Maestro

“Maestro” begins with American conductor and composer extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) playing his home piano. For a second, you might think he is alone, until you notice the television cameraman hovering in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and as the shot gradually closes in on Bernstein, the more cameras and lights come into view. He is performing, in other words, an apt emblem for a movie that is all about performance, and as much about performance in terms of its filmmaker and star and his co-star as it is about Bernstein, making for a fascinating yet frustrating film. After this sequence, we flash back to the past, the day Bernstein takes a call in his bedroom to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic, setting him on his way to professional glory. When the call ends, the dark curtain that has been drawn over a large window, is suddenly thrust open, revealing an exultant Bernstein standing on a window ledge. It put me in mind of Seinfeld’s immortal Elaine Benes saying of Rava’s boyfriend, the flamboyant possible thief Ray, and his penchant for theatrical flourish and melodramatic monologues, “Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere?” Cooper spends all of “Maestro” on the ledge.

In directing and co-writing the screenplay with Josh Singer, Cooper has opted out of making a traditional biopic, eschewing Leonard’s childhood and even forgoing any real insight into what made him a musical savant and how that manifested itself. No, “Maestro” suggests an artier “Walk the Line” in so much as the latter, despite a cut and paste kinda non-quality, found its spine through the love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter in so much as “Maestro,” too, preeminently functions as a love story of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, it proves her movie as much as his, foreshadowed in that same opening scene where in his on-camera interview, Leonard talks of sensing his deceased wife’s presence in their home, as if she’s still with him in death. In Cooper’s telling, Felicia was very much a moon pulled along in the orbit of Leonard’s massive planet, though one with the wherewithal to keep up. “You have a lot of energy,” he says to her the first time they meet, and the ring Cooper gives this line lets you know it’s a compliment. And though I can’t confess to knowing the real nature of their relationship, and though it is crucial to note “Maestro” was made with the blessing of Bernstein’s children, indicating a movie made in the image of their own feelings on the subject, despite all the wrenching complications that go hand-in-hand with Bernstein’s bisexuality, there is genuine electricity between Cooper and Mulligan that makes their love believable in spite of it all. 

If a thousand movies have contained a Supportive Spouse standing in the shadows, Cooper pulls Felicia into the spotlight, demonstrating her own artistic pursuits and honoring her point-of-view, literally even, slipping into a breathtaking shot from her perspective as she lies on her deathbed. And if he puts Felicia in the spotlight, he puts Mulligan there too, putting her name first in the closing credits and offering her smattering of smashing close-ups, ones in color that come across like moving Life Magazine covers, and a monochrome one on a sidewalk as she walks toward the camera as the camera moves toward her, as if illuminating its pull toward her, the wordless language of movie stardom laid out before us. In other shots, though, like the camera gradually pressing in on Felicia as she lays on her side on a blanket, telling a friend about her husband’s incompatible dimensions, Cooper is essentially allowing Mulligan’s acting to carry the image. That occurs later, too, for both of them during a Thanksgiving Day row, conveyed in one take and a long shot that turns their blocking into a reflection of the words. It works so well to leave each character spent and wrecked that the comic capper of a Macy’s Parade balloon floating past in the background falls flat.

For all the attention lavished on Mulligan, however, Cooper the director kind of hangs Cooper the actor out to dry. His controversial prosthetic nose and considerable old man makeup as Bernstein all would seem to symbolize how Cooper vanishes into the character, though in reality, the opposite is true, how despite so much virtual transformation, Cooper himself still shines through. This is never more acute than the climax in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Resurrection. Recounted in a six-minute single take, Bernstein is left drenched in sweat, though because Cooper has done so little to demonstrate his character’s conducting genius, what makes him one, how he harnesses the power of the orchestra, this moment becomes nothing more than an exhibition of Cooper’s own technique. It isn’t Bernstein’s sweat we’re seeing; it’s Cooper’s.

