Big Hair, Bad Scams, Motormouths (Published 2013) (2025)

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Movie Review

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Big Hair, Bad Scams, Motormouths (Published 2013) (1)

American Hustle
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by David O. Russell
Crime, Drama
R
2h 18m

By Manohla Dargis

Irving Rosenfeld, the con man running the great scam in “American Hustle,” isn’t, his mistress admits, much to look at. He has a belly the size of a beer keg and a torturously complicated comb-over that he arranges with the fastidiousness of a Michelin-starred pastry chef. Appearances are not everything to Irving (Christian Bale), but rather just part of the swindle that is his life’s work, his passion and genius. The confidence game is his honey pot: It’s what lines his pockets, lights his fire and cigars, and has transformed the mistress, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), into his equal in theft and dissimulation, making her the Rosalind Russell to his Cary Grant in a romp that’s pure Scorsese screwball.

Only the director here is David O. Russell, who, more than any other contemporary American filmmaker, has reinvigorated screwball comedy, partly by insisting that men and women talk to one another. To that end, that chatter, written by Mr. Russell and Eric Warren Singer, is fast, dirty, intemperate, hilarious and largely in service to the art of the con, specifically the Abscam scandal that almost incidentally inspired the story. The real scandal dates back to 1978 and an F.B.I. investigation into political corruption that found agents posing as wealthy sheikhs anxious to buy off public officials. (Abscam was short for Arab scam, or the nominally less derogatory Abdul scam.) The swindle netted a trove of greasy-palmed politicians, but also charges of entrapment.

ImageBig Hair, Bad Scams, Motormouths (Published 2013) (2)

The movie tracks the scandal primarily from the points of view of Irving and Sydney, whose he-said, she-said voice-overs are interspersed with adenoidal dispatches from his stay-at-home wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). After setting the contemporary scene, Mr. Russell cuts back to Irving’s childhood, sketching in the con man’s background with brief, funny scenes and a devil-may-care take on criminality that pointedly mirrors the trajectory of Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas.” Like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose period bacchanal “Boogie Nights” also borrows from “GoodFellas,” Mr. Russell is a cinematic Son of Scorsese. Yet while his swooping cameras and motor-mouth characters follow in the virtuosic wake of Mr. Scorsese, they’re equally beholden to Mr. Scorsese’s own influences, including the Golden Hollywood likes of the director Raoul Walsh.

Mr. Scorsese once called Walsh’s 1939 post-World-War-I crime film, “The Roaring Twenties,” a “twisted Horatio Alger story,” a thumbnail description that also fits “American Hustle.” Corrupt politicos and a federal Venus’ flytrap give the movie a veneer of topicality, and there’s plenty in it that matches up with the historical record, including the role played by Irving’s true-crime counterpart, a Bronx-born swindler named Mel Weinberg. Even so, Mr. Russell doesn’t seem all that interested in veracity, and the movie opens with a playful assurance that “some of this actually happened,” a declaration that feels calculated to block off-point objections that some of it didn’t happen. Details have been changed, and everyone, as is often the case in movies, looks younger and prettier, less lumpy and beaten down by life than the original players, even Irving and his magnificently tragic, trumped-up hair.

The attention that Irving bestows on his mop — the movie opens with him whipping it up into a spritzed froth — is emblematic of a life lived as a masquerade. There was something about him, Sydney says in voice-over, “he had this confidence that drew me to him.” A classic type as essential to the American Dream as Horatio Alger, if one who’s ditched honor in favor of hustling, Irving doesn’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps; instead, he steals the boots off some stooge and then sells them back to their original owner at twice the price. He dwells in that shady space between faith and doubt, between our divinely given, legally sanctioned national confidence (“In God We Trust”) and the deep, routinely vindicated recognition that it’s all a con. (Never give a sucker an even break.)

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Big Hair, Bad Scams, Motormouths (Published 2013) (2025)
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