David O. Russell gets his Scorsese on in a fiercely enjoyable, fact-based crime caper about con artists working with the feds in 1970s New Jersey. Mimicking Marty’s sweeping camera, sprawling storytelling techniques and jet-black humour to gloriously entertaining effect, Russell makes the best film Scorsese never made, and would’ve got a Scorsesian full house if he’d thrown a few Rolling Stones tracks in there — maybe we’ll get those from the big man himself in the upcoming “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Like “Goodfellas” and “Casino” before it, “American Hustle” is loosely inspired by a true crime story, that of the “Abscam” sting, and is nostalgically narrated by one of its key figures: Irving Rosenfeld, a lowlife conman played by Christian Bale. Bale has had some startling physiques in his career — most memorably his nightmarish skeletal frame in “The Machinist” — but this one’s a little different; here, he’s sporting a beer belly the size of a wrecking ball and a hideous comb-over rightly described by his mistress as “elaborate" (its process involves square patches of fuzz and a prit-stick).
With his mistress Sydney (Amy Adams), a smart and seductive ex-stripper who masquerades as a British countess, Irving runs a loan scam business in which down-on-their-luck clients naively hand over $5,000 and receive nothing in return. When they’re nabbed by the FBI they’re offered a deal: if they help the bureau entrap some corrupt politicians in an elaborate sting operation they’ll get off scott free. They accept and along with Bradley Cooper’s ambitious, curly-locked Agent Richie they scheme to catch the crooked public figures red-handed, among them the super-quiffed Jersey Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner). You might notice I’m mentioning the hairstyles a lot; it's nigh impossible to discuss “American Hustle" without talking about all the outrageous ’dos on display, along with the stunningly garish ‘70s fashion and Amy Adams' ever-visible cleavage — it’s her character’s alluring method of misdirection and seduction and, well, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work (watching the film, it’s hard to remember her as Princess Giselle in Disney’s “Enchanted;” Adams is great that way).
Things get tricky when Irving’s unstable young wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) enters the equation to play a part in the sting; described by Irving as “the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate,” she’s a born trouble-maker and regularly sets fire to her kitchen with various household appliances. Things get even trickier when a love triangle starts to blossom, with Sydney straddling the top and Irving and Richie both clamouring for her from the bottom. Always a delight in Scorsese’s gangster movies was the interaction between the wild and colourful characters, and here Russell wrings belly laughs from his central quartet’s merciless banter and ferocious screaming matches. I damn near laughed my head off when, during an argument, Richie ruffles Irving’s comb-over out of place, to which a frozen Irving reacts with an intense, mortified stare — and that was only 5 minutes in.
Part of the joy of watching “American Hustle” is predicting how exactly they’re going to derail the operation: Lawrence’s unpredictable Rosalyn is the obvious loose cannon but really, they’re all loose cannons ready to blow at any second; there’s Sydney with her identity crisis and ever-changing accent; there’s Richie with his increasingly manic behaviour and the poor fiancée he’s cheating on (or at least striving to cheat on); and then there’s Irving with his mounting doubts about the operation and his growing friendship with one of the operation’s key targets (who might not be such a bad’un after all). You wonder when the whole thing’s gonna collapse in on itself; and then they bring out the Mexican to play the part of the Arab sheikh, and you can’t help but cackle.
The central story of dodgy deals and crooked politicians is less interesting than the characters that surround it, but Russell keeps the hustle always moving forward, and the characters are performed with such energy and ferocity that it’s impossible not to be reeled in by their undeniable, scene-thieving presence. Lawrence, in particular, is a force to be reckoned with, and her frantic, hoover-wielding rock-out to Wings’ Live and Let Die stands tall as one of the most memorable movie moments of 2013 — just you wait for the gifs!
Rating: 8/10
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