Saw it. I think it's near my favorite DOR film, just behind I Heart Huckabees and neck and neck with Three Kings.
What I like about those movies is it is that none of those three are too preoccupied with plot. It's about the film's thesis, that is in hyper-text, and how the characters live within that thesis. What annoyed me about Silver Linings Playbook, that I merely thought was okay, was it appeared that Harvey Weinstein enforced DOR to be about plot, which meant the entire film's third act was about wrapping things up with a bow. Russell talks about how the film's original edit was a completely different, even darker film than what was shown in theaters. Here with American Hustle, it is DOR simply knowing there is an end to the story. He made the movie under Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures that gave us The Master last year- Ellison notably pushed for Paul Thomas Anderson's cut not getting any interference from Weinstein, who distributed, which Weinstein spun as blame for the film being a financial flop (like any movie with Freddie Quell as your lead was going to do boffo at the box office). DOR does seem to have more free reign here like many other of Ellison's collaborators. Not because 'the bad guys won' in the end of this film but like most of DOR's films, nobody is a bad guy*, it truly feels like an ensemble piece with no studio edit on being one actor's particular showcase, only one character has any semblance of a backstory, and the film, as I noted before, could not give a flip about plot. There is that running gag between Cooper's Richie and Louis CK's FBI guy where the straight-laced Midwesterner CK is trying to tell Richie a story about ice-fishing and Richie could not be any less interested because he is expects a cliched lesson with each different telling and even at one point insists to know the ending. To me that was DOR being rather devilishly meta about how the lessons and plot in this film are secondary. It is about the characters finding more comfort in lies and constructs of their creation.
What also really endeared me to this film was the throwback nature to it. People insist it's a Scorsese rip-off or DOR is doing a Casino/Goodfellas retread. To me it is a Preston Sturges/Cukor/LaCava comedy in Martin Scorsese clothing- and that's because I associate DOR more with Cukor, LaCava, and Sturges than Scorsese. People can tell me about the musical cues of period rock music being a Scorsese touch but that's like saying any movie with a longtake is a rip-off of Orson Welles. To me the figure people are suggesting is getting 'ripped off' is such a giant in cinema that yeah, many filmmakers will follow certain cues because they are now essential. With that said, I dare Scorsese to make a film with two original female characters as realized in their performances as Amy Adams' Sydney/Edith and Jennifer Lawrence's Rosalyn. Scorsese has often said female characters are not his strength, he's aware of it even when his biggest defenders don't. DOR is actually pretty even-handed in his depictions of gender and the film plays to those strengths. Both Adams and Lawrence had my audience eating out of their hands.
But really, everyone is good. I cannot really say who is the best but to me everyone was impressive in their own unique ways. I loved Bradley Cooper as the volatile doucheboat he was born to play while also being this pathetic, possibly sexually repressed Catholic Italian-American whose payback you never realize you enjoyed watching until it happens. I want him and Louis CK to play Abbott & Costello archetypes in a comedy. Jennifer Lawrence's role is small and while I really wish the other cast members besides her got the critic awards spotlight, her Judy Holliday vulnerable dumb blonde to me worked better than what I ever expected. Yes, she scored laughs but her dramatic moment of when she tells Jack Huston's character she's afraid she'll die before she can ever change was a wonderful moment. I liked her more here than in Silver Linings Playbook. **shrugs** Bale seems to be getting less kudos because it feels DeNiro-esque (he even meets eye to eye with DeNiro, for goodness sakes) and how his physical transformation seems so manufactured but to me DOR and Bale work to bring a humanist touch to Irving. We see Richie mess up his hair and his elaborate ritual and I feel kind of bad for how much effort he puts in and his scenes with Rosalyn and Sydney are gold. He plays reactive to those two very well and maybe that's not what gets awards, but I haven't liked Bale this much since The Prestige. Adams and DOR need to work together all the time, if I had my way. That he reintroduced a mass audience to a pretty well-known actress in finally having an assertive sexuality and vulnerability, where her Mary Sue doe eyes are now these eyes that can carry scenes without a word, are an amazing testament and reinvention of Adams. Jeremy Renner is a solid and not simply perfunctory. He is believable as this nice son of immigrants who believes in carrying out the greater good for his state and city who has no idea how much he is destroying his name, city's progress, and family in the process. I like after playing guys with screws loose in The Hurt Locker and The Town he is just playing a straight-laced family man.
The film's accuracy to the real story is loose but I think there could be a criticism in that the wrong people got fingered for the sake of scoring one for the FBI. People might not like that but considering how much the film mentions it being a post-Watergate, horrific time in America, a manufactured sting operation that stemmed from other criminals protecting their skin, that often does happen, feels like a hollow victory. You have that final Irving-Carmine confrontation for a reason. But still, to say the movie has a plot is generous. Quite frankly, Lawrence's Rosalyn functions like the Coens stated the cat does in Inside Llewyn Davis. When she enters, the stakes and tensions arise.
Anyway, I feel like this movie is the crowd-pleaser and awards threat it was made out to be. A few people will immediately assert that it is just a middling film with stars, but I feel like there is a humanist touch to this movie, so enjoyably character-driven, and so militantly old school. I'm sure if there was a scandal like Abscam in the '30s, DOR would've made it but why do that when you have those costumes and that music catalog?
*- I know, I know, Richie is kind of a 'bad guy' but he felt like a lost man-child that I felt bad for when he had that pretty stubborn reaction to Sydney telling him the truth.
ALSO: Anybody notice that a lot of the trailers had a lot of footage not in the film, or better yet felt like it had a different take than what was on the screen?
Updated On: 12/29/13 at 10:52 PM
