2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2013
The Abscam scandal! I have carried the sound of those words in my
mind somewhere ever since the late 1970s when it became a headline, but I never
made a study of it or pinpointed the details for my own education, and when I
read these thirty-five years later that “American Hustle” pertains to it, I
could not for the life of me remember what it was about. Maybe after Watergate I felt I had had enough
of national scandal to last me for a lifetime and instinctively let it pass me
by. Fortunately since that time the
Internet has emerged, and those details are now easy to come by. I suggest that anyone who has seen the
picture, or plans to do so, go on line and investigate. It has to do with a sting operation conducted
by the FBI in 1978 that was aimed at exposing alleged government
corruption.
In my recent review of the
1999 movie drama “The Insider,” I expressed some thoughts about what a
docudrama is, as opposed to a screenplay loosely “based on a true story” or a
whitewash designed to improve the image of a popular figure. I explained that a docudrama is a dramatic
enactment that follows actual events quite closely, an authentic examination of
vibrant facts and developments intended to arrive at the truth latent in those
events. I hailed “The Insider” as an
outstanding high quality example and I referred to “All the President’s Men”
(1976) as another. Let me make it clear
from the outset that “American Hustle” is not a docudrama. Whatever might be said to be good about it as
biting entertainment – and it does a lot of biting and with much professional
relish – it goes its own way, only (again, the word) loosely related to the
facts. I mean, l-o-o-s-e-l-y! I do appreciate the way the disclaimer at the
beginning is worded: “Some of this actually happened.” How refreshing! Nothing formal sounding! That is the closest any film derived in any way
from fact has ever come to being totally honest about the suspected veracity of
its content.
Abscam is a contraction for
Arab Scam, the code name given by the FBI to a scheme it cooked up with a
professional con artist (granted immunity from prosecution) to help entrap
trusted members of Congress and a Camden, New Jersey mayor into exposing
themselves as corrupt. They arranged for
a man to pose as a wealthy Arab sheik who is desirous of contributing some of
his millions to the redevelopment of Atlantic City, particularly for the
construction of gambling casinos, which were purportedly to raise needed
revenue for the area. The targeted
individuals were offered payoffs from this phony sheik’s largess with a
surveillance camera planted to film them accepting the payoff. Many arrests were made and the operation
became big hot subject news across the nation.
The FBI took a lot of heat for its methodology in gathering this
evidence, and the movie gives them yet more heat. I cannot imagine any Bureau official viewing
it without coming close to having a cerebral hemorrhage. The agency has not been treated with a great deal
of kindness in the movies of recent decades, but what it endures this time out
is about as close to outright slander as a motion picture can get.
But do not let this stop
anyone from screening it. There are five
quite fascinating fictional characters involved in the movie’s plot. A Bronx man named Irving Rosenfeld, played
with sneaky understatement but visible tension by Christian Bale, is an
accomplished con artist. He lines
himself up with a young woman-on-the-make, Sidney Posser (Amy Adams), from a
backwater childhood, who turns out to be even cleverer at the rip-off than he
is and manages to take his duplicitous operation into a more ambitious
territory, she turning herself into the likeness of a high society British lady
of manners named Edith. Voiceovers let
us in on the thoughts and motivations that attract them to each other. They are thriving just fine until FBI agent
Richie Dimaso (Bradley Cooper) catches them in a swindle. Dimaso, however, is so impressed with their
talent that he decides to employ them in a shifty scheme to obtain convictions
of high-flying public figures, while he himself is more than a little seduced
by the phony lady of Britain. Dimaso is
a supercharged, hot-tempered man of insatiable desire for success, hungry for
arrests and convictions. He bites the
hardest of all.
And then there is Roslyn,
Irving’s manipulative and unpredictable wife, played with irresistible flair
and in your face bravura by the remarkable Jennifer Lawrence. The main string by which she holds onto
Irving is her little boy, whom Irving adopted when they married and whom the
adoptive father does not want to separate from.
This tie he feels to the kid serves to complicate plans Sidney/Edith has
for having the man all to herself. And
finally there is the Camden mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), a bighearted
politician without guile who with the best of innocent intentions gets caught
in the net that Irving and Dimaso and the FBI are spinning for him and others.
One of these five at a very
heated moment of confrontation waxes proverbial: “All you have sometimes are poisonous, f----d
up choices.” This has the sound of a
topical sentence amidst the flurry of sordid words that run just about the full
course of this movie’s dialogue. Any one
of the five except Carmine could have said it and it would have rung true. You could call the script a roundelay of
passive/aggressive behavior seasoned with the distillation of sex, betrayal,
and conspiracy. Others have called it a
wild comedy, but I must confess that I found little to laugh about in it, wild
and quirky though it may be. But there
is nothing quirky about a climactic scene in which Irving has to confess to
Carmine what he has done to mislead and deceive him. It is about as heartbreaking a moment as you
are ever likely to view. It is difficult
to tell which is the cruelest, the admitted deception or the painful
truth.
The neat thing about these
people is the fact that all of them, as self-assertive as they are, reveal quite
visible insecurities and vulnerabilities, and we never know which side of each
personality will show up from scene to scene, which keeps us on our toes. There are many surprise reactions to stimuli. They all play fast and loose with
options. But Director David O. Russell
(who recently scored big with “Silver Linings Playbook”) and his screenwriter
Eric Warren Singer have done an amazing job of finding the very human core in
each individual. The soundtrack is a bit
raucous, but none of its thunder or rattle ever interferes with this process,
thanks not only to Russell and his gift for originality but to superb and
inspired acting on the part of all the major players, especially the
women. And the movie is never allowed to
turn slick; the ride is bumpy all the way.
We are left trying to imagine
how all these compromised parties will live with themselves during the
remainder of their lives. What kind of
future relationship will Irving have with his adopted son? How will Roslyn fare with the drastic and
desperate choice she makes? At what
price will any form of respectability be required of any of them?
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn
about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment