American Hustle (5/5 Stars)

The feel of this movie reminded me of a great Hall of Fame Rock and Roll concert. You know those concerts where they induct a great musician and all his friends get up on the stage and they play all the great songs songs and everything is great. ‘American Hustle,’ the new movie by David O. Russell feels like that. It has an incredible cast and a plot that allows every actor the opportunity to do some really throw down acting. In essence this movie is acting in that it is about people who are reinventing themselves in order to pull off scams and sting operations. The backdrop of the movie is the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal in which several members of Congress were convicted of taking bribes from an Arab sheik that in reality was an undercover FBI agent. It should be noted however that almost none of the movie is true. The names of the Congressmen are the same but all the FBI agents and con artists are fictional characters. As the movie’s opening subtitle states, “Some of this actually happened.” So expect fiction as a default not the other way around. In terms of storytelling this strategy is an unambiguous success in that it allows the actors to make very broad dramatic choices with their performances without the inherent worry that a movie inspired by real events usually has, i.e. that they are unfairly slighting real people.

The main quartet of actors involves the con artist team of Christian Bale and Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper as the FBI agent, and Jennifer Lawrence as the housewife of Christian Bale. In supporting roles are Jeremy Renner as the main target of the sting, Mayor Carmine Polito, Louis C.K. as Bradley Cooper’s long suffering supervisor, and Robert De Niro as the mobster who appears to get a cut of the deal when the original sting starts getting escalated way out of hand.

This is the third great movie of David O. Russell about redemption and reinvention. “The Fighter” was about a down and out boxer who came back as a champion. “Silver Linings Playbook” was about a manic-depressive fresh from a stint in a mental asylum trying to get his life back on track. “American Hustle” draws from both movies in terms of theme and cast. From “The Fighter” are Christian Bale and Amy Adams and from “Silver Linings Playbook” are Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro. Making their debut in a David O. Russel movie is Jeremey Renner and Louis C.K. It is no mistake that actors in the last two movies were nominated for Oscars (Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, and Jacki Weaver were nominated. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Jennifer Lawrence won) and this movie should be no different. The only question is who gets nominated and who wins because almost every performance is worthy of it.

Christian Bale plays Irving the main con artist. For this role, Christian Bale that most humble/masochistic of actors decided to gain sixty pounds and sport an elaborate comb-over. There are very few actors in movies that would gain an ungainly amount of weight (or lose it!) to portray a fictional character. Perhaps the best thing though about his performance is his willingness to support all his fellow actors. Irving is a soft-spoken kind of guy who spends his time trying to bring everybody else in the cast back from the brink of insane shenanigans. It also helps that he has all that weight because he moves slower than everybody else.

The opposite side of the coin is the manic cocaine-addled performance of Bradley Cooper as the over-ambitious FBI agent that snags the con artists and employs them to catch bigger game. This man is all sound and fury and not so much thinking. Louis C.K. plays his long suffering supervisor and the interactions between the two are some of the funniest in the movie what with Bradley yelling and screaming and Louis C.K. doing the definitive embarrassed put upon Louis C.K. performance. At the same time however, the Bradley Cooper character of Richie Tomaso is the most tragic. I won’t give away how everything turns out but the treatment of the FBI agent says a lot about how David O. Russel probably feels about the ABSCAM scandal in general. It was a bad thing wasn’t it because after all everybody in politics in beholden to money anyway (just not in an illegal way) and what exactly is the point of entrapping people who do not have a history of criminal behavior.

Amy Adams puts in several performances as a stripper from Alburquerque who moves to New York and somehow finagles her way into a job at Cosmopolitan magazine before falling in love with Irving and becoming a British financier with royal connections in their respective scams. After the FBI catches Amy and Christian she pretends to fall in love with Bradley (or does she pretend?) in order to have just one more trick in the bag if things go south. She is playing just about everyone. It is a very bold performance by Amy Adams and perhaps the most complex character she has ever created.

Rounding out the main cast is Jennifer Lawrence, the wildcard. She plays the housewife of Irving whose reckless impulsiveness is guided by the fact that she knows nothing of what is going on. The funniest scene in the movie involves Irving bringing home a new invention, a “science oven,” as a gift from the man he is conning. He tells J-Rentz to not put any metal in it but doesn’t say why. So she puts metal in it almost immediately and microwave bursts into flames all over the house. Here’s the exact quote: “Don’t put metal in the science oven. Don’t put metal in the science oven. He’s always treating me like a fucking child. I do what I want.” BOOM!

As much of a character as anything else are the little details that inhabit the movie: Christian’s combover, Amy Adams revealing dresses, Bradley Cooper’s curlers, J-Rentz furs, Jeremey Renner singing Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah,’ Duke Ellington’s role in two characters falling in love, the thump and grind of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times,’ a trip to the disco with Bradley and Amy, Louis’ story about ice fishing, the Mexican-American Arab sheik, a pool party in the middle of the winter, and the purity and goodness of mayor Carmine Polito and his family. Everything about this movie is exceptional. But above all, “American Hustle” cares deeply about these exciting, fun, and charming people that care deeply about what they are doing and who they want to be. They fight, they laugh, they cry, they sing, they scream, they cheat and tell the truth, and they live and fall in love. It was a wonderful experience to spend a few short hours in their company.