A Star Is Born

The title card of the 2018 version of “A Star Is Born” evokes the predecessors on which it is based with an opulent, Technicolor-ish red even as it offers something new, stretching across the whole screen, leaving a small space in the middle for the eponymous star, Ally, to fit right through, twirling, like all the world’s a stage and she was born to glide across it. That’s true of Ally but also of the woman playing her – iconic pop star Lady Gaga. If Gaga intended her 2017 Netflix documentary “Gaga: Five Foot Two” as revelatory, she still felt guarded, covered up, even when she was literally topless onscreen. In Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, however, Gaga comes to life, playing Ally with an insecure exterior and a more forceful interior born of an Italian Catholic iron will. The latter is glimpsed in home scenes with her father (Andrew Dice Clay, moving, really) where she emotes with the loving exasperation of an entire upbringing, suggesting what has held her back and giving her strength to move forward. Even later in the film when Ally becomes a sensation and dons costumes and wigs, Gaga has so nimbly laid the groundwork in removing her character’s mask, that her real soul shines bright.

If Ally finds her way, Jackson Maine (Cooper), a country-western superstar, is losing his. Cooper’s croaked mumbles recall the Oscar-winning turn of Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart”, yes, but his head-down, demurring attitude is just as evocative of Joaquin Phoenix’s more polite moments as Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line.” Indeed, even if Jackson pops pills, drinks too much, suffers from tinnitus, and feuds with his manger brother Bobby (Sam Elliot, who cocks his head with as much get off my lawn gusto as Gary Cooper wielded a six shooter), Cooper invests Jackson with enough haggard compassion to suggest he’s less trouble than flawed. But he’s spiritually underwater, which his physical sluggishness illustrates, and he needs a way up.

He finds one when, in search of a drink, he unwittingly enters a drag club and sees Ally perform. That the gaggle of kindly drag queens makes way for a straight woman is written off in one line, and may or may not be rooted to truth, but comes across like one of those Golden Age films where a boarding house have banded together to navigate a patriarchal word. And Ally slithering around the club singing “La Vie en Rose” feels born of the Golden Age too as Gaga channels the ghost of Rita Hayworth as much as Judy Garland, eventually splayed across the bar and looking right into Jackson’s eyes in an electric scene evoking how the right music show on the right night can see right through you.

When he approaches her afterward in the dressing room there is less an air of fantasy than anxious hesitation as Gaga plays the moment with with a convincing, halting suspicion about what he really wants, pulling away her hand when he takes hers, demonstrating an honesty within her character and about the whole world. No, he must prove his courtliness, and does in an extended sequence where he tends to her wound after a bar fight. It is familiar stuff played with a ring of truth, where her eyes betray an escalating enchantment and his eyes are not puppy-dog so much as dumbfounded. And while Jackson removing Ally’s false eyebrows might symbolically connote her character’s veneer crumbling, when she spontaneously breaks into a song in a parking lot she is not just signaling her immense talent but saying to him “I trust you.”

Visually the scene mirrors the whole movie, with big close-ups the preferred angle, not that Gaga frequently over-emotes in them. When Ally is about to surge onstage, Gaga’s choking back vomit is ephemeral rather than emphasized. And while the banter over Ally’s nose is properly playful, you sometimes wish Cooper more often just let that nose speak for itself. You also might wish for a few more master shots, whether to establish scene and situation or just let moments breathe, the few wide frames being less for our benefit than Ally and Jackson’s, giving them flickers of privacy. Still, the visual strategy correlates to the movie’s narrative intimacy, mimicking “Million Dollar Baby” in so much as a movie about someone going global deliberately refrains from showing us the masses.

