on thin ice
by Douglas Messerli
Eric Warren Singer and David O.
Russell (screenplay), David O. Russell (director) American Hustle / 2013
David O. Russell’s 2013 film, American Hustle, concerns a fraudulent
and demented vision of the American Dream that has long been a staple of
American film and drama, from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons to numerous of Edward Albee’s plays centered on
characters who, through whatever means possible, are determined to reinvent
themselves and financially “succeed.” In film, we perceive a more comic
variation of this theme in Preston Sturges’ The
Lady Eve, in which Barbara Stanwyck and her gambling father con a naïve
Henry Fonda, she later transforming herself into a British heiress to get her
revenge.
Two down-and-out losers, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale)—a small-time
con-artist and owner of several dry cleaners throughout New York—and Sydney
Prosser (a stunningly beautiful Amy Adams)—a former stripper—meet at a Long
Island party. Although neither is what one might describe as a good
“catch”—Irving is overweight and already married and Sydney is a clever
manipulator—they recognize themselves in one another and immediately fall in
love.
With Irving’s long experience with
conning (he runs a small art-gallery featuring fakes out of his dry cleaning
business, and takes others “to the cleaners” by offering them loans which are
never paid out) and Sydney’s brains, good looks, and her suddenly acquired
British accent (along with a new name, Lady Edith Greensly) the two quickly
escalate their petty thievery into a thriving business. That is, until they are
suddenly caught in the act by a rookie FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley
Cooper), in the midst of the transaction.
Every one of the figures in this film of the late 1970s and early 1980s
is obsessed with clothing (outrageously patterned and brightly colored or just
as outrageously sexually revealing), hair, and makeup, as if the outside of
their bodies might represent something that they knew they were not within.
Richie, like the other two, is also out to transform himself by rising
up in the agency ranks. Accordingly, he offers freedom to the two in return for
their help in a bigger con that might catch at least four bigger con-artists.
At first the couple consider taking their money and running off. But one
redeeming quality, his love of his wife’s young boy, puts a damper of that
decision. And then there is the wife, herself a dangerous ditz who—with her
alcohol-induced accidents, including a house fire and, later an explosion of a
microwave—puts the boy’s life in danger. Although he has long begged her for
divorce, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) is a passive-aggressive manic who cannot
abide any change in her pampered life.
The success of Irving and Sydney’s past scams has depended on what
Irving describes as “working from the legs up,” gradually reeling in their
suckers, often by saying no, and keeping their robberies relatively below
radar, mostly by asking only $5,000 to help people at the end their rope to
open foreign accounts and obtain loans. Suddenly, working with Richie, the two
quickly discover themselves out of their league, so to speak, as the FBI agent
keeps upping the ante by involving, at first, a fake Arab sheik and a local
northern Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), who, hoping the sheik
will invest in the Atlantic City casinos who will hire the people of his Camden
to find jobs, is convinced, after originally rejecting it, to the take the
bribe. He promises, and we believe him, to make good use of the money.
When it’s determined that the sheik must become an American citizen
before he can invest in the casinos, Carmine suggests he might pull strings
with several New Jersey congressmen and senators; all hell breaks loose, as
Richie, smelling success, now sees a way to entrap several even larger prey.
Before these clever small-time con-artists even know it, they are involved with
the mob, with their very lives at stake.
Beyond that, there are the FBI higher-ups, refusing at nearly every
point, the tools of entrapment, from a suite at the Plaza, to a helicopter for
the arrival of the fake sheik, to say nothing of the millions and millions of
dollars used for the briberies. When major mafia mobster, Victor Tellegio
(Robert De Niro) circles the hook, Richie nearly salivates, suddenly perceiving
how he might make one of the biggest catches of all time! The small-time
hustle, however, as Irving and Sydney perceive, has turned into an unmanageable
fiasco. Both want out, but are no so intensely caught up in what later would be
described as “ABSCAM,” that, for different reasons, they determine to go
straight, beginning to rid themselves of all the lies and prevarications of
their lives. Even more complexly, Sydney becomes sexually interested in
“Richie,” while Irving bonds deeper and deeper with Carmine and his family.
Even more disastrously, Irving’s jealous and lonely wife Rosalyn falls
in love with one of Tellegio’s men, spilling the beans about the impending FBI
sting and almost assuring her husband’s murder—along with her own and her
son’s. Indeed, things grow so out of control that Russell’s film reminds one,
at moments, of a screwball comedy like Bringing
up Baby—only, as we are told in the very early credits of the film, “Some
of this actually did happen.”
Some of the logic and even relevance of the film’s scenes, just as in
Russell’s previous film, Silver Lining
Playbook, gets lost in the director’s clearly improvised antics of Jennifer
Lawrence in the later part of the film. By film’s end the actress has taken her
character so humorously over the top, there is hardly anything left of her
stick-figure stereotype, as she drives off with her mobster lover into the
Miami sunset.
Yet in the final twist of these American hustles, the director and
screenwriter magically pull several more rabbits out of their hat that stave
off mobster hits and release Irving and Sydney, and even commute Carmine’s
prison sentence by spinning up a tale that takes Richie down again to the
lowest peg on his office totem pole by implying that he either exhorted the
missing 2 million dollars or was fooled by the con-men he employed to do the
job.
Throughout the film, Richie’s disapproving boss, Stoddard Thorsen,
attempts to use a private story to warn his young assistant of the dangers of
his acts. Growing up in Duluth, Minneosta, Thorsen recalls, he, his brother,
and father used to go ice fishing. On cold winter days they would dig a hole,
drop a line, and wait in the cold air for a nibble. He remembers it as a
beautiful event. But one October, after a brief frost, his brother wanted to go
out fishing, and he had joined him, the father warning that it was not yet
time, suggesting that the ice cover was still too thin. The first time he tries
to tell this story, Richie interrupts him, suggesting he knows the moral of the
story, that Thorsen fell in and nearly drowned. Thorsen denies that that was
the story.
A second time Thorsen tries to tell the story he mentions that he and
his brother were fishing, when they saw their father approaching them, he going
out to meet his father before the elder discovered his brother fishing on the
lake. Again Richie interrupts: “All right, so the brother fell in and died!”
No, Thorsen again proclaims, that isn’t what happened. By brother died years
later.
The running gag is not repeated, and we never do discover what the true
story was meant to reveal. I’d suggest, however, that the third alternative,
the father falling in and drowning, is, at least, what might have happened.
Certainly, in the end, that is what happens to Richie, who, in his surety of
righteousness himself suffers at least a symbolic death, a return to his
miserable apartment where he lives with his mother, visited every day by a
plain-looking mother-selected fiancée to whom he is unattached and of whose
existence he cannot even admit. In a year in which so many major films that feature
characters who are failed and flawed, even despicable beings, the righteous,
those who cannot see, as Sydney argues, in the very fact that they are lying to
themselves, inevitably become the true villains.
Los Angeles, December 26, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position (January 2013).
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