Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2023. I’m so happy you’re here.
The movie we’ve come here to discuss is about crime, so let’s start with the crimes of its director, David O. Russell. On the set of Three Kings, he was such a dick to the lower-level staff that the gentlemanly George Clooney had to engage in fisticuffs. During the filming of I Heart Huckabees, he was caught on tape berating national treasure Lily Tomlin. But his worst crime (well, second worst, by a long shot) is what he (almost) did to Jennifer Lawrence’s career.
Let’s back up. To truly understand American Hustle, we must first consider the circumstances of Silver Linings Playbook, a romantic comedy about how dance cures mental illness with artificial stakes because it’s all based on a bet no one is enforcing. The movie was supposed to star Mark Wahlberg (far from the most cursed name I’m going to have to use in this piece) and Anne Hathaway, which actually makes a lot of sense! But Hathaway wasn’t having Russell’s shit and dropped out of the movie, so Harvey Weinstein (so cursed) caught Jennifer Lawrence on a hot streak and plopped her into the role, despite the fact that she was kinda young for it. The movie explains this away by having her say she’s “old enough to have a dead husband,” and yes, she’s very good, and a very charming interviewee, and we all love her for a reason, so she got an Oscar the same year Hathaway won for Les Mis. So all’s well, right?
Sure.
Hollywood loves nothing more than a winning formula, so Lawrence and her SLP co-star Bradley Cooper were quickly paired again for the alpine drama Serena, which no one saw or liked. Then Russell put them both in American Hustle, and though they basically had no scenes together, they were both on the poster, so people went to the theater. And then he put them together—with actual interaction this time—in Joy, a boring movie about mops, in which Lawrence just comes off too young to be a mom, and I guess the way she processed being constantly cast as a mom in her youth was to make mother!. And now, finally, she gets to be the hot young girl we always knew she was (No Hard Feelings was fun, you guys!).
So, American Hustle. The trailer makes it look like the second coming of Boogie Nights. It’s not! It’s more like an imitation of The Wolf of Wall Street, which came out the same year. I saw it twice in theaters—I don’t remember why, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with my parents being divorced, so sometimes I ended up seeing things twice. And the movie is not exactly subtle, OK? It employs multiple expository voiceovers and title cards to guide the viewer through the real-life story it’s based on: the ’70s sting operation known as ABSCAM. And even after seeing it twice with all the details laid out for me, I could not tell you what ABSCAM was. And I’m a smart person! Confuse me once, shame on me. Confuse me twice, your movie is too confusing. Write that down.
The trailer makes it look like the second coming of Boogie Nights. It’s not! It’s more like an imitation of The Wolf of Wall Street, which came out the same year.
In general, Russell has an annoying habit of not trusting his audience. After all the action of Silver Linings Playbook has happened, and we’re about to go into the final here’s-how-it-ends-up resolution scene, he inserts basically a slideshow of locations from earlier in the movie, as if to remind the viewer of what they just watched, even though they just watched it. During one memorable scene in Joy, Bradley Cooper takes Jennifer Lawrence to a TV studio and points at different activities swirling around them, going, “Look! Look!” as the camera follows his gaze. Yes! We are looking! This is your movie!
So, anyway, my main questions going into this rewatch were, “Was I right that Jen and Amy Adams should have switched roles?” And, “Will I understand ABSCAM this time?” Answers: No, and sorta.
Adams and Christian Bale (who, having recently conquered Getting Really Skinny For A Role with The Machinist, here tries his hand at Getting Really Fat For A Role) play con artists in love who are caught by the feds (Cooper) and promised a get-out-of-jail-free card if they can get four more crooks to take their place. Lawrence plays Bale’s unstable wife while Jeremy Renner is the New Jersey mayor who gets caught up in the elaborate scheme once it grows bigger and more out of control. Unfortunately, Louis C.K. is also in the movie as Cooper’s boss, and even more unfortunately, he’s very funny.
It should have been a comedy! Somewhere in this two-hour-and-20-minute no-thrill ride is an hour and 45 minutes of Ocean’s Eleven–style heist-y fun. The performances are good, the twists are solid, the costumes are excellent. Russell knows how to shoot his actors entering a scene to the sounds of an obvious needle drop (men of a certain age think “Dirty Work” is the greatest song ever written, for some reason), and Adams is spray tanned to the gods. Truly, she glows. Yeah, the movie is mostly yellow, because for some reason Hollywood decided that the ’70s were yellow, and yeah, the epigraph (“Some of this actually happened”) undercuts any actual point of view the movie might have on its events (which makes no difference, since the movie doesn’t have anything to say), but some of it is OK and clearly everyone’s relishing the opportunity to act coked up!
Somewhere in this two-hour-and-20-minute no-thrill ride is an hour and 45 minutes of Ocean’s Eleven–style heist-y fun.
No, no one’s developed, neither the men nor the women (though it’s more obvious with the women). Adams is a fighter (evidence? We’re told she is) who’s special because she liked Duke Ellington, while poor J Law does her best with character traits like “obsessed with the smell of her nail polish” and scenes like “lights her microwave on fire because she’s too stubborn to not put metal in it.” And just when you think the movie was kind of a fun time, they make her aggressively clean her house while singing “Live and Let Die” for the benefit of her young son.
“Fuckin’ Jimmy Carter. Fuckin’ Nixon, really. And the war and the deficit and all that shit.” Do people talk like this? Did they then?
ABSCAM was about entrapping a mayor who was trying to build a casino. Amy Adams laughs hysterically on the toilet and never fucks Bradley Cooper because I think we’re…supposed to root for her and Christian Bale and she’s allowed to sexually manipulate an FBI agent as long as she doesn’t use actual sex? De Niro is there to add nothing to the plot except to remind the audience that A) David O. Russell has seen Goodfellas and B) David O. Russell has Robert De Niro’s number from when he was in Silver Linings Playbook and C) This Movie Is Going To Get Oscar Buzz Whether You Like It Or Not.
I didn’t see Amsterdam. I heard it was bad. It’s sad that Taylor Swift got roped into it. But you know who escaped Russell’s clutches? Katniss Everdeen, baby. Good for her. FL