If anything, this will be the Best Original Screenplay of the year. Hands down. It’s great. 

Silver Linings Playbook (5/5 Stars)

White-Knuckling It

“Yeah about a week before the incident I called the cops and I told them that my wife and the history guy were plotting against me by embezzling money from the local high school which… wasn’t true. It was a delusion. And we later found out from the hospital that it’s because I’m uh….undiagnosed bipolar.”

- Pat

It turns out that Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, had been white-knuckling his mental disorder for most of his life without the proper help. Then one day he walked in on his wife with another man, snapped, and nearly beat the other guy to death. He was arrested. The court ordered him to spend eight months in a psychiatric institute. As the movie starts just about as he is to leave the hospital. How do you know that he still might have a problem? Well, he is in his late 30s. He has lost his wife, his job, most of his friends, and his home and is moving back in with his parents. The kicker though is that he is very optimistic about his chances of getting all of it back especially his wife even though she sought and received a restraining order against him. His plan involves not taking his medication, getting in shape by running around the neighborhood while wearing a garbage bag (for the sweat you see), and reading his ex-wife’s summer reading list for the high school English class she is teaching. His parents, played by Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver worriedly try to impose some sort of reality on him to no avail. Until that is he has a couple of rage induced episodes at 4am in the morning brought upon such trivial matters as not being able to find his wedding video and a not-so-happy ending to Hemingway’s  “Farewell to Arms” that end up waking up the entire street and getting the police invited over to the house. And at that point after the subsequent mood swing and humiliation set in, he finally and sadly realizes that he simply cannot white-knuckle it anymore. He still needs help.

The director of Silver Linings Playbook is David O. Russell, a filmmaker who is the preeminent authority in cinema on eccentric slightly crazy families. Other must-see movies he has made about these types of people are “Flirting with Disaster” starring Ben Stiller and “The Fighter” starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. There is such a degree of authenticity to these off-kilter movies that it would not surprise me a bit if David O. Russell came from an extremely dysfunctional family himself. He has had huge blowups and arguments on the sets of his movies before (George Clooney won’t ever work with him again after “Three Kings” and there is a video on YouTube that involves him getting supremely pissed off at Lily Tomlin on the set of “I Heart Huckabees”) and has freely admitted that one of the reasons he was inspired to make “Silver Linings Playbook” was his own son’s issues with depression. Like the father and son in this movie, I think that it is likely the Russells have mental illness in their genes. But let me be clear: whatever ‘crazy’ David O. Russell does have in him, it is definitely the kind that borders with brilliance.

Great directors tend to have signature styles. Some are so strong that it becomes easy to spot their stories with or without knowing beforehand who directed it. You can’t really mistake an Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick movie with any other director’s movie. Contemporary moviegoers should also be able to pick out the latest Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, or Quentin Tarantino movie without much help. David O. Russell too has a very recognizable style but it is itself a very unique unique style. Whereas most of the time a great director’s films are characterized by clarity of vision or a certainty in which types of camera movements and angles they use, Russell’s style is impenetrably chaotic. There is a kinetic shakiness and unpredictability to the camera movements that lend his movies a disconcerting rhythm. He is doing something behind the camera that I do not understand. And yet it still works and given the subject matter is perhaps the best way to tell a story.  

And he is an amazing writer too. His movies are always insightful, original, and funny. One of the ways you can tell a movie has very good writing is when awards season comes along and most of the cast is nominated for awards. And right now Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro (playing Pat Senior), and Jennifer Lawrence (playing Tiffany, a recently widowed and equally damaged love interest) are being considered for all kinds of awards. My favorite scenes include the pharmaceutical shoptalk between Pat and Tiffany at a dinner party about what kind of drugs they have taken, Pat Sr.’s OCD obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles, and the ballroom dancing contest. Yes, there is also some really not that bad dancing in this movie. The writing can be said to be so good that it got Chris Tucker out of retirement. You might remember him. His last movie was a lead role opposite Jackie Chan in “Rush Hour 3.” That was in 2007. His last movie before then was 2001’s “Rush Hour 2.” So basically he has been retired for ten years. Chris is one of those rare cases where a movie star quits after starting to pull in $20 million a movie in salary. He just did not want to act anymore. But, inexplicably, here he is as Danny, a friend of Bradley’s from the mental institution. He pops into the movie a couple of times after illegally breaking out of the asylum.

I would say the only real problem with this movie is the casting of Jennifer Lawrence. She does not do a terrible job but I bet somebody else could have done it better. The character calls for an emotionless deadpan performance sure, but there are emotionless deadpan performances and then there are emotional deadpan performances that nonetheless convey every single emotion the person is feeling anyway. Go ahead and rent an Aubrey Plaza movie, either “Safety Not Guaranteed” or the TV show “Parks and Recreation” and you will see what I mean. Jennifer Lawrence may just get a nomination for this movie, but I figure that has less to do with her talent and more to do with the fact Tiffany is an extremely well written role combined with the fact that the supporting actress category always has notoriously few well-written roles, this year being no exception. Any competent actress probably would have had a chance to be nominated.

Oh and this movie has a much better ending than “Farewell to Arms.”

The Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”