Disco Lies

It’s all about survival in director David O. Russell’s winning American Hustle.

And hair. It is also all about big, late-’70s-style hair.

For the girls and the boys involved.

Every character involved in this mostly true story (“Some of this actually happened,” we’re winkingly told up front, for what is to come is...way too bizarro to, y’ know, actually have taken place…right?) has a hair situation that tells quite a story about the feat at hand (gimme a sec and I’ll tell ya what that is).

And I do mean everyone – from Christian Bale, who, as shyster Irving Rosenfeld, rocks a “rather elaborate” combover (a close-up of which helps open the film), to Amy Adams’ Sydney Prosser, Irving’s lover and partner in crime (btw, Adams commands the screen with her fiercely malleable disco-era styles, not to mention her cut-down-to-there halter tops), to Jennifer Lawrence’s in-your-face upwardly ’do, which sets her apart memorably as Irving’s seemingly vulnerable, yet smart wife.

Their hairstyles – yes, I am making a big fuzz about hair! – absolutely enhance what I shall and can only describe as incredibly, indelibly nuanced performances.

It is a must that delivered in spades that the cast got to the root – ha! – of their characters in that way. After all, Russell is having us deal with the story of an essentially, flabbergastingly rogue FBI sting operation, uh, serendipitously led by Bradley Cooper’s perm-happy agent Richie DiMaso that brought the house down on a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner, in all his full pompadoured glory), as well as several congressmen, and a senator in a cloud of corruption allegations...thanks to a couple of con artists!

I have long harbored a bit of a jealousy for Russell as a writer, but with American Hustle, he makes me jelly of his craft as a director.

He is such an actor’s director (and one of the most truly exciting ones working now): He writes these honest-to-life worlds that oh-so-genuinely blend drama and comedy (as exemplified in last year’s awards bait Silver Linings Playbook) that bring out effortlessly amazing…tours de force in the actors that he surrounds himself with (four fifths of the core cast of the film are Russell vets, and two of them have won Oscars under his guidance).

That’s why I wanna be David O. Russell when I grow up.

So run, don’t walk to see American Hustle.

It is an energetic film in which everyone’s bulls---in’ one another to make it to the next day, in which everyone (good guy, bad guy) straddles the line that separates the white hatters from the black hatters in this like, funny, effectively subversive way, and in which everyone wears a different ’do for every hustle.

It’s the name of the game – and these cats (Adams and Lawrence, in particular, are stand-outs in this at-first-glance male-centric offering) play it in style. 

My Rating ****

Photo: Sony Pictures.