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.

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 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 original 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,
and 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 moments 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-determined fiancée to whom he is
unattached and of whose existence he cannot even admit. In a year in which so
many major films—Dallas Buyer’s Club,
Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street, and
Russell’s movie, to name only a few—feature characters who are failed and
flawed, even despicable beings, the righteous, those who cannot see, as Sydney
argues, that they too are lying to themselves, become, perhaps, the true
villains.
Los Angeles,
December 26, 2013
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