David O. Russell’s Abscam comedy is a loud, funny, over-dressed party with five actors having the time of their lives. It is a pleasure for ninety minutes and baggy after that, and the con at its centre never adds up.
The film opens with a caption, “Some of this actually happened”, and then with Christian Bale gluing a hairpiece to his scalp and combing his own hair across it. The comb-over gets three minutes and it is the best joke in American Hustle, because David O. Russell and his co-writer Eric Warren Singer make everything that follows a version of it. Irving Rosenfeld fakes loans, Sydney Prosser fakes an accent and a title, Richie DiMaso sleeps in curlers, and the mayor of Camden tells himself the casino money is clean. The story is built loosely on Abscam, the late-1970s FBI sting that used a fake sheikh to catch politicians taking bribes, and Russell treats the facts about as carefully as his characters treat the truth.
The cast carries it for a long stretch. Bale plays Irving as a small, tired, oddly decent man who is good at one thing. Amy Adams’s Sydney is the centre of the film, a woman who has remade herself so often she has to check which version is talking, and Adams lets the English accent wobble whenever Sydney is frightened. Bradley Cooper plays Richie at the top of his lungs. Jeremy Renner gives Carmine Polito a pompadour and a warmth the film never mocks, and the scenes in which Irving starts to like him are the best-written in the picture.
Then there is Jennifer Lawrence. Rosalyn Rosenfeld is a housewife who will not divorce her husband, will not stop talking, and calls their new microwave the “science oven”. Lawrence plays her at a pitch nobody else attempts: she is on screen for twenty-five minutes and takes every one of them. We laughed out loud, which we rarely do at something this obviously engineered, when she puts a foil dish in the oven, watches it catch fire and blames Irving for buying it. The laugh is all in Lawrence’s face, which is furious and not remotely sorry.
Linus Sandgren shoots it in browns and golds and keeps pushing the camera in on faces mid-sentence, so the actors seem to be improvising even when they are not. Judy Becker’s production design is wood panelling, shag carpet and hotel gilt. Michael Wilkinson’s costumes do the hardest work: Adams’s dresses are cut to the navel and Sydney wears them like a uniform, while Cooper gets a leather jacket and a chest medallion. Danny Elfman wrote a score and we could not tell you what it sounds like, because the film is wall to wall with period songs, several cut in so loudly they replace the scene rather than sit under it.
The three editors, Alan Baumgarten, Crispin Struthers and Jay Cassidy, had a hard job. The film is narrated in turn by Irving, Sydney and Richie, jumps back to explain itself, then jumps forward, and for the first hour the cutting keeps pace. After that it does not. Richie’s operation, the sheikh, the bribes, the hotel suites, keeps getting bigger without getting clearer, and somewhere past the hundred-minute mark we realised we had stopped following who was conning whom and, worse, had stopped minding. At 138 minutes it is twenty too long.
Russell’s previous two films, The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, were about loud people shouting past each other, and this is looser than either. The usual comparison is with Scorsese, and it holds for the tracking shots and the song cues, but Scorsese’s films know what the story is for. This one is about the pleasure of watching good actors mess about in costume, and that does not fill the running time. Louis C.K., as Richie’s exhausted boss Stoddard Thorsen, gets the best running gag, a story about ice fishing with his brother that he is never allowed to finish, and it is the only scene that knows when to stop.
See it for the cast, and for Lawrence above all, and go in knowing the story will not pay off the way a con should. It is a 15 certificate, mainly for the language. Watch it with a drink and people who will not ask you what is going on, because by the end you will not be able to tell them.
