American Hustle has witty dialogue, spectacular performances, memorable costumes and a plot that’s so damned formulaic you’d never forgive a different director for trying to pull it off. But of course, David O. Russell seems to be getting away with it. Because that’s what he does: he makes cookie-cutter movies with so many freakin’ sprinkles that you don’t even care if you’ve swallowed it all before.
And normally, that works. The Fighter is a by-the-numbers underdog boxing movie that takes its characters so seriously, and puts such a great cast in charge of making its clichés feel human again, that you don’t care that it ends with a boxer earning the support of his family and winning the big fight. It’s a pretty damned good movie. Silver Linings Playbook is a by-the-numbers meet-cute romantic comedy that takes its characters so seriously, and puts such a great cast in charge of making its clichés feel human again, that you don’t care that it ends with a ridiculous wager, a dance competition and everyone’s mental health problems miraculously solved through the power of dating a hunk/superbabe, or that the “wacky” black sidekick only gets one thing to do, and that’s teach white people how to dance. It’s a pretty damned good movie.
American Hustle goes through those same motions, presenting a by-the-numbers genre movie with more emphasis on the characters and their emotions than we’re used to, with a great cast bringing them to life. But the thing is… that’s kind of the problem this time. The con artist genre undermines all the sincere character development, and the rampant character development undermines the film’s inherently insincere genre.
American Hustle stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams as professional shysters who are forced by Bradley Cooper, an overzealous FBI Agent, to con other con artists into incriminating themselves. As the situation spirals out of control into a dangerous political corruption scandal, Cooper becomes increasingly unhinged, Bale starts to feel guilty about the people he’s duping, Adams questions where her loyalties lie, and Bale’s wife – played by a scene-stealing Jennifer Lawrence – threatens to destroy everything they’re building with her shrill, yet sexy, meddling.
David O. Russell luxuriates in all the stress his plot causes to the cast of characters, and in the way that those people deceive everyone – including themselves – to their own detriment. He also sunbathes in period attire, haircuts and pop songs that feel more 1970s than the 1970s probably ever were. He lets his film expand into visual and acting showcases that seem to desperately beg audiences to compare American Hustle to Goodfellas, but the two hours of build-up to his inevitable but underwhelming final con can’t help but play like just a misdirection. It’s still a con artist movie, after all, and that’s the effect con artist movies have on audiences. They inspire us to doubt everything on camera, and that’s antithetical to Russell’s whole approach to filmmaking these days.
Russell wants you to believe everything his cast is going through, no matter what happens in the plot, but he clearly doesn’t want you to know everything that’s going on either. (Just look at the way he reveals Jennifer Lawrence for the first time.) So it’s hard to know whether we should allow ourselves to invest in what these people are feeling. The whole film could be a sexy discotheque of lies.
If it is all true – and I’m not going to give that away – then the genre trappings make it feel false. If it’s all lies, then the character development makes it feel padded. If it’s a con artist movie first and a character study second, then the plot – though entertaining – isn’t nearly clever enough make American Hustle do the hustle. And if the opposite is true, then the characters are so distracting that the plot feels incidental and the pacing drags, which isn’t enough to make this movie freak. Either way, at its best – and overall, its best is decent enough – American Hustle does an adequate little bump.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