Jackson functions less as Ally’s mentor than a conduit to the industry, which happens when she walks out on her job to attend one of his gigs. Gaga plays this moment not with devil-may-care defiance but giggling like she can’t believe it as she throws caution to the wind, with Cooper intelligently not ending the scene on Ally’s boss punctuating the scene with some dumb one-liner to ensure the moment is hers. And when, arriving at the show in a palpable moment of adrenalized delirium, Ally seeming to float, momentarily disappearing in the popping bright white of a spotlight, emblemizing the turn her life is about to take, the whole movie becomes hers. Jackson summons Ally to the stage, leading her in a duet of a song, “Shallow”, she’s written, the lyrics, a la “Once”, matching the moment, Ally having swum, so to speak, far out from the shallow end, a fear which Gaga’s eyes evince even as that full-throated sonic uppercut she eventually unleashes signifies a self-confidence that had been rumbling inside all along.

Swiftly, marking the nature of Our Times, she becomes a star, culminating in a shot onstage playing piano alongside Jackson where her face appears on the giant video board hanging above. Cooper sets the shot so that essentially she’s singing to herself, visually demarcating the moment when the apprentice surpasses the master, and when the narrative hands itself off from Ally & Jackson to Jackson and his tailspin. The latter stems from jealousy over his her sudden success, though that jealously is born more from his increasingly alcoholic fog and an emergent dissatisfaction with, to quote “Shallow” itself, the modern world. All this tracks along a predictable line and to a predictable conclusion, whether or not you have seen the previous versions, which is not so much the problem as how many story beats need to be hit at precise intervals to get us there, sadly letting so much atmospheric air out as it opts for more basic and expedient narrative filmmaking.

It also suffers from a lack of Gaga. But then, her character has found herself, and this back half is not about Jackson losing himself so much as realizing he is obstructing her ascendant superstardom. That point is conveyed by Cooper’s sheepish smiles throughout, as if he’s almost embarrassed to still be the camera’s point, a fascinating, vexing paradox wherein the leading man seems to know he’s in the way even as the director – who, of course, is the leading man – makes him the focus anyway. You admire it more than embrace it with arms outstretched, this backslide into tragedy, which, inadvertently or otherwise, makes a solid case for the rock star fantasy of burning out rather than fading away.

Aloha

“Tell me you don’t believe in the sky.” This is what Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone) demands of her superior, and eventual suitor, a military contractor, Brian Gilchrist (Bradley Cooper), pleading for him to see the atmosphere for the heavens, a place that is the playground of Hawaiian gods rather than the jurisdiction of the SDMC. It may as well be the same demand writer/director Cameron Crowe, the once heralded Oscar winner, now unofficial master of the rom com disaster, but evermore sentimental fool is making of us. Though “Aloha” is filled with real world concerns it nonetheless comes equipped with devout belief in the ineffable magic of the scenic landscape and indigenous culture of the archipelago in the Central Pacific. A young boy, Mitchell (Jaden Lieberher), a character who’s all traits rather than a whole person, a plague emblemizing the entire movie, is in love with Hawaiian myths, and you can tell Crowe is too. You can tell Crowe wanted “Aloha” to be his own Hawaiian myth – “Brian Gilchrist & the Space Rocket.”

Gilchrist is the liaison between the American military stationed on Oahu and an eccentric billionaire, Carson Welch, Bill Murray imagining himself as Richard Branson, who wants to a launch some uber-super-duper doohickey into space. The launch site, however, doubles as a sacred burial ground watched over by a fervent Hawaiian independence activist, Dennis “Bumpy” Kanahele (as himself). Thus, Gilchrist, in tandem with Captain Ng, is dispatched to mediate terms. It’s a storyline completely counteracting the media’s pre-release allegation of no Hawaiians because, in fact, the film is primarily about America’s imperialism run amok over the islands. Well, not primarily; perhaps we should say…partially. And that’s a serious part of the problem.

