Review: ‘American Hustle’

So now David O. Russell has gone three-for-three in terms of putting out movies that are both crowd-pleasing and critically praised, no small feat for a guy who had his Jessica Biel political sex comedy taken away from him by an insurance company due to production troubles, leaving Russell with no movie and no prospects at the time.

After recovering nicely with the well made “The Fighter” and then following that up with the award-winning “Silver Linings Playbook,” here we have his version of a rollicking 1990’s Martin Scorsese movie, as “American Hustle” is filled with knowing voice overs, astute period details, great performances from an array of great actors, great musical choices blasting on the soundtrack, and features a fantastic juggling act of different characters and storylines that all come together so nicely.

Loosely based on the Abscam FBI stings of the 1970s and 1980s, “American Hustle” is about a pair of con artists (Christian Bale, Amy Adams) avoiding federal prison time by agreeing to work with an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) to take down a series of people on federal charges, starting with a well meaning New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) and working outwards from there. But really it is not so much about the actual sting operations than it is about the characters and people involved in this whole thing. And of course just about all the character names have been changed, allowing for more creative license so they can have these characters say and do whatever they need them to say and do in order to tell their story, without having to worry about the real life people getting upset at the perceived misrepresentations of this fictional retelling of a real story.

And these are some strongly sketched out and interesting characters, to say the least. Here we have yet another towering performance from Christian Bale, as we get to see him play this great con man characters just a couple of weeks after we saw him play a down and out Pennsylvania blue collar worker in “Out of the Furnace,” and of course it helps that he gets to share many scenes with two of the best actresses working right now in Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, who plays his wife and has her own craziness and issues and complexities that all make for a fascinating performance of a remarkable character. And with both Cooper and Renner also turning in some career best work and really the whole movie is just a pleasure to watch from that standpoint alone. David O. Russell has long been a director who somehow gets great work from his actors over and over, and “American Hustle” is no exception.

With this focus on characters, we have a movie about relationships, marriages and affairs and friendships, and how these relationships change and morph as people use and ultimately abuse each other, sometimes in the name of love, sometimes not. And this is a sign of a great movie in which the most scumbaggy characters in the beginning of the film end up being some of the most sympathetic by the end, and while you may not want to actually encounter these types of folks or would ever want anything to do with them, you still find sorry for them a little, you might even empathize with some of their predicaments, and that’s interesting considering how shitty some of these people turn out to be.

David O. Russell seems to excel at stories about characters in the margins of society, whether they be con artists or washed up boxers or the institutionalized or the existentially lost or the adopted children searching in vain for their birth parents, people whom the average viewer would not immediately identify with, and he peels back the layers on these people, sometimes painfully, until we all see the universal truths of life reflected in their lives and in our own. “American Hustle” is the same way, whether we identify with the ambition of the con artists or overzealous FBI agent or even the seemingly corrupt political folks, or their struggles to get what they want, or even their regrets in taking the paths they have chosen, there is something for everyone to connect to in this movie, no matter how specific these characters and place setting are, because Russell finds those truths and puts that on display and that’s why people are responding to his movies they way they have been lately.

Highly recommended, “American Hustle” should be seen by everyone and see it soon because it is quite great.