Russell: American Hustle (2013)

A loose dramatisation of the FBI ABSCAM operation of the late 70s and early 80s, American Hustle essentially plays out as a love triangle between a pair of con artists, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), and the FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), appointed to coerce them into a sting operation designed to take down a selection of corrupt senators. By this point in time, the 70s period piece has been well and truly exhausted, let alone the 70s true crime period piece, so it’s a credit to David O. Russell and his cast that they aim for nothing more than to exhaust it, ramping up the inventory of hairpieces and accessories until we’re presented with a prosthetic 70s, the kind of hyperbolic pastness that’s more typical of an older, nostalgic brand of musical theatre. And great swathes of the film could be played as a musical, or a musical seguing into rock opera – the soundtrack is front and centre, with the characters actually lipsyncing to several of the songs, particularly Irving’s estranged wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who steals the film as the epicentre of all that’s gloriously kitsch and exhausted about it. As in some of the most memorable musicals, the characters veer vertiginously between extreme introspection and extroversion – which also works perfectly for a con film centred on a love triangle – while Russell’s trademark dialogue has never felt closer to soliloquising into an improvisational life of its own, sometimes manically, sometimes lyrically; every staccato exchange feels on the verge of condensing into a patter song or expanding into a rock ballad. That gives the film a tragicomic bathos, epitomised by Louis C.K.’s small but pivotal role as Richie’s boss Stoddard Thorsen – a role that pretty much consists of continually trying to get out one of his typically bittersweet stand-up anecdotes, only to be continually intercepted before we can discover whether it ends comically or tragically. In fact, most of the characters are little more than a couple of power riffs, all of them subsumed into Rosalyn’s choric refrain that the best perfumes always have something rotten about them, just as the most exquisite flowers thrive on garbage. That summarises the film, which is committed to giving you too much of a good thing, hustling you into the same nauseating complicity with its mythology that made Goodfellas so queasily wonderful; Robert de Niro’s cameo is spot on. In other words, a film you smell before you see, moving almost subliminally from ambient to illbient, like a decade going rotten before your eyes.