Amsterdam: Dutch Ado About Nothing
Throughout Amsterdam, things break: an ugly teapot, a bird’s egg, a man’s optic nerve, a loveless marriage. Yet because it’s the work of David O. Russell, the movie views such destruction not with sadness but with opportunity. A grinning carny barker whose attractions are warped and trampled human feelings, Russell savors goofy misfits, with their thwarted dreams and foiled scams. He likes to break things—and people—apart so that he can put them back together.
He doesn’t always succeed. Russell’s career is wildly uneven, not to mention polarizing; survey critics, and you’re unlikely to find consensus on his three best films. (For the record, they are Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.) Amsterdam, Russell’s first feature in seven years, showcases the director at his best and worst; it’s full of vibrant verve and stylish flair and ragged writing and quite a bit of nonsense. (His last picture, Joy, was similarly bumpy, suggesting that he’s grown consistently inconsistent.) In fact, the main characters here repeatedly improvise what they call “a nonsense song,” coming together to warble an off-key melody accompanied by incomprehensible lyrics, and it works handily as metaphor for the movie itself: meandering and patchy, yet oddly charming and full of life. Read More
The holiday season is a time for gifts, and in 2015, the multiplex delivered its usual assortment of delightful treasures and lumps of coal. Due to time and space constraints (OK, mostly time), the Manifesto is providing shortened, capsule-like reviews for the numerous theatrical releases we saw during the holidays. We’ll begin with three movies today, followed by an additional three next week.
As wonderful as it is to watch, American Hustle was assuredly a difficult film to make. It has a labyrinthine plot, replete with double crosses, false identities, fake accents, and cons nested inside other cons. Its structure is ungainly, with cascading flashbacks, multiple voiceovers, and repeated shifts in point of view. And its based-in-truth narrative, about the FBI’s ABSCAM sting in the 1970s, is laden with insider minutiae, ranging from the mechanics of organized crime to the breadth of political corruption to the egotism of law enforcement. You would think, given the need to balance all of these plates spinning on screen, that American Hustle would require a workmanlike and disciplined director, someone capable of streamlining the screenplay’s disparate elements and synthesizing its busy plot. Instead, it got David O. Russell.