Cinematic claims of authenticity are intriguing and almost always misleading. Back in the 70s, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was advertised with the tag line: "It happened!" (it didn't), while in the 90s the Coen brothers opened their crime drama Fargo with the words: "This is a true story" (it wasn't). In 2009 The Men Who Stare at Goats assured audiences that "more of this is true than you would believe". Now into the great canon of enigmatic obfuscations comes American Hustle, which begins with the words: "Some of this actually happened."
"This" turns out to be a serio-comic tall tale (bearing the whiff of the shaggy dog) with one toe in the real-life "Abscam" operation in which the FBI used a con artist and a fake sheikh to entrap corrupt public officials in the late 70s and early 80s. The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning. In terms of awards fodder (with seven Golden Globe nominations, this is a leading Oscar contender), it also owes a debt to Argo, following its winning formula of handsome stars with outlandishly retro hair arrangements reliving American stories from the late 70s that are too implausible to be entirely made up.
We open in the Plaza hotel, New York, in 1978, where Christian Bale's dry cleaner cum art forger/loan shark Irving Rosenfeld is seen concocting an ostentatious comb-over involving glue, hairspray and an improbably pubic-looking appliance. The rituals of hair maintenance will play a key role in the ensuing drama; over the next two hours we will get to see most of the principal cast in curlers, notably Bradley Cooper, whose tightly coiled tresses involve a rigid regime of miniature rollers wound like over-cranked watch springs upon his increasingly agitated head. Cooper plays creepy federal agent Richie DiMaso, an ambitiously jumpy live wire who first busts and then enlists Rosenfeld, forcing him into a run-of-the-mill operation that almost accidentally spirals into something involving the city, the mayor and the mob, the latter in the form of (an uncredited) Robert De Niro's Victor Tellegio, a man so dangerous that he is going bald and doesn't even care.
The real fireworks, however, come from the women: Amy Adams's fraudster's moll, whose fake Anglo-American accent wavers with brilliant precision; and Jennifer Lawrence's glamorously rattled New Jersey housewife, who divides her time between setting fire to the kitchen and performing alcohol-fuelled renditions of Live and Let Die to the dismay of cheating husband Irving. Having earned a best actress Oscar for her lead role in Russell's previous film, the wilfully whimsical Silver Linings Playbook, Lawrence here lets rip in a terrifically ballsy supporting role; part harpy, part siren, a vision of steely defiance with an undercurrent of cracked exasperation.
But it is Adams who is the centre of the storm as the mercurial Sydney Prosser, a master of reinvention whose alter ego, "Lady Edith", is no more "unreal" than anyone else. In a world in which everyone is pretending to be someone, only Sydney seems to know who she is, a quality due in large part to the strength of Adams's performance, which injects an unexpected note of reality into the garishly artificial proceedings.
Like Silver Linings Playbook, the tone of American Hustle is self-consciously anarchic, its broadly comedic caper structure fraying to reveal madcap tragedy lurking just behind the painted smile, teetering on the brink of both pastiche and (worse) zaniness. This sense of spiralling chaos has long been Russell's defining trope, even in such broad canvas works as Three Kings, on which the director's own erratic temperament reportedly led to him coming to blows with leading man George Clooney. Cooper is particularly well attuned to this register, his default mode of barely concealed mania making him Russell's ideal muse, a man who might do anything, at any time, because he's that kind of guy. Meanwhile, Bale goes for the same total immersion that defined his performance in Russell's The Fighter, flaunting his bloated belly, fondling his pate, sinking ever deeper into the polyester suits and brown-tinted shades with the conviction of one who is drowning in melted vinyl. He is so 70s it hurts.
Whether this all adds up to something more than a brilliantly window-dressed period piece with ring-a-ding performances from an all-star cast remains to be seen. On first viewing, it's all about the look, with Linus Sandgren's widescreen lens repeatedly zooming in on bubbling social tableaux (the bar, the restaurant, the gambling table) with an air of deliberate superficiality. Ogling the shiny surfaces while tapping your toes to the pulsing pop beat, you forget that Russell once made such impenetrable navel-gazing twaddle as I Heart Huckabees, and simply revel in the fact that American Hustle is often deliriously good fun. Yet like the eye-popping costumes and note-perfect decor, there's a sneaking sense that it's all for show; an elaborate comb-over covering an absence of "truth". While Silver Linings Playbook was all about the heart, this is ultimately all about the hair. But what hair!
