American Hustle review – hellzapoppin black comedy that is irresistibly watchable

It’s not just any kind of hustle. The adjective “American” appended to a word in a movie title always implies something with instant design-classic status, gorgeously laced with irony and modernity. There is no plausible UK equivalent. British Beauty, British Psycho and British History X sound like films from the 1950s respectively starring Diana Dors, Richard Attenborough and John Profumo. David O Russell’s hellzapoppin’ black comedy is an aspirational hustle, a sentimental hustle, a romantic hustle. Perhaps Hollywood Hustle is the truer title. It’s a brazen, nerve-jangling, irresistibly watchable movie full of jittery backtalk, pop-eyed tension and wacky hair: wigs, frizzes and beards. The drama is loosely derived from a true story from the late-1970s of how FBI agents coerced a notorious New Jersey conman into helping them entrap corrupt politicians with the offer of bribes from a “fake sheikh”, a scam later refined by British red-top newspapers. It blends the wiseguy voiceover-nostalgia of Scorsese’s Goodfellas with the cheeky imposture of George Roy Hill’s The Sting. The headbutting dialogue also has something of David Mamet. But the neurotic, shrill and often very funny action is distinctively Russell-esque.

Four preposterous characters launch into something like a dysfunctional four-way comedy routine, or perhaps a challengingly atonal modern jazz quartet. These are people who hate and love and suspect each other; each is resigned to the possibility of being hustled by his or her criminal colleagues, and each philosophically inclined to accept the idea that self-deception and self-hustle is what gets you through the day. Everyone often seems on the point of screaming, like Gene Wilder deprived of his blue blanket in The Producers.

Christian Bale plays Irv Rosenfeld, a fat, ugly and self-pitying grifter with a comb-over; he epitomises the Spinal Tap maxim about that fine line between clever and stupid. Much given to pontificating, he is like a venal and aggressive version of Woody Allen’s character in Broadway Danny Rose. Irv is married to highly strung Rosalyn, played by Jennifer Lawrence. Irv calls his wife the “Picasso of passive-aggressive karate”, a killer line for which co-screenwriters Russell and Eric Singer deserve a special mini-Oscar.

Irv is, however, hopelessly in love with his mistress and fellow con artist, super-sexy Sydney Prosser, played with a gleam of pure self-harming passion by Amy Adams; she puts on a fake British accent, styles herself “Lady Edith” and advertises her bogus private banking contacts to sucker people in to pay Irv non-refundable consultancy fees to discuss the possibility of non-existent loans. Sydney is a sociopath, and cannot quite bring herself to abandon the British accent: it fades in and out of her real voice. Irv and Lady Edith are ensnared by hyperactive federal agent Richie DiMaso, played by Bradley Cooper; he forces them to work for the government and also falls hopelessly in love with Sydney, who plays along with a certain cynical erotic languor, just in case she needs him at some future juncture.

The bizarre and hilarious situation rattles along, never entirely diverted or derailed, with plenty of comic set pieces. Richie is infuriated by his tightass boss, played by Louis CK, who keeps on telling him a homely anecdote about his childhood ice-fishing trips; Richie petulantly interrupts these when he thinks he understands the moral. It is a running gag, punctuated by furious rows, and there is even a psychotic flashback in which the two appear to be pulling guns on each other in some scuzzy bathroom. Did that really happen? Or just in Richie’s head?

There are also scenes of pure mobster sentimentality, accompanied by the Ray-Liotta-ish gravel of Irv’s voiceover. He insists on taking Rosalyn to dinner à quatre with Mayor Carmine Polito and his wife at exactly the kind of steakhouse that was regularly torched for the insurance in Goodfellas. The mayor, played with genial used-car-salesman brio by Jeremy Renner, sports another of the film’s outrageous hairstyles, a quiff that defies gravity as urgently as the schemes under discussion.

It’s all rangy and loose, with scenes that look as if they could be re-cut and re-edited every which way. It could easily be two or three times as long, and there is enormous pleasure in Russell’s sustained riffing. The pressure-cooker simmer of suppressed madness bubbles continuously and more consistently than in his previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, and more entertainingly than in an earlier movie such as I Heart Huckabees. And at the end, we feel dizzy and disorientated, like marks who don’t know we’ve been had. It is pure style from David O Russell.