American Hustle

The hair! The clothes! The hair!

Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) is a jobbing conman who has worked his way up from the bottom of the pack after seeing his honest father ground down by bad people. He hits gold when he meets Sydney Prosser (Adams), a dancer whose turn as English aristocrat Lady Edith Greensly allows the pair to pull off increasingly high profile art and loan scams. Their life is complicated by Rosenfeld's estranged wife Rosalyn (Lawrence), who holds custody of their son over him, and then further when FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) catches them in a scam and ropes them in to help him get more arrests in exchange for immunity.

When the original operation offers the chance to net first Mayor Carmine Polito (Renner), then members of Congress and the Senate and a substantial mob operation represented by Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro), Richie starts to lose control. Obsessed with his own glory as an agent, and with 'Lady Edith', his growing ambitions threaten to spiral the scam into something that can not survive its own weight. With Irving's growing admiration for and friendship with Polito and Rosalyn's relationship with a mobster, the stage is set for disaster, or for the con of the century.

American Hustle is loosely based on the real-life Abscam operation conducted by the FBI in the late 70s and early 80s, but that's mostly background. The dramatic core of the film is the relationships between the protagonists, both professional and personal, and the lies that they tell to each other and themselves. The lies in this movie are almost characters in their own right, in particular the big one, the scam that begins with an attempt to hook an art fraudster and grows into a monster than can not be tamed. "No more fake shit," Prosser pants in her entirely false English accent while deflecting DiMaso's advances in a nightclub toilet cubicle. That's the quintessence of the movie, right there; lies, sex and squalid glamour.

Renner's hair in this movie can only truly be appreciated in
profile.

The script and story are good, but the film really triumphs on the strength of its look and its cast. The faded glamour of the 70s/80s divide is everywhere. Bright clothes clash with a grimy backdrop, the collapsing promise of the American dream as elaborate and unconvincing a pretense as Rosenfeld's extraordinary comb-over. The cast put in note-perfect performances as slightly grotesque versions of the real figures involved in Abscam, and every aspect of the production design evokes the era as something extraordinary and almost alien to a modern eye.

American Hustle is not a tightly-plotted scam picture in the mould of The Sting or Ocean's Eleven; the Abscam plot is more of a bar on which to hang the personal drama, and while there are twists they are not the point. It's a film about lies and love and above all about what is fake and what - if anything - is real, and a damn good film at that.