Dubiously revealed as one-fourth Hawaiian, Ng is like Crowe’s attempt to appease in advance the people upset by a lack of native protagonists. Crowe’s heart is in the right place – I swear it is – but he’s standing smack dab in the middle of the forest, writing about the trees without, somehow, still being able to see them. General Dixon, played by Alec Baldwin, laments near the end “We never should have let civilians into space”, a truly odd takeaway in a film generally stressing free-thinking. You can’t figure out why in the hell there’s not a Bumpy Kanahele line countering it – “We never should have let white people into Hawaii.” The sky is one battle ground, Oahu is the other, yet politically the film keeps to the shallow end. When Gilchrist’s and Ng’s meeting with Kanahele grows terse, it suddenly shifts to a sing-along as Ng acquires an acoustic guitar and strums along like Joan Baez in fatigues. It’s classic Crowe, of course, that unshakable faith in music as a conciliator of all things. But in this case he’s unable to square his prominent earnest perspective with a film whose foremost twist involves a nuclear warhead.

All that could and should be enough plot but alas, that old Crowe fail-safe, the love triangle, appears too, pitting Gilchrist between his ex-flame, Tracy (Rachel McAdams), who is now married to a decidedly non-garrulous pilot, Woody (John Krasinski), with two kids, and Captain Ng, with whom Gilchrist must obligatorily pine despite being put off by her aggressively outgoing personality. In a way, Ng is just an over-produced cover version of Kirsten Dunst’s much maligned character in “Elizabethtown”*, imposing her P.O.S.I.T.I.V.I.T.Y onto a broken down male until his cynical exterior cracks and gives way. (*Disclaimer: I stand by Claire Colburn, forever and ever.) Except the cynicism from which Gilchrist supposedly suffers after a tour of duty in Afghanistan is woefully undercooked. It's not backstory, it's a parenthetical. It's made worse because Cooper, while aptly turning on the charm when required, barely plays to this supposed battlefield paralysis. Whatever angst the character is carrying never shows up in the performance.

Amidst this romantic quagmire, a truly sublime turn by McAdams is left to rot. She has, as she so often does, a consummate effervescence that all on its lonesome embodies the enchantment of the islands, a mainlander who has been swept up in their mana. Yet her character is conspicuously un-evolved, trapped between This Man and That Man, left to their whims rather than her own, as though, echoing so much of “Aloha”, a serious chunk of something seems to have been left behind on the cutting room floor. Even worse is the ultimate complication of her marriage – that is, her daughter, Grace (Danielle Rose Russell), not being Woody’s but Gilchrist’s. This is a significant situation but one for which the film has virtually no adult nuance. It is presented blithely, like it’s a hiccup rather than a really big freaking deal, and the way it’s handled by all parties involved suggests a forthcoming lifetime of emotional scar tissue for the little girl who barely gets her own say in any of this.

The last scene, involving the daughter, is the film’s best. You’ll want to shake the movie screen and wonder why the whole film couldn’t strike this tone, sincere but also willing to finally acknowledge the confusedly elaborate nature of their dynamic. It’s the one moment when the film looks to the sky and believes, even with both its feet planted firmly on the ground.

American Sniper

"American Sniper" opens with a moment of intensely rendered drama when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), Navy SEAL extraordinaire, is stricken with an immense heat-of-the-battle decision, to shoot or not to shoot a mother and child potentially on the verge of taking the lives of his comrades-in-fatigues. The film brings us right up to "Yes!" or "No!" and then......flashes back to the beginning of his story. This is a traditional thriller device and one that seems tailor-made to trigger a tidy all-American action-adventure. After all, the real-life Chris Kyle, as the ads ceaselessly bill, was the most lethal sniper in United States military history, one with 160 confirmed kills that directly correlated to an $80,000 bounty put on his head by Iraqi enemies. He was nicknamed "The Legend" on account of his exploits. Yet just as that nickname is employed onscreen not as mere militaristic braggadocio but as a skewering of mythologizing in the midst of events still taking place, the opening sequence plays as a purposeful feint toward a traditional thriller before opting for something more illuminatingly introspective.

