lawrence is so charming that she can make anecdotes about butt plugs seem like standard girl-next-door fare, so I like her chances.)
Nevertheless, I think that Bale actually gives the best performance in the film (which seems fitting since he is the lead). Amy Adams is also fantastic. When is she ever going to win an Oscar? She’s been nominated four times, so you can’t exactly call her overlooked, but I don’t see how she can possibly pull off a win this year with so much competition. I’ll be stunned if she even gets nominated. She deserves to be. The trouble is, I can personally confirm that Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Sandra Bullock, and even Adèle Exarchopoulos also deserve nominations. And while I haven’t yet seen Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, it’s pretty hard to believe they don’t deserve it. (I mean, let’s be real. Streep always deserves it. I keep wanting to leave her out this year for the sake of variety, but I’m sure that impulse will die the moment I see her performance.)
The good news for Adams is that she goes one step further toward proving to the world that she does have range, so even if she misses out this year, her superb performance here helps build the case for a future Oscar win.
Bradley Cooper’s pretty fantastic here, too, just a ball of energy playing an increasingly berserk character. Apart from Lawrence (let’s face it, she’s getting that nomination), I think Cooper has the best chance of Oscar recognition simply because Supporting Actor could go so many ways at this point, and Cooper seems like he’s going every which way at once. There may well be room for him in there somewhere.
But forget Oscar nominations for a minute. A more important question might be, Is American Hustle a good movie? Yes, yes it is. It’s quite entertaining, start to finish.
The Good:
I think this film also deserves nominations for screenplay, picture, and director. I particularly like the screenplay (as it unfolds onscreen, anyway. I haven’t read it).
Normally I find voice over narration forced and lazy (although I make so many exceptions to this rule anymore that I feel like a liar as I say it). But I really loved the narration by Christian Bale and Amy Adams in the early scenes of the film.
Watching it, I thought, This all feels so true, so real. That’s exactly what it was like when my husband and I fell in love—except we weren’t con-artists (though the first time my husband pulled up and stepped out of the Crown Victoria he then drove, my father assumed he was in the Mafia—because why else would a man be coming to the front door? I can imagine my dad weighing the options. Is someone more likely to take out a hit on my daughter or ask her on a date? Yep, this guy is definitely in the Mafia.)
I think this early bit of narration really makes you root for Bale and Adams. How else could we ever trust con-artists? To believe them even for a moment, we have to hear them open up their hearts to us in an apparently candid soliloquy.
I was also impressed with how quickly I fell in love with these characters. Right away the film makes us sympathize with the criminals, and throughout the film that really doesn’t change. Early on, Bale has a great line about most things in life occurring in the shades of gray, and the movie stays committed to this idea, delivering schemers, crooked politicians, and mob bosses of great integrity alongside law enforcement officials who are arbitrarily, ego-maniacal, and self-serving.
I always love David O. Russell’s films, but this one is quite different in feel from his two most recent movies, Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter. In certain aspects, it more closely resembles I Heart Huckabees. There are so many characters, each with his or her own agenda, all plotting overlapping storylines. And the characters are extremely complex, layered, almost all concealing some sort of secret identity (sometimes from themselves). Watching I got the feeling that if we spent more time exclusively with any one of the characters we would come away with a totally different (and enriched) understanding of the person. (The one exception here may be Jeremy Renner’s Carmine Polito. With him, what you see seems to be what you get. Renner gives a pretty great performance, too. In a weaker year, he might have a shot at a supporting nomination, but that will never happen this year.)
(Apparently at one point during production, Bale thought he couldn’t do the film, so Cooper was going to play Bale’s role, and Renner was going to play Cooper’s role. In that scheme I don’t know who was set to play Carmine Polito. I wish Russell would remake the film with this casting, plug Christian Bale into the Polito role, and have Adams and Lawrence switch parts. Don’t get me wrong. I love the movie as is. Bale, Cooper, and Renner are all perfect in their parts. I’d just get a kick out of seeing it the other way, too.)
American Hustle is not at all what it seems like from the previews. The plot is very complicated, full of twists and turns and surprises (including uncredited cameos) that I’ll do my best not to spoil. Its greatest strength is always its performances, but I love the lines they say, too. It’s rather odd because as the movie is happening, what’s coming next is never clear, but somehow we get to the end and think, Oh yes, that’s just what I expected. How did I ever doubt that it would turn out this way? At least, that was my experience.
The soundtrack and over-the-top period costumes (and hair) are lots of fun, too, and I also liked the score. We also get all kinds of delightful surprises in the supporting cast—John Huston’s increasingly popular grandson Jack, Colleen Camp (still funny even all these years after playing Yvette in Clue), Louis C.K. (newly talented at being cast in Oscar baity films), Michael Peña (who always turns up in everything good). And there’s also one surprise addition to the cast who’s definitely very welcome.
