The Oscars are over, but we’ve still got things to say! This series is comprised of five essays on Academy Award nominated films — some of them honored, some of them snubbed, all worthy of a second look. Find the rest of our After the Oscars essays here.
If you live in New York, as I do, over the past year you have spent a lot of time with Amy Adams’ breasts. Advertisements for American Hustle were pasted to billboards, buses, and the tiled walls of subway stations, with the film’s stars standing underneath their own names, printed in a stylized, sans-serif font. Jennifer Lawrence stood with her hands on her hips, Christian Bale wore a satin shirt. In the poster, Adams is in a halter-top dress made of silver sequins. It looks like hundreds of tiny mirrors are covering her torso. The sides of her breasts are exposed — on the ads, they were usually placed at eye level — and her hair is in a puffy red perm. Adams looks sideways at the camera with an expression of sultry incomprehension. For what seemed like months I walked past her every morning at the Nostrand Avenue A stop, and stood in front of her while I waited for my train.
American Hustle is set in New York City in the late 1970s, and Adams’ character, Sydney Prosser, has come there in search of a better life. A former stripper, she falls in with a corrupt businessman named Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale. Rosenfeld is a native New Yorker with a thick accent and an underdog’s ambition. Once a street kid from the Bronx, he’s gained success through hard work and wit. He wants to climb higher, and he wants to take Prosser with him, so the two set up a con operation, where they make a neat living extorting money from the seedy and desperate. There are problems: Prosser gets too cozy with one of their marks, and Rosenfeld cannot control Rosalyn, his operatically psychotic wife. But the future looks rosy, and the audience sees that these are the happiest and most hopeful days of their lives. As the two fall in love, one montage shows them trying on a series of flamboyant outfits in the back of a dry cleaners’. In another, we see them dancing through a crosswalk on Park Avenue.
When the pair are caught by the Feds, they fall under the mercy of an erratic FBI agent, played by Bradley Cooper, who offers them a choice between cooperating with him in an elaborate sting operation or going to jail. Loosely based on the real-life Abscam scandal, the ensuing enterprise involves imaginary sheikhs, mob money, corrupt congressmen, and the staged landing of a private jet. The pair are out of their league.
Bale put on enough weight for his role in American Hustle to round out his severe, angular features: he has an ample gut and slightly sagging jowls, and looks like somebody’s bloated bachelor uncle. Adams, meanwhile, has round blue eyes and uncommonly large teeth set in a mouth that never quite closes; more than anything, she resembles a cartoon rabbit. This is useful for the film, since American Hustle requires its audience to never take its characters’ actions quite seriously. Rosenfeld and Prosser engage in violence, extortion, entrapment, and frank opportunism; there is romantic unfaithfulness, betrayal of friendship, and drugs. But the lost innocence and deteriorating sanity of American Hustle’s protagonists is ultimately meant to play less as tragedy than as camp. Just because Irving sits across from a suspicious mob boss who might kill him in an instant does not make it any less funny that he is wearing enormous, silly 70s glasses. Just because Rosalyn is experiencing a psychic collapse does not make it un-laughable to see her dancing around her living room in rubber gloves, lip-synching to “Live and Let Die.” These characters are blinded by vanity; they speak with heavy Long Island accents and behave with a working-class flippancy. In part, their story is supposed to be pitiful. But it is also supposed to be funny, the unserious fate of unserious people.
Part of why it is easy not to invest in American Hustle’s protagonists too much is that most of their problems arise because they are almost childishly naïve. Enchanted by big money and the big city, Sydney is too trusting of a mark who turns out to be an undercover cop. Thinking that anybody is nice enough to have a good time with, a drunk Rosalyn cozies up to a mobster at a party. Towards the beginning of the film, when they realize that they’ve been trapped, Rosenfeld and Prosser fantasize about running away to Estonia with Rosenfeld’s adopted son. These are people with an almost fatal hopefulness; they are always ready to believe that their next plan will pull through, that better days are on the horizon. In his cons, Irving emphasizes manipulation, and commitment to long-running, and involved deceptions — lies that are built, as he says, “from the feet up.” It is as if he believes that if he invests enough in the illusion of his own success, he can make it into a reality.
In the beginning of the film it’s clear that Rosenfeld thinks of himself as smart, or at least as having a sort of hardscrabble, working-class authenticity. A voiceover narrates his transformation from a rough-living adolescent into a semi-successful businessman with a survivor’s pride. The con man that he wants to be is at heart an entrepreneur, unregulated by ethics, who gets ahead in a survival-of-the-fittest competition of resourcefulness and wit. Overcome with empathy for one of his marks, the populist mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Rosenfeld bonds with the man over their shared background. “Guys like you and me,” he says, “we dream and we build.” Regardless of the seediness of his actions, what Irving takes pride in his own inventiveness and determination, his common sense and hard work. What he does not realize is that he is no longer living in a world where such virtues will deliver him to happiness.
For all of their failings, it is difficult not to understand these characters as victims of their age: well-meaning people who were conned by the false promise of upward mobility, the brutality of late-twentieth century capitalism, and the glitz of New York. There is perhaps no imagery that more neatly encapsulates this tragic, deceptive brand of glamour than that of the 1970s, and American Hustle is saturated with visual tokens of the disco era: everyone is wearing sequins and jewelry, and the light is the color of Cheetos. In one scene, Amy Adams’ character rails against the injustices of the film’s historical moment. “Interest rates are north of twelve percent and heading to eighteen percent. Fucking Jimmy Carter. Well, fucking Nixon really. And the war and the deficit and all that shit.” Adams’ cheeks are red, her skin is white, and her eyes are blue. Like its characters, American Hustle’s imagery is sometimes unsubtle.
In the end, wit saves the day. Through a clever maneuver Rosenfeld manages to save himself and most of the people he loves, and the denouement is happy. But the twist seems unlikely, and the resolution like a betrayal of everything that the film has set forth. Despite all the intimidation, fear, and manipulation that Rosenfeld has endured, we are made to understand that he is still the superior player, that both his intelligence and his dignity remain intact. This doesn’t sit well. After all, one of the things that American Hustle has shown us most beautifully is that desperate people are seldom smart.
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