I don’t want to suggest that TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE didn’t deserve the trophies it collected a few weeks ago at the Academy Awards — I didn’t see it because I’m squeamish about sustained wanton brutality onscreen, but I’m sure it’s very well done — but I do feel that the best piece of filmmaking of 2013 was unfairly overlooked for Oscar recognition, and that is the trailer for AMERICAN HUSTLE.
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When you watch this trailer, you get the idea that this is going to be a great, twisty, plotty, tense heist picture, full of great performances, quotable lines, memorable scenes, and amazing period costumes and soundtrack.
Well, it had the costumes and the soundtrack, and the actors did very well with what they were given, but this is one of the most overhyped movies I can remember, and the idea that it was up for Best Picture is kind of unbelievable.
To me the test of a great movie is how long it stays with me after I’ve seen it. GRAVITY, to take another Best Picture nominee from this year as an example, was a thrilling, visceral experience, using 3D to the best effect it’s ever been used, by far. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for two weeks after I saw it.
On the other hand, AMERICAN HUSTLE didn’t even stay with me all the way back to the subway. You may recall that it came out just before Christmas, and since there wasn’t much going on at my job at that time, I snuck out at lunch hour to check it out. When I got back and told a coworker I’d just seen it, he asked what it was about, AND I DIDN’T HAVE AN ANSWER.
I could tell you that it involved con artists, an FBI guy, the Mob, a Mexican in a turban, and a corrupt mayor. I know the “good guys” won in the end, but I couldn’t explain how they did it. If you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t explain the plot of this movie. I could tell you that ELO was on the soundtrack, and that everyone (except golden girl Jennifer Lawrence) is forced into horrifying ’70s outfits and hairstyles, but that’s about it.
When the movie came out on video, I watched it again, thinking maybe I was the problem, maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention. After all, it was nominated for all the Oscars, so it couldn’t be as bad as I thought, right? Wrong. I hated it even more the second time. (There will not be a third.)
Two other well-hyped movies from prominent directors — the Coen brothers’ INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS and Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET — came out right around the same time as American Hustle, and since my family life doesn’t allow for a lot of moviegoing, I felt like I had to pick which of the three movies I wanted to see most, since I’d likely only be able to get out once. I surprised myself by choosing AMERICAN HUSTLE, and I chose it entirely on the strength of that trailer.
It looks like a great movie, evocative of GOODFELLAS and CASINO and DONNIE BRASCO, period epics that are funny, scary, tense, loose, and engaging, packed full with great performances and characters. It looked like it might out-Scorsese Scorsese. It looked like it had something that the other two movies pointedly did not have, which is not one but two interesting, three-dimensional female characters, played by Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence — both great actresses, super talented, fiercely intelligent, easy to look at. Seemed like an easy choice.
Shame, then, that they are both stranded (along with Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale) in a nothing script that doesn’t make sense and has some of the clunkiest dialogue this side of a daytime soap. A few of Adams’ scenes are truly embarrassing, as she stammers and repeats herself: “What are you talking about? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” It feels like director David O. Russell told her something like “Today we’re shooting scene 27, where you find out that he’s taking his wife out to dinner with the mayor. Action!” and then he used the first take, when she’s still processing the fact that she has to improv a scene she doesn’t understand like a first-time UCB student. And what was the story with her English accent? I know her character was faking it, but why did she fake it so badly, and why didn’t anyone else ever notice?
As for Jennifer Lawrence, she has a couple of good moments, she wears the holy hell out of some ’70s dresses, and generally continues her march to usurp Anne Hathaway as the new Julia Roberts. But she is woefully miscast: Her whole plotline is that she is an emotionally damaged housewife with a failed marriage and a young son from a previous marriage, whose second marriage is being threatened by her husband’s smarter, prettier partner in the con game. So why does she look like a college student? Why is the put-upon housewife fifteen years younger than the lady grifter? I like Jennifer Lawrence a lot and I can understand why everyone wants to work with her, but we can’t just give her every role. (Her Oscar-winning turn in Russell’s previous film, SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, also suffered slightly from this problem — she’s just too young for the role.)
This trailer spackles over all of those problems, because it only has the faintest hint of what the plot is and it’s got all those costumes and all that music and all those great lines that seem like they must be from much longer great scenes. But no, they’re not, they feel shoehorned into the movie, and the movie itself is so bereft of memorable moments that when you notice a setting from the trailer you start to get excited because you’re about to hear “We’ve got to get over on all these guys” or “Always take a favor over money, I think Jesus said that” in context and you just know it’s got to be part of a great scene, but then you see it and NOPE. I think Russell just wrote the trailer first, worked backward from the memorable lines, picked some great tunes, made a list of fashion tragedies to inflict on their otherwise superhumanly attractive cast (“You know what would really ruin Bradley Cooper? A PERM!” “Would anything look worse on Amy than corkscrew ringlets?”), shot it all, and then went back to the drawing board to write the script, which didn’t go quite as well as he assumed it would. It’s like a dollar-store Scorsese knock-off, like one of Max Fischer’s plays. But the trailer was good enough to fool everyone into walking past two much better movies, and even more impressively, taking such a benefit of the doubt into the theater that the Academy nominated this litter box of a movie for 19 Oscars, and for that, it deserves some recognition.
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I will give Russell credit for this much, though: AMERICAN HUSTLE is the perfect title for this movie, because that’s exactly what it is. And the big twist is, Russell is the hustler, and the mark isn’t up on screen — he’s sitting in the audience.
Hi – I love your blog. Found it after watching your band perform at Atlantic Antic and wondered who is this modern day KC from the Sunshine Band with all this soul & vigor. I’m depressed so I read a lot. I was really feeling every post, loving your sense of humor and thinking that you could be a long lost friend but then I read this post. I loved American Hustle. I couldn’t disagree more with your opinion of it and it surprises me so much that you did not see the UHmazing performances by Amy Adams and Christian Bale AND a badly permed Bradley Cooper. Jennifer Lawrence…meh. She was miscast, I agree. She did okay though but was a dim light compared to Adams. I can think of 5 scenes right off the tip of my head that were incredible and so strong that they made me gulp and also that great jolt you get when a movie shows you something real. The look in Christian Bales face while he was listening to Duke Ellington, or that dry cleaning scene! C’mon stranger…you gotta see it! Okay, not really that important. But hey, mainly thanks for all the media. You’re a regular one man entertainment system. It’s good to see someone so alive.