These movie essays on
current releases are not for the thumbs up thumbs down crowd but for those who
want their brains teased with what and why.
Please join the commentary at the end.
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Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams having
a bizarre
confrontation in “American Hustle.”
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By Dominique Paul Noth
As I watched Christian Bale as con artist Irving Rosenfeld diligently minister to his elaborate comb-over
and hair patch, for the first time in my life I felt a pang for Donald Trump
and what his ego and self-image must go through every morning to face the
world.
This is not a cheap joke at the expense of The Donald and
his coif. It is really the gift of director
David O. Russell. He guides our empathy toward the most unlikely, quirky and
self-obsessed characters, forcing us to rethink our priorities and social
conventions.
In “American Hustle,”
hair becomes a society metaphor of how the imperfect present themselves to
sucker, con or manipulate those with even less confidence or more desperate greed.
From the immense pompadour flourished by Jeremy Renner as a baby-kissing 1970s
mayor not above some under-table corruption (a still current metaphor for New
Jersey apparently) to the huge hair curlers of Amy Adams as a just clever
enough wannabe preparing to fool the marks, from the puffed hairdo and artificial
suntan of queen bee Jennifer Lawrence to the permed Brilliantine locks and tiny
rollers of FBI agent Bradley Cooper, the movie loads up on follicles as Freud.
The fact that the actors are in real life beautiful people
mocking the need to be beautiful people is just a layer upon a layer of the
hustle.
Russell is great at this.
The movie constantly turns upside down our attitudes about nutty
behavior and appropriate conduct, mocking our belief in traditional values,
nastily upending our establishment ideas of appropriate ethical norms. It has a comic spin and sense of outsized
grandeur and con, but it also strikes true.
The movie is an actor’s paradise of improvisation and outrageous
behavior, from Adams indicating submission to sex and then peeing and howling in a nightclub stall to Lawrence
dancing madly to “Live and Let Die” after setting the mob loose on her wayward
husband. But there is a wacky enduring
romanticism that permeates this commentary on Americana values, as in many of
Russell’s outings.
In the 1960s the academic auteur theory often went too far. It
correctly noted how pervasive a powerful director’s style and themes could be (John
Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock) but ignored the collaborative nature of
moviemaking.
But among the handful of modern directors who fit the auteur
theory – yet embrace teamwork and improvisation -- and whose unique (in this
case cockeyed) vision of humanity dominates (“The Three Kings,” “I Heart
Huckabees,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and now “American Hustle”) Russell is right
up there – and according to industry reports as beloved, hated and outspoken as
many of those directors of yore.
One reason why the love affair at the heart of “Silver
Linings Playbook” carried so much weight is we were forced to rethink the boxes
we put couples into. Here were two people (again Cooper and Lawrence) wrestling
for control of their mental faculties yet somehow closer to love and trust than
the rest of us.
Similarly, down to the mad dance motif, “American Hustle”
and its bizarre leads are hardly what society regards as normal. But that same
money-crazy society that would question their mores is clearly a pushover for
their methods. Bale with his pot belly,
self-absorption and a heart condition interrupting his sexual entanglements and
Adams with her desire to flaunt her British accent along with her body are
hardly models of decent behavior. Bale's street scam, built around dry-cleaning and fake art, is
modest crime until he is forced by the FBI into a million dollar wire hustle
that fills him with personal and emotional doubts – along with guilt over who he is targeting while becoming a target.
Yet we root for him. And for Adams, who is manipulative,
shrewd and strangely honest, which contrasts her with Lawrence, who turns every
bizarre behavior into a justification of her impulsive personality.
There is a curious code of fidelity among thieves missing in
the establishment world of FBI, prosecutors, politicians and even the Mafia (Robert
De Niro blisters the screen through dangerous presence in an uncredited cameo).
Crooked politicians and gangsters would
normally be the targets of comeuppance, and the law would normally be the
agents of justice, but the movie turns that expectation on its ear.
In a plot too bizarre to explain, but based quite loosely on
the infamous ABSCAM (fake Arab sheik scam) of the 1970s that netted several payola
politicians, the story reverses comedically the people we want to see punished,
with a satirical point of view that resonates with viewers.
Despite some overhype at awards time, in contrasting ways
Adams and Lawrence have never done as good work, and Bale and Cooper are great
fun.
The finale is a bit of loose-ends wrapping up of escapist
romanticism. Some of the antics along the way can mainly be explained as letting
actors cut loose. Still, “American
Hustle” is a vision of America that needs a hearing, a slyly original piece of
storytelling that still echoes the values of humanistic cinema. It is one of
the most satisfying movie journeys of the year.
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