Beginning a major Hollywood picture with a bald guy working on a comb-over isn’t the most obvious of artistic choices. American Hustle starts with Christian Bale, paunchy and fleshy and in decidedly non-Dark Knight shape, fixing his thinning hair with a watchman’s precision. He glues down a massive comb-over and maneuvers a monstrous toupee before the coup de grâce: dousing the hirsute creation with nearly half a can of hairspray.
A bald guy who fools no one is a fitting ruse to begin David O. Russell’s loping and loopy caper set in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The story is loosely based on ABSCAM, the 1980 FBI sting operation that netted bribery convictions of a handful of U.S. congressmen. The key word, however, is loosely. That scandal merely provides a chessboard on which Russell and co-screenwriter Eric Singer can move around a motley group of cons, crooks and cops.
The swindling high life of the aforementioned baldie, Irving Rosenfeld (Bale), and his business partner/mistress, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), comes to a screeching halt when they are busted trying to run a con on an undercover FBI agent. The arresting lawman, a manic macho man named Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), has greater ambitions. He coerces the pair to help nab the mayor of Camden, N.J., (Jeremy Renner) and other politicians into taking bribes from a fictional sheik. Irving and Sydney grudgingly agree.
Alliances spring up and shift in what becomes a love triangle. Richie falls for Sydney, an ex-stripper who has convinced him and the world that she is British nobility. And Irving’s ostensibly street-smart toughness begins to soften when he sees that the pompadoured mayor isn’t your run-of-the-mill corrupt politician. Con games blur as characters reinvent themselves, whether that invention is as modest as Irving’s hairpiece or as elaborate as Sydney’s “Lady Edith” charade. “My dream, more than anything else,” Sydney confides in voiceover, “was to become anyone other than who I was.”
Whoever these characters really are, or want to be, American Hustle is too humanistic not to celebrate their glorious instability. Irving, Sydney and Richie are emotionally volatile and altogether delusional about the degree of power they think they wield. Russell adores these broken people, and that affection extends to Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Jennifer Lawrence), Irving’s scheming, irresponsible powder-keg wife.
Lawrence is clearly having a ball as “the Picasso of passive-aggressive,” as Irving puts it. The cast is uniformly hilarious. Bale, sporting rose-tinted glasses and an impressive gut, delivers one of his customarily chameleon-like performances. Adams is a particular revelation, and not just because her period wardrobe is more than revealing. Bale, Adams, Cooper and Lawrence all snagged Oscar acting nominations.
With its constantly roving camera, voiceover narration from multiple characters, period detail and wall-to-wall pop music, American Hustle invites comparisons to other, greater movies with a similar vibe, especially Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. But Russell is no imitator. His characters are warmer, quirkier and a helluva lot funnier. In a year of terrific movies, American Hustle was among the best of 2013.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 