The Seventies were hairy. There’s no getting away from it. No wonder Christian Bale’s character in American Hustle goes to great lengths to construct a complicated comb-over/wig arrangement every morning. Irving Rosenthal is a con artist who has taken the whole Seventies gold bling vibe to heart. We see something of his life in flashback, but director David O Russell is not really interested in how the characters got where they are. Rather he shows us the human interactions between Irving, his depressed wife Rosalyn played by Jennifer Lawrence, girlfriend Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and the rest of the ensemble cast.
Irving Rosenfeld is fat, and unfashionable. He runs a chain of dry cleaners, deals in stolen art and hustles for a living. He meets Sydney over a shared love of jazz and with her fake English accent and pretend banking connections they develop his method of scamming – taking money for the promise of a future loan. Though no one ever gets a loan this seems to have no comeuppance and all their victims appear to go off happily into the night – until the FBI get involved. To avoid prison Irving has to help catch some big fish for the authorities. Cue a complicated tale of bribes and undercover recording as Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent Richie diMaso raises the stakes until they are going after corrupt mayors and politicians.
A title at the start of the film tells us that ‘Some of these events happened’. That’s not very informative, but whether you take it as a true story or a complete fiction the award-winning American Hustle is surprisingly suspenseful. Christian Bale turns in a winning, understated performance, helped by a growling voice and the weight of Seventies clothes which he wears. Bow ties were so big back then. He makes Irving’s character sympathetic, even though he is a beer-bellied crook who sees stealing expensive clothes as one of the perks of owning a dry-cleaners. Irving is not an honest man, but he’s not a bleak antihero we can’t identify with – he loves his adopted son and cares about his estranged wife, though he memorably describes her as ‘…the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate’.
Filmed in muted colours with wide aperture lenses this is a luscious looking tale of the effects of greed and ambition. Ostensibly about grifters and conmen the film is also about the complexity of relationships. The grift is a background to the power struggles between the characters. Everyone is fooling themselves, the film tells us. We only see what we want to see – that is what allows conmen to be successful. These charlatans may be taking it to extremes, but the impulse to ignore everything but what fits with our ideas is inherent in us all.
With a cameo by Robert de Niro (…Niro! Computer please stop autocorrecting to Robert de Biro…), Rosalyn’s first encounter with a microwave oven and the hip visual reproduction of the Seventies there’s plenty to enjoy on screen. You might be uncertain just who is scamming who, especially when the mafia get involved, but lean back and enjoy the vibe, it will all be explained in the end.
The Flaneur saw American Hustle at the Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue. Something about the name Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue suggests that it is on Shaftesbury Avenue, but it’s actually on Coventry Street – on the first floor of the Trocadero centre. Seven screens of the latest blockbusters and the James Bond theme playing as you wait for the film to start. The adverts and trailers before the film were enlivened with an interactive quiz using the Cinime app. I hadn’t downloaded the app so couldn’t take part, but next time I intend to win.
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