Funniest Scene:
If we’re talking most meticulously planned joke (the joke that’s set up as carefully as any con), then definitely the film’s opening scene featuring Christian Bale’s character’s elaborate grooming ritual should take first prize. Bale puts in a lot of work, and when the time is right, Bradley Cooper gets the movie’s first big laugh (well, second if you count the amusing written disclaimer before the opening scene).
In terms of actual sustained hilarity, though, it’s hard to beat Jennifer Lawrence’s theatrical fiasco with the “science oven.” Lawrence gets many of the movie’s biggest laughs.
Best Scene Visually:
I like the scene in the club with the strobe light because it’s so disorienting. Strobe lights always freak me out. They remind me of when I was a kid and my teen cousin would turn on the strobe light in his darkened bedroom, then jump out to scare me by saying in a spooky voice, “I am the Night Stalker.” (Incidentally he did that to be fun, not to terrorize me. I remember it fondly. I was fascinated by the strobe light and why it was so powerfully visually disturbing.)
The next bit when Amy Adams looks up from the toilet is also almost viscerally disturbing (and mesmerizing).
Best Scene:
As I’ve said, I really fell in love with the film’s early flashback, the story of how Rosenfeld and Prosser met and fell in love. There’s something so odd and yet so authentic about this element of the story. Adams and Bale create compelling, enchanting characters, and much of what they have to say about one another fascinates me.
Best Action Sequence:
When DiMaso and Edith decide to take things to the next level in her apartment, things escalate so quickly. The next thing you know, Louis C.K. becomes the world’s most legitimately aggrieved boss. (Throughout the movie, his rapport with Cooper is superb. Maybe one day there will be a sequel and we’ll finally hear the resolution of the ice fishing story.)
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Christian Bale):
All of Bale’s scenes with Jeremy Renner made me want to cry. Renner makes Polito very likable, quite admirable, in a weird way a tragic hero (a doomed champion of the people like Robin Hood or something but more doomed). Bale meanwhile conveys his genuine anguish and frustration so well.
Every time the two of them talked, I found myself thinking, How can this possibly end well? How can this situation ever work out? I found myself really wanting it to even as I knew it couldn’t. (Incidentally, this is one of the strengths of the screenplay—it stirs up in us the same emotions it describes to us. The more it convinces us something won’t work, the more and more desperately we want it to work.)
Bale couldn’t be better in his scenes with Renner. He’s great with Adams, too, and with Lawrence. Basically he’s phenomenal in all his scenes.
As far as his most effective scene—it’s a toss-up between his last big conversation at Polito’s house and his tense encounter with someone whose appearance in the film took me by surprise.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Amy Adams):
At the very beginning of the movie, Adams and Bale have a fight that seems to end their relationship, but then they suddenly make up. I think Adams is amazing in that moment. In general, the way she slips in and out of her English accent is terribly endearing and adds a lot to the character. Normally a here-then-gone accent is a bad thing, but in this case, the at-some-times-more-English-than-others accent enhances our sense of Sidney’s inner turmoil. It also keeps us on our toes in terms of the superficially twisty plot.
Adams more than holds up her end of some fabulous, intense scenes with both Bale and Cooper. Another moment of hers that I love comes when she reacts to the terrifying spectacle of Jennifer Lawrence at the party.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Bradley Cooper):
Bradley Cooper gives a great performance in the movie, but his character is really something else. In fact, the DiMaso character is so weird that I found myself wondering if perhaps there were one more wrinkle in the plot. (I kept whispering to my husband, “Is this guy really what he says? What if he’s acting under duress, too?”) In story terms, I think Cooper’s character is the weakest in the film, but I find no fault with his portrayal of this coked up weirdo who seems misleadingly ordinary the first time we meet him but keeps getting stranger and more frantic until he seems sure to go flying off into the aether. I think his strongest scenes are the ones with Louis C.K. They escalate. They build.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Jennifer Lawrence):
I like the way Lawrence plays her final one-on-one conversation with Bale in their bedroom, but she has so many great moments. Her surprise kiss in the ladies room is also interesting, an equally strong moment for Amy Adams.
The Negatives:
Bradley Cooper turns in a perfectly respectable (even Oscar nomination worthy) supporting performance as Richie DiMaso, but I think the character he’s playing is the weakest element of American Hustle. In some ways, DiMaso is the Lady Macbeth of American Hustle. It feels like we’re missing some key transitional scenes of his development. At first he seems perfectly normal, almost nice. Then he comes across as capable and feisty, even if a bit monomaniacal. But then five minutes later he starts snorting cocaine and attacking people right and left and sideways and upside down and just going off every which way and then basically coming apart at the seams. (Maybe you don’t need many transitional scenes if you include a scene of snorting cocaine. Maybe the cocaine snorting itself is transition enough.)