Clint Eastwood directed the film and while there are several notable battle sequences set in Iraq, these are never the film's strict focus. He, in tandem with writer James Dean Hall (adapting from Kyle's book of the same name), transform "American Sniper" into a patient character study, one that traverses almost nauseatingly familiar ground while nonetheless enlightening specifically because of its resistance to elucidating the war-going experience. The 84 year old auteur's preferred leisurely un-auteurist sorta style allows the theoretically rote introductory moments of Kyle's boyhood with a father demanding ferocious obedience giving way to a pre-military existence as a rodeo rider, a "cowboy" as if he were a latter day John Wayne Green Beret, to effectively encompass a structured life giving way to one of aimlessness.

It is not until he heeds Uncle Sam's request in the wake of the twin bombing of African US embassies in 1998 (a sly dig at the reactionary mentality) that his life gains genuine traction, both within the naval ranks and on the homefront, where he eventually marries Taya (Sienna Miller). Their meet cute at a bar is a fairly moldy concept, yet still rings true in how the actress believably communicates in but a few moments her search for something tangible in a wandering life. Kyle recognizes and embraces it. And then 9/11 happens and he goes to war.

"American Sniper" deftly portrays how the military both builds Kyle up in the very real brotherhood he forms and tears him down in the psychological toils of war. It does not, however, resort to blatant speechifying to make these points, simply letting events accumulate until he is internally hurtling out of control. Nor does it seek to openly politicize. The only examination of the Iraq war from a national perspective is a palpably naive one wherein Kyle wants to serve and protect America because it's America and America is The Greatest Country In The World. Slowly, quietly, that viewpoint is stripped away, and, perhaps without him making the conscious realization, he finds himself accepting extended duty to protect and avenge the friends he has made more than to defend the honor of his country. "They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it," as Eric Bana said in the exemplary "Black Hawk Down", though, to its immense credit, "American Sniper" doesn't even need to say it.

“Tell me why you do it. I want to understand.” This is what Taya demands of Chris in a late sequence because she wants to know why he keeps sending himself off to harm’s way in spite of his family, and why he is so shut off and closed down from the world around him. And despite her putting the question to him so pointedly, he doesn’t give an answer. Not because he doesn’t have an answer, necessarily, but because he can’t articulate it. What can you possibly say to get someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it? And this marks "American Sniper" as an outlier. It's not quite a recruiting film but it’s also not quite anti-war. It says everything by saying nothing. War movies, often rendered by those who have never been to war, so often seek to denounce it or exalt it or explain it. Eastwood has no intention of doing any of these things.

Cooper is a revelation in the lead role. Under the shepherding of David O. Russell he tapped into a distinct and marvelously entertaining manic energy for back-to-back powerhouse turns in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." Here, however, he takes that manic energy and purposely represses it so that by the end he is practically bubbling over with a mental strain that he cannot (not will not - cannot) define. In one harrowing scene he has arrived home from war only to avoid his family and take up residence at a barstool. Taya calls him. He admits where he is. She expresses distress. Why wouldn't he just come home. "I guess," he replies, "I just needed a minute." And in that single line reading and in that single bit of actorly affectation, Cooper conveys the toll a serious military life takes. Though we empathize with it, we can't understand it. "What is it about?" I sense people craving to ask in the wake of this film. That's just the thing - we'll never really know what it's about.

A 2013 Scene To Go Home With You

"This method acting? Well, I call it living." - Bright Eyes 

A common phrase employed in conjunction with that most bandied about of performing topics - Method Acting - is this: Living The Part. Living the Part was more or less born of Experiencing the Role, a critical ingredient of Constantin Stanislavski's system for acting, a system out of which parts of the Method would eventually flow. Stanislavski would discover that in truly experiencing a role, his mind and being would merge with the character's mind and being, allowing them to act jointly. He was, in other words, Living the Part. Now, that sounds mystical, and the New School of the Method certainly adds to that mystique. People think Daniel Day-Lewis and they automatically assume the man's personage literally fused with the soul of Honest Abe. Of course, it's never really that simple, and Method Acting combines psychological and physical preparation with affective memory. Stanislavski writes in his book "An Actor Prepares": "Always act in your own person, as an artist. You can never get away from yourself. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part."

