American Hustle Movie Review

          Irving Rosenfeld, the con man working the great scam in “American Hustle,” isn’t, his mistress admits, a lot to look at. He has a stomach the size of a beer keg and a torturously complicated comb-over that he arranges with the fastidiousness of a Michelin-starred pastry chef. Appearances aren't all the pieces to Irving (Christian Bale), however fairly just part of the swindle that's his life’s work, his passion and genius. The boldness game is his honey pot: It’s what strains his pockets, lights his fire and cigars, and has remodeled the mistress, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), into his equal in theft and dissimulation, making her the Rosalind Russell to his Cary Grant in a romp that’s pure Scorsese screwball.

          Only the director here is David O. Russell, who, greater than every other modern American filmmaker, has reinvigorated screwball comedy, partly by insisting that women and men speak to one another. To that end, that chatter, written by Mr. Russell and Eric Warren Singer, is fast, soiled, intemperate, hilarious and largely in service to the art of the con, specifically the Abscam scandal that almost incidentally impressed the story. The true scandal dates again to 1978 and an F.B.I. investigation into political corruption that discovered agents posing as rich sheikhs anxious to purchase off public officials. (Abscam was short for Arab scam, or the nominally much less derogatory Abdul scam.) The swindle netted a trove of greasy-palmed politicians, but in addition charges of entrapment.

          The movie tracks the scandal primarily from the points of view of Irving and Sydney, whose he-mentioned, she-said voice-overs are interspersed with adenoidal dispatches from his stay-at-house wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). After setting the up to date scene, Mr. Russell cuts again to Irving’s childhood, sketching in the con man’s background with brief, humorous scenes and a devil-might-care tackle criminality that pointedly mirrors the trajectory of Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas.” Like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose period bacchanal “Boogie Nights” also borrows from “GoodFellas,” Mr. Russell is a cinematic Son of Scorsese. Yet while his swooping cameras and motor-mouth characters observe within the virtuosic wake of Mr. Scorsese, they’re equally beholden to Mr. Scorsese’s own influences, together with the Golden Hollywood likes of the director Raoul Walsh.

            Mr. Scorsese as soon as referred to as Walsh’s 1939 put up-World-Conflict-I crime movie, “The Roaring Twenties,” a “twisted Horatio Alger story,” a thumbnail description that also fits “American Hustle.” Corrupt politicos and a federal Venus’ flytrap give the movie a veneer of topicality, and there’s lots in it that matches up with the historical record, including the role performed by Irving’s true-crime counterpart, a Bronx-born swindler named Mel Weinberg. Even so, Mr. Russell doesn’t appear all that interested in veracity, and the film opens with a playful assurance that “some of this actually occurred,” a declaration that feels calculated to block off-point objections that a few of it didn’t happen. Details have been changed, and everyone, as is commonly the case in films, looks younger and prettier, less lumpy and beaten down by life than the original players, even Irving and his magnificently tragic, trumped-up hair.






              The eye that Irving bestows on his mop - the movie opens with him whipping it up right into a spritzed froth - is emblematic of a life lived as a masquerade. There was one thing about him, Sydney says in voice-over, “he had this confidence that drew me to him.” A traditional sort as important to the American Dream as Horatio Alger, if one who’s ditched honor in favor of hustling, Irving doesn’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps; as a substitute, he steals the boots off some stooge and then sells them again to their original owner at twice the price. He dwells in that shady house between faith and doubt, between our divinely given, legally sanctioned nationwide confidence (“In God We Trust”) and the deep, routinely vindicated recognition that it’s all a con. (Never give a sucker an even break.)

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