When I was in college, our drama department put on a production of Macbeth, and the professor in charge cast the same actress as Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff. Though a number of frustrated actresses found this choice exasperating, he suggested that in Shakespeare’s day, the same actor played both roles so that the audience wasn’t as shocked by Lady Macbeth’s stark transformation because it saw the same performer making that emotional transition while playing another character. I was thinking along those lines as I watched this movie. There’s so much doubling and mirroring going on, so many foils, and just as many red herrings. (Bale basically has two wives. Adams has two identities. Renner used to play Cooper’s part. DiMaso feels like he’s a thousand people crammed into one, and none of them has a remotely stable or accurate self-concept.) The script places a lot of emphasis on what’s counterfeit and what’s real, the importance of a good copy, the authenticity of adoption, the fine art of forgery.
I think DiMaso is a hugely important character as a foil for all the other characters, but I feel like his own self-concept gets lost in the jumble somewhere. It’s like he’s never fully developed. Now granted, part of this is intentional because I think we’re meant to view the criminals as noble people who circumvent unjust, ineffective laws to do what is needed (whether for their own survival or the good of the community). I think the randomness of DiMaso’s attempted self-aggrandizing heroism is intended to make a strong impression on us.
But I still think the character feels a bit half-baked, or maybe it’s more accurate to call him overdone. (What’s going on with his mother and his fiancée? What’s his backstory? What are his precise motivations?) We know so many weird details about this guy, and yet, at the end of the day, who is he?
Now I know American Hustle is loosely based on true events (and I love the way it tells us up front that it’s a work of fiction first). I know, too, that Amy Adams has this great line early on saying that all she knows for sure is that she wants to be anyone else other than who she is. I think DiMaso’s character is intentionally written as a big coked up crazy train of confusion. But I do a lot of things intentionally that don’t work out to my greatest advantage.
Honestly I think Bradley Cooper has clearly spent more time seriously thinking about who DiMaso is than DiMaso ever did, and while that works out well for Cooper, it’s ultimately quite confusing for the audience.
Of course the movie does thrive on creating confusion for the audience. If it didn’t try so hard to keep us confused, the story would become a bit dull.
As a heist movie, this isn’t really as sharp and delicious and rewarding as something like Ocean’s Eleven. Of course, I don’t think American Hustle is trying to be a heist comedy like Ocean’s Eleven, but some people are bound to think that, and they’re probably going to be disappointed. Like all of Russell’s films (that I’ve seen, anyway), American Hustle is really a serious character study, a drama about human relationships disguised as an off-beat comedy about a bunch of unhinged people living on the edge. Given how hard the film works to disorient us continually, I’d say that the line about life being in the “shades of gray” is one we’re meant to take away with us. The movie imitates life. We never know exactly what’s going on or what’s in another person’s heart. Sometimes we’re not even sure of our own intentions. So we just have to muddle through it all the best we can until we get to a moment that resonates emotionally and feels true.
My husband found the beginning of the movie a bit slow, and while I agree (especially that the pacing picks up once Jennifer Lawrence makes an appearance), the love story between Bale and Adams was actually my favorite part of the film. So yes, the beginning is slow, but I still adored every second of it.
The narrative structure of American Hustle makes it feel different from most films that came out in 2013. I’ve seen a lot of movies this year. None of them was told quite like this. (It reminds me a little of Burn After Reading and a little of Seven Psychopaths, though it’s really only like those in that all are equally unlike other films.)
In terms of events, American Hustle tells a very simple story but complicates it infinitely by shifting point of view and exploring the mysteries of the human heart. What I mean is, there would be no mystery or suspense to the plot if only we (and the characters) knew whom we could trust when and with what. But that crucial information is precisely what nobody ever knows for sure (in the film or in the audience). Taken on its own terms, the film works, but people looking for something more formulaic might find its cluttered, deliberately confusing method of storytelling off-putting.
My only other slight complaint is that Adams gets much better lines in the first half of the film than in the second (when she has to make do instead with poignant looks). She gives a great performance, but Lawrence is a lot flashier, and I worry that what Adams is given won’t be enough to get her the Oscar nomination that she probably deserves.
Overall:
David O. Russell has become one of my favorite directors working today. Last year he directed all four principals of Silver Linings Playbook to acting nominations at the Oscars. I’m not sure that he’ll be able to repeat that trick this year in such an unusually crowded field, but I will say that Bale, Adams, Cooper, and Lawrence all deserve nominations. The acting in American Hustle is phenomenal, the hair is exciting, and the story is both thought-provoking and (at moments) hilarious. Given all the phenomenal supporting work out there this year, Jennifer Lawrence probably should not win a second Academy Award. But I have the feeling that the Best Supporting Actress Oscar might be American Hustle’s ultimate heist.
So you’d better see the movie now because you know if you wait until next year when it comes to Netflix, Jennifer Lawrence will already be getting buzz for Oscar number three. Trust me, the Oscar buzz will never end. You don’t want to be playing catch up for the rest of your life. Go see American Hustle today.
Christian Bale and Amy Adams are pretty amazing, too, and Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner aren’t half bad.