This lavishly humorous crime drama with a star-studded cast had as many as ten Oscar nominations, but David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” ended up not confirming a single one. It was the year when Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” dominated, and it is a film that narratively and structurally owes a lot to the films of Martin Scorsese. Russell (Three Kings, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook) found inspiration in the real-life FBI operation codenamed Abscam in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which later led to the conviction of seven members of the US Congress for bribery and corruption. But if Russell’s film is to be believed, all of this happened not only completely by accident, but also in a completely hilarious and unbelievable way.
A really impressive cast has been assembled here and the four main actors who appear in “American Hustle”, Christan Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were nominated for Oscars. Bale is New York con artist Irving Rosenfled, who in 1978 met the con artist Sydney Prosser (Adams) and began a relationship with her, even though he is married to the mentally unstable Rosalyn (Lawrence), whom he does not want to leave for fear of losing contact with his adopted son. Soon, Sydney created an alter ego of an English aristocrat, and in this way they carried out scams and extracted money for a while, until they fell into the FBI’s network. In order to get out of prison, Irving and Sydney will agree to work as informants for agent Richie DiMasia (Coopet), and he will quickly become obsessed with Sydney, who he still thinks is English.
The plan is for Irving and Sydney to try to catch some bigger fish in their fraud network, and after Irv hires a friend who pretends to be an Arab sheik ready to invest in America, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Carmine Polito, will get involved in that network. (Jeremy Renner). Of course, nothing will go according to plan and very soon they will all get into some extremely dangerous situations and get involved with extremely dangerous guys, and although Irving is aware that what they are doing is not very wise, there is no going back. Mainly because the grotesque FBI inspector wants to arrest big fish in order to become famous, and although we are aware that they are all complete lunatics and/or criminals, the characters are well thought out, and the story is one of the funniest and funniest of the last few years.
The well-known acting chameleon Bale put on quite a few pounds for the role of Irving, while Cooper also looks hilarious with a mini-wave haircut and trapeze pants. The dynamics and pace of the film are fast, there is not even a second of idle time, and it is really a pleasure to watch not only how they all get deeper and deeper into the bilge from which there is no way out, but also how practically everyone here plays their own game and seems to be trying to deceive someone. It is a film that brilliantly portrays greed, but not only greed for money and power, but also the greed of an ambitious inspector for fame and recognition that he is the best in his job. It is intentionally exaggerated and almost dressed up to the point of kitsch, because almost all the characters here are almost true caricatures, and in this way, it seems as if an additional attempt was made to caricature their sick ambition and to project some distorted attempt to realize the American Dream.