In other words, there is no magical melding nor does an actor simply become someone else when living the part. He or she specifically brings him or herself to the part and his or her own feelings. "And any exception to the rule of using your own feelings," writes Stanislavski, "is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul."

"American Hustle" is based on the infamous Abscam FBI sting operation of the 70's and 80's, though "based" might be too strong a word. Perhaps we should say loosely based. Or, excessively loosely based. Or, director David O. Russell and writer Eric Warren Singer lift the Abscam riff to cultivate their very own unwieldy power ballad with disco underpinnings. This jumping off point is entirely appropriate given the film's primary motif - acting. Here, Abscam is merely dinner theater, and all the characters use it as an excuse to role play.

One scene in particular captures the essence of "American Hustle." The gang's role-playing grandmaster, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), is forced to spend an evening out in the company of Camden Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner). Ah, but he is forced to spend it not in the company of his buxom role-playing cohort Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), but in the company of his mouthy, headstrong wife (Jennifer Lawrence). He'd really rather be with Sydney. And Sydney would really rather be Irving. But, she isn't. She's alone. And in being alone she is forced to square with reality. And who in their right (wrong?) mind wants to square with reality?

So she calls up Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), the FBI man running point on their sting who has gotten in too deep. Not in too deep in the manner of, say, Donnie Brasco, but in too deep in the manner of Kirk Lazarus. He's at home, so desperate to ignore the reality surrounding him - his fiancé he apparently doesn't like and his screeching mom - that he retreats to the bathroom with dinner. So, when Sydney phones, he's out the door in a flash.

The shot that initiates the scene is as side-splitting as it is sad - Richie is all done up like a permed OCD Tony Manero and Sydney dons a fur coat like a more assured Stephanie Mangano. They strut down the street, through the night, to the club. They are themselves, which is to say they are not themselves, because they are uncomfortable in their own skin, and assuming alternate personas and the lead roles in Sydney & Richie's Night Out! (in neon). It's a disco-era paradox, and in the disco-era where better to deny your true self then on the dance floor? What did Kylie Minogue say about the "Dance Floor"? Ah yes. "Gonna lose it in the music."

So they do. Donna Summer croons about how she "Feel(s) Love" on the soundtrack and Richie and Sydney shimmy and shake and sweat and move in close. They are not know who they are. They are whoever they want to be. But you know what they say about dancing - it's like sex. Thus, they hustle to bathroom stall to have some. Except they don't. They don't want to consummate until they've consummated the sting. They want to know that the sex is real, not something used to level the scheme-playing field. Except, of course (did I forget to mention this?), Richie doesn't even know she's Sydney. He think she's Edith, a totally proper British Lady. And so even though they have just decided in a bathroom stall to be entirely on the up-and-up, they are not at all on the up-and-up.

It’s a complicated moment. She is pledging honesty even as she maintains fakery by not divulging her true identity. Yet, in her own mind, crucially, she is not faking it. In the moment, she is Lady Edith, only Lady Edith, Sydney momentarily forgotten, and as Lady Edith she is being utterly forthright. This is to say, she has made an exception to the rule of using her own feelings. The scene concludes with Sydney releasing a blood-curdling shriek that you can literally (figuratively) see rise to the discoteque's rafters, symbolically working as the death cry of the person she is portraying, even if that death will stay on life support for several scenes.

As of this moment, she is no longer living the part.

American Hustle

“American Hustle” opens with the following disclaimer: “Some of this actually happened.” This is partly meant to instantly counteract the extravagant amount of liberty-taking with the film’s factual roots and partly meant to simply get a laugh, a broad twist on a typical device, but I suspect there is something more to it. I suspect this unshackles the film from having to be an exposé, a commentary on having to Hustle for the American Dream, or some such, and instead frees it up to be a sprawling $50 million shaggy dog story.

