Sunday, April 20, 2014

American Hustle (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                  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.

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