American Hustle

American Hustle is built as the 2013 revival of classic Scorsese gangster pictures like Goodfellas and Casino, but without the gangsters. It has the plot twists, the plethora of pop tunes, the conniving characters, the backstabbings, the high life, the low life, the disgruntled females merciless attached to crooked husbands, the stranded children, and so on. But it's new. Fresh out of the oven. Baked with wonderful performances and tight scriptwriting. And it has characters who inhabit the story and make it their own.

The movie begins in medias res, with two con men -- and one con lady -- attempting to buy out a Jersey mayor. There's a lovely opening shot of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale, almost unrecognisable) carefully and painstakingly combing over his thinning strands of hair. This scene reminded me very much of the opening of Richard Linklater's Bernie, where a plump but serene mortician played by Jack Black joyfully lectures a scarce hall of students on the process of embalming. It's a slow scene, maybe too slow to open up a movie, but we are never bored, because we are given insight to a skill that we've never seen before, or don't know much about. It's the same with this scene. I've never seen anyone cover up bald. It's always bald being uncovered; wigs and toupees accidentally being ripped off, or blown away by strong winds. The scene also informs us that Irving is a certain kind of character.

After jumping to a series of flashbacks, in which the history between Irving and his long-time girlfriend Sydney (Amy Adams, almost unrecognisable without her makeup) is revealed to have blossomed over a shared love of Duke Ellington, the plot begins proper. Irving and Sydney -- now posing as a wealthy British banker named Edith -- have been arrested by Richie (Bradley Cooper, fully recognisable despite his hairdo), an ambitious FBI agent who thinks he has the wit and skill to take down corrupt congressmen and casino gangsters with flimsy, ill-conceived plans. He ropes Irving and Sydney into his little schemes, and soon has them taking on an entire network of illegal tradesmen.

Caught in the middle are two people: Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), and Irving's wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Carmine is the mayor whom the trio wanted to con at the start of the movie. He becomes integral to the plot when Irving develops a friendship with him. Do I tell him that I've been conning him all along, and that my innocent little scheme might get him arrested in front of his wife and six children? Or do I stay quiet, maintain the friendship, and face my conscience alone? What he does, I will not say.

Rosalyn is an interesting character. Yes, she skirts dangerously close to the Sharon Stones and Lorraine Braccos of the old Scorsese pictures, but Jennifer Lawrence is able to lift her away from them by being more grounded. Stone always seemed to operate on her own terms in Casino. She was a third wheel, functioning outside of the overall story. Here, Rosalyn is fully aware of the situation at hand. She's right smack in the middle of the story. She doesn't love Irving. Irving doesn't love her. But they both love their son, and Rosalyn doesn't want a divorce tarnishing her solid family marital integrity. But she knows that the love festering in the household is only producing toxic fumes. Where her character goes is a place best kept hidden.

And then there's a mix of other secondary characters, including perhaps the best cameo I've seen (not because of the cameo itself, but because of the meaning of the cameo). All of them dip in and out of this intelligent story with impact. Why, even Richie's boss, Stoddard Thorsen (Louis C.K.), is a lovely guy. He provides much of the movie's humour, and there is much of it. Director David O. Russell has said that his goal with American Hustle was to focus on the characters instead of the plot. Indeed, what a good decision. It's a rare moment when not a single character seems out of place. They complement each other, whether they're kissing, punching, clawing, or scratching. And they share so much chemistry that you could select any two of them at random, chuck them into an empty room, and watch them chatter till their throats went dry.

I attended a screening of this movie in Mandurah, which is a lovely place. The cinema had maybe nine other patrons (weird, considering it was opening day). I'd been to Mandurah a few times before, and I watched The Counselor there. That was a poor movie, but the screening was smooth, which is more than I can say for the screening of this film. With about 15 minutes to go, the video jammed and stuttered slowly to a halt. It's the first time I've seen digital video jam. And it couldn't have happened at a worse time. The projectionist eventually rectified the problem, but I had already been sucked out of the moment. That's a pity, because American Hustle was shaping up to be one of the best movies of the year. You know what? Screw it. It still is.

The performances are the safeguard for this movie to have a very long life. I couldn't care less about the characters but I loved the actors playing them. They, the characters, make choices that are as coarse as their wardrobe. Thank God for the people wearing them .Christian Bale is absolute perfection. His character is disgusting and irresistible at the same time. brilliant performance. Amy Adams is superb and Bradley Cooper an unnerving hoot - also the brief moment with Robert de Niro is simply delicious but it is Jennifer Lawrence who made me want to see the movie again as if to confirm what I seem to remember. Yes indeed. She is spectacular. A performance of such maturity - her laughter alone belongs to one of the great ones of yesteryear. - Totally present. A character actress/star.

I'd heard mixed responses about this film over the years so I had to finally give it a watch. And I'm sorry to anyone that hates this film, but I really enjoyed this one!

The first half an hour or so is quite bland I'll be honest. No obvious direction for the film to go in, I wasn't too sold on any of the characters and just generally the pace was really slow.

But the film massively picks up and it just gets better and better and more interesting with every minute that passes. The ending I thought was fantastic, it ended all the characters arc's amazingly well and had a brilliant twist involved which I didn't see coming.

The standout for me is the acting. When I saw the pretty extravagant cast lineup I was skeptical. Usually films that go all in with cast typically don't do too well. So when I saw Bale, Adams, DeNiro, Renner, Lawrence, Cooper and CK and more I was thinking just that. But this doesn't fall into that category at all! Acting from everyone was superb and a real standout, really added so much more to the characters. Just a great job overall.

But yeah, overall it's a fun, interesting watch with a little touch of subtle humour added which is always nice. 8/10 from me, would recommend.

American Hustle is all about large characters, outlandish fashion and awful hair. It may tease you into thinking it's some kind of smart con- artist movie with it's (very loosely) based-on-real-events premise ("some of this actually happened", the opening credits inform us) and snappy trailer. But for all visual pizazz, this is in fact a very small movie, focusing on a small set of unique and frequently bizarre characters that just happen to cross paths amidst the ABSCAM operation in the late 70's and early 80's. Imagine if the characters from I Heart Huckabees (2004) were in fact the people who took part in the operation covered in Argo (2012), and you'll have something akin to American Hustle.

Paunchy con-artist and loan-shark Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) hooks up with the beautiful Sydney (Amy Adams), an intelligent and ambitious American girl who improves Irving's scams by pretending to be an English aristocrat. When they are busted by creepy FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), they are promised leniency if they assist the Bureau in making four additional arrests. The plan is to entrap popular Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), who is looking to inject funds into gambling in Atlantic City, by having a friend pose as an Arab sheik looking for potential investments in America. As Irving, Richie and Sydney delve further into the sting, things start to spiral wildly out of control, as Irving's loud-mouth wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) can't seem to keep her mouth shut, and Richie develops feelings for Sydney.

As said before, the plot plays second-fiddle to director David O. Russell's obvious fascination with this ensemble of weirdo's. Surprisingly, it's the slimy swindler at the centre of it all, Irving, that comes out of it the most recognisably human. In the opening scene, we see a shockingly bloated Bale, slapping his awful toupee across his head to cover up an embarrassing hairline. Is this the American Dream at work, a petty criminal posing as a sophisticated, honest guy? Well, no, American Hustle doesn't need to try and touch those metaphorical heights, but this is the type of person we're to spend the next two-plus hours with. An apparently successful sort of guy, covered in gold and eyes covered by tinted sunglasses, but hiding something fragile or dangerous that may soon reveal itself.

The performances are spectacular, as one would expect. Bale manages to make you actually root for his slimeball character, and Jennifer Lawrence shows that she seems able to tackle any role or character with aplomb. Cooper does a job similar to his previous work with Russell, Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but even betters that. He seems to have the uncanny ability to make you instantly know there's just something wrong with his character, and when we see him at dinner with the fiancée he clearly doesn't love or respect, his hair bunched up in tiny little rollers, there's something simply tragic about him. And Amy Adams, let loose here to reveal an unseen feistiness, wins the award for Side-Boob of the Year.

The whole thing is a rather strange experience, never really falling into a recognisable genre or taking a conventional approach to storytelling. It could only really come from the mind of David O. Russell, the only director that seems able to combine a mixture of mainstream commercial success, nominations and awards a-plenty, and independent sensibilities, never really moving away from his own vision. It's not a total success of course - Irving's admiration from the 'moral' Mayor Polito, who just wants to rejuvenate Atlantic City, seems a bit of a sympathy quick-fix, and no-one can out-Scorsese Martin Scorsese. Well, maybe Paul Thomas Anderson can. But American Hustle is a big dose of strangely endearing entertainment, that even when it outstays it's welcome towards the end still made me want to spend more time with the characters.

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Frankly, the movie itself does not live up to its hype. I never was fully engaged with any character even though it takes more than enough time and delivers a tedious and often painstaking pace. Honestly, it felt to me like the film dragged and that the ending would never arrive. Even though not fully engaged and not empathetic towards any character depicted, there is enough style that I somehow cared about how the story ended. Every scene seemed to me like an exercise in an acting class. It feels like a professor took a group of talented actors and gave them this over-the-top 1970's assignment. Everyone gets an "A" because they are that good but it barely felt like a coherent film to me. It's like their assignment included constant references to try and deliver a "Goodfellas" type tone without having a script to back it up. The events of the conclusion were so easy to spot that I'm sure most everyone will see it coming a mile away.

Overall, interesting but there is far less substance than I was expecting. I have to say this was a let down.