Undoubtedly the film will invoke comparisons to Martin Scorsese with its frenetic camerawork, pop-heavy soundtrack and implementation of a rotary telephone for a character beatdown. It will also allow for citations of Paul Thomas Anderson, himself influenced by Grandmaster Marty, particularly 1997’s “Boogie Nights”, what when you consider “American Hustle” is set in the 70’s and makes liberal use of the era’s flamboyant costuming and disco tuneage. Some movies, however, do not aim to advance nor re-invent the form, merely to gather varying techniques of the form and wield them for the sake of sheer blinding entertainment. “American Hustle” is not The Story Of Abscam as much as it is David O. Russell’s Variety Hour – starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and assorted others!

Bale is Irving Rosenfeld, yet another character that allows for its actor to undergo a physical transformation, adding serious paunch and a delightfully ridiculous comb over. Partly a dry cleaning entrepreneur, but mostly a con man, Irving falls for/teams up with Sydney Prosser (Adams), so desperate for any other kind of life that she sees Irving not for the fake hair on his head but for the desire to deceive in his heart. It's love at first lie. These two set the stage, past and present, with voiceovers that continually trade off, two grifters reciting a ripping yarn over cocktails. Bale finds real pathos amidst all the put-ons and Adams is remarkable, the film's foremost emblem, conveying that her desperation to be someone else is, in fact, who she is.

Sydney adopts an English accent, re-casts herself "Lady Edith" of the isles and the two indulge in a prosperous scheme until undercover FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) nabs them. If Sydney is determined to lead a different life then Richie is determined to move through the ranks at the speed of sound. So, he enlists them in a sting to go after Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and, in turn, crooked congressmen and, in turn, maybe, just maybe, the mob (represented in a particular walk-off cameo of inexpressible perfection).

Enter: The Wildcard, Rosalyn (Lawrence), wife of Irving and mother to the son he has adopted. Her initial appearance, after we have already seen Irving fall for and pledge devotion to Sydney, is a masterstroke, painting her as an afterthought, which is clearly how she views herself. He tries keeping her out of his crooked lifestyle, she worms her way in, repeatedly and hysterically. The role itself, from the screenplay by Russell and Eric Warren Singer, is killer, first and foremost, but Lawrence, who overcomes the comes-and-goes nature of her Jersey accent with manic energy, owns it. She threatens to blow up everything (the scam, the microwave) and threatens to steal the film entirely, if not for the fact her theatrical fervor is met head-on by the whole ensemble. (In keeping with the put-on-a-show nature of the whole film, I kind of wish Lawrence and Adams had swapped parts midstream. I so would have liked to see what each one could have done in the other role.)

As the untraditional crew lures Polito into its web, Richie reveals himself to be terrifically unstable and less intelligent than he thinks, falling for Sydney. She might be falling for him too, but she might be playing him, but then she might be doing both. Irving meanwhile forms a genuine affection for Polito and his family, and for Polito’s ideas to rebuild Atlantic City and, in the process, create new jobs and new wealth for New Jersey. This subplot, however, the political and social ramifications of the high-reaching undercover op, feels like an afterthought. It merely crops up around the edges, failing to provide the intended equilibrium to the Abscam shenanigans, and Russell repeatedly appears to purposely upstage tension and/or drama by playing for laughs. Thus, “American Hustle” ultimately fails to ring with any profound meaning, and yet I don't think it wants to.

There are so many little moments of absurd bliss and physical and verbal drollery inviting cuts from a theoretical editing standpoint that stay in because they are the point so much more than any “point”. As the stakes of the sting are raised, the more Richie yearns to elaborate on the ruse, to be a big shot, to rent out a whole suite at the Plaza, to be someone else.

One heightened moment goes so far as to find him dressing up like Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever" and squiring Sydney to the discoteque. He’s play-acting, and from the get-go we can tell that what Irving and Sydney (or is it Edith?) get off on more than the cash is the burlesque. The conclusion suggests our “heroes” have settled into their own skin, but it's telling that is the least convincing part of the picture. Everyone here just wants to lose themselves in the part, to put on a show, and what a hell of a show “American Hustle” is.