American Hustle

Christian Bale's Irving Rosenfeld spends the first scene of American Hustle in a hotel bathroom, gluing a toupee to his scalp with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. It's a perfect opening for a movie about people who build themselves from scratch and then can't stop tinkering. David O. Russell's 2013 film takes the bones of Abscam, the real late-1970s FBI sting that used a fake Arab sheikh to catch crooked politicians, and turns it into a loud, funny, melancholy comedy about ambition and self-invention.

The cast is the draw. Bale disappears into a paunch and a New Jersey accent. Amy Adams plays Sydney Prosser, a former stripper who reinvents herself as a British aristocrat named Lady Edith Greensly. Bradley Cooper is Richie DiMaso, the FBI agent who catches them and then gets in way over his head. Jennifer Lawrence, fresh off Silver Linings Playbook, steals every scene she's in as Rosalyn, Irving's wife, a woman whose unpredictability could blow up the whole operation. Jeremy Renner rounds out the main players as Carmine Polito, a Camden mayor who genuinely believes the shady deals he's making will save his city.

Russell wrote the script with Eric Warren Singer, who had the original idea. The film cost $40 million and brought back $251 million worldwide, a solid return for a period crime drama with no superheroes. It earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and all four acting categories. It won none of them, which became a talking point in itself. More than a decade later, the movie still gets rented and streamed, and its images, the comb-over, the plunging necklines, the sweaty dance floors, remain instantly recognizable. [edit]

New Jersey, 1978. Irving Rosenfeld runs a small-time scam out of a dry cleaning business. He brokers loans for people who can't get them anywhere else and takes a fee on the side. He also deals in forged art. At a pool party, he meets Sydney Prosser, a woman from Albuquerque who has already shed her old life and is working on a new one. They recognize each other immediately, two people who have fabricated their identities and are good at it. They become partners in business and in bed.

Sydney invents Lady Edith Greensly, a British aristocrat with banking connections in London. The persona gives their loan scheme a veneer of class. The operation stays small until Richie DiMaso, a tightly wound FBI agent with a taste for big busts, arrests them. Instead of prosecuting, Richie offers a deal. They will use their skills to help him catch bigger targets. In exchange, they walk. Richie is ambitious and increasingly obsessed with Sydney, and he pushes the operation far past what his superiors have authorized.

The target becomes Carmine Polito, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey. Polito is charismatic and sincere. He wants to bring casino money to his struggling city, and he is willing to work with unsavory people to do it. Irving and Sydney set up meetings with a fictitious Arab sheikh, played by Michael Peña, designed to catch Polito and his associates accepting bribes. The sting grows to include fake sheikhs, mob figures, and eventually members of Congress. Richie's boss, Stoddard Thorsen, played by Louis C.K., watches with mounting exasperation as the operation spirals.

Irving comes to like Polito. The mayor believes he is doing right by Camden, and Irving sees a decent man being set up. The moral lines blur. At home, Irving's wife Rosalyn becomes a wild card. He married her partly out of obligation to her young son, Danny, and she is unstable, impulsive, and resentful of Sydney. Rosalyn's decisions threaten to unravel everything. Richie's recklessness and his romantic fixation on Sydney push the operation toward dangerous territory. The tension comes less from the mechanics of the con than from the question of who is conning whom, and whether anyone can survive being honest.[edit]