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I’m trying really hard to think of the last time I had so much fun while watching a movie in 2013. It was probably Pacific Rim, but that was a different kind of joy and fun. That film had clearly demarcated characters – these were good guys, there were bad guys, and there were characters that were mostly good but needed to lose their bad attitudes. Nothing so easily digestible is to be found here. American Hustle gives us nothing but variations on characters who are bad, sneaky, liars and cheats.
So it’s a pity that I must admit that it doesn’t evolve much from there. It’s a sloppy narrative with an ending that just feels wrong and illogical, but as an excuse to watch a group of supremely talented actors have a grand time chewing scenery and playing bad? Well, it can’t really be beat.
Degradedly referred to as “Explosion at the Wig Factory,” American Hustle is a fairly easy target to lock-on as being “overrated.” It does venture mightily close to being Scorsese-Lite – like GoodFellas or Casino without the magic touch that Scorsese brings to them, oh, and pump up the shrieking hysteria to eleven. But Hustle is more concerned with being a dark comedy than anything else. And don’t expect much fidelity to the true ABSCAM story, but at least the film is upfront about that from the very beginning. Hollywood has a long history of playing fast and loose with true stories, but this one throws its hands up in the air from the get-go and tells us “Some of this actually happened.”
But no matter, let’s talk about how great David O. Russell is with actors before he break down what went wrong with Hustle. The film has five major roles and each is filled by an actor I greatly admire. Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner and Jennifer Lawrence – how is that for an ensemble? While Bale and Renner look fairly unattractive (a feat in itself), they’re not tasked with playing loud or obnoxious characters. In fact, despite being the main con artist and a crooked politician, they’re the most decent, self-aware characters with a strong moral compass. Sure what they do is wrong, but Renner’s shady political dealings are from a strong desire to make things better, and Bale’s character undergoes a quagmire once he gets too close and involved with his mark. Don’t let the distracting beer gut and spectacular comb-over fool you, these are just ornamentations on another solid performance from Bale. While Renner has the quietest part, but delivers a surprisingly heartfelt and emotionally sincere performance, despite the sometimes distracting bouffant.
It’s nice to see Cooper taking that Oscar nomination for Silver Lining’s Playbook and trying to make good on the promise his work in that film gave us. Here he plays an FBI agent trying to make his name and reputation by bringing down corrupt politicians. There’s just one tiny little catch, he falls hard for Amy Adams’ seductive grifter and lets his unbridled ego get the better of him once he lets it out to play. It’s a large and loud performance from him, but it’s also very engaging at the same time. Which is pretty much the same thing you could say about Jennifer Lawrence’s part as Bale’s loud, needy, desperate and manipulative wife, except her character is engineered to steal the show. She comes in like a bang of foul-mouthed Long Island accented neurosis, her hair like a crumpled bedsheet thrown atop her head and chain-smoking like a chimney. Lawrence is aces in the role and plays it to the comical heights, cultivating in a scene in which she sings along to “Live and Let Die” while doing household chores and scrubs in time to the music. It’s the kind of gonzo comic work that’s scene-stealing and seems primed for baiting awards, but Lawrence actually brings a real depth and emotional honesty to it, locating the real woman beneath the theatrics.
The true MVP of Hustle is Amy Adams, though. Her characters (and yes, there are two) are duplicitous and balance on a fine line between seducing us and making us question if she’s ever been totally honest with anyone. There’s the real character that she plays, the one that she invents which she must continue to play and the possibility that she may lose herself within this long con. She doesn’t get to ignite as many fireworks as Cooper or Lawrence, but Adams reveals her depths of her already impressive talents.
But the problem with Hustle is quite simple, really. It’s mostly an actor’s vanity project, and it frequently gives them too much room to be loud and give grandiose displays of “ACTING!” I’ll gladly take this over the mental-illness-as-romantic-comedy-device bad taste that Silver Lining’s Playbook left me with. Yes, I enjoyed SLP, but I also had massive problems with it at the same time. Hustle gives over to its actors too much and apes Scorsese’s style pretty blatantly, but at least it’s also really fun and funny.
Except for that damn ending, and, look, I know endings are hard. Russell has said that after The Fighter and SLP, Hustle completes his thematic trilogy about redemption. And this wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t insist on giving the characters a “Happily Ever After”-style ending. That worked in Fighter because there was one of those in the real story, it was irksome and one of my points of contention over SLP and just feels plain wrong-headed here. These characters just committed a long-con on several people, helped indict numerous politicians and cost an FBI agent his job. Tell me how and why these people deserve a happy ending? It just feels so wrong based on everything that has gone before, not that the “bad guys win.” That doesn’t bother me, but tonally it stands in stark contrast to everything else that preceded it. It’s an imperfect film, but I would say that I enjoyed the hell out of it far more than anything else. Sure it’s showboating the actors, and the story is a beat all over the place, but sometimes a piece of pop entertainment is just what is needed on a Saturday night.
