American Hustle
Film-makers have been reluctant to find an alternative to the words “based on a true story”. (It wasn’t a story! It was somebody’s life!) But for American Hustle, the writer and director David O Russell comes up with an improvement – “Some of this actually happened” – which foreshadows the film’s theme: the intangibility of truth. The part we can be sure about is the Abscam scandal, a sting operation in the late 1970s in which FBI agents colluded with a con artist to snare bribe-happy politicians. Into this period setting, Russell inserts fictional characters, many of whom have reason to ask the same question: is this real? The answer is rarely straightforward.
But how real is American Hustle? It’s one part Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and one part Ocean’s Eleven to two parts Boogie Nights; it takes a while to find the film beneath all that familiarity. If Russell has a trademark, it is his skill with an ensemble cast, reflected in the Oscar nominations that went to all four pugnacious main performers in Silver Linings Playbook, with Lawrence winning Best Actress.
True to form, there is an electrifying rapport in American Hustle: the group dynamic keeps the film fizzing. But it seems at times that Russell is going undercover just like his characters. Unusually for an idiosyncratic director so far into a magnificent career, he keeps drawing from Martin Scorsese’s box of tricks here: the camera that swoops at high speed on to an actor’s face, the medleys of 1970s hits (Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, ELO), the flashbacks to nostalgic scenes of boyhood crime – what is Russell doing if not remaking Goodfellas in miniature?
Gradually, the point of all this is revealed. American Hustle doesn’t conform to one genre, though it has elements of farce, screwball, heist thriller and caper comedy. In dressing it up like a Scorsese-style crime movie, Russell brings an unusual weight and tension to what is, in essence, a gentle, rather lovely romantic comedy about tentative people trying to trust one another. The film is not without moments of physical jeopardy. The overriding danger, though, is that someone may engage prematurely those words that are as explosive as any bomb, or as final as a bullet: “I love you.”
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