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Film, Male Film Directors

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) : Stanley W. Rogouski’s Review

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There are three reasons I moved out of New York City. The first was 9/11. I was over 8 blocks away from the World Trade Center when it came down, and my apartment was all the way up in the north Bronx, but seeing the windows of my office go completely black that horrible morning, twice, gave me a mild case of PTSD. So I went back to Southeast Alaska. When I returned back to New York, I found that I could no longer afford to live there, which would be the second reason. The third reason is entirely personal and idiosyncratic: Steve Madden Shoes.

Anybody who lived in New York city in the late 1990s remembers the ads in the subway for Steve Madden Shoes. Women with over-sized heads, tiny arms and legs and bitchy looks on their faces, they were a conscious caricature of urban femininity. For all I know women may have liked Steve Madden’s shoes. They may even have liked his subway ads, but, for me, looking at those images of those angry dolls every morning on the D-Train all the way down from 205th Street in the Bronx was just too much to take. I had begun to feel like Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror.

Steve Madden, as it turns out, was a high school friend of Danny Porush, the co-founder, along with Jordan Belfort, of the “pump and dump” brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont. Steve Madden Shoes was the first company they “took public.” Martin Scorsese’s new movie The Wolf of Wall Street is their story.

Porush, fictionalized as Donnie Azoff, and played by Jonah Hill from Seth Rogan’s Superbad, is a nerd with power. A soft, puffy, effeminate, angry little Pillsbury Dough Boy with man titties and clear glass in horn rim glasses — to make him look more like a WASP—Azoff would normally be a joke, the kind of kid the jocks beat up in high school, and women “friend zone” in their 20s. At best he might grow up to be Chris Christie. But in The Wolf of Wall Street Azoff finds himself in the right place at the right time. Not particularly articulate, or even competent, Azoff, nevertheless, has the one quality essential to success in late 1990s, neoliberal America. He’s completely unethical. That gives him money, which, in the words of Al Pacino from Scarface, also gives him power, and that, in turn, gives access to the best drugs, and, more importantly, to beautiful woman. He doesn’t get bullied. He does the bullying. In one hilariously over the top scene, for example, he catches one of his brokers cleaning a fish tank on the day of the Steve Madden IPO. He fires the man on the spot and eats the fish. If you want to know what “The American Dream” looks like for the frustrated American geek, The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a bad place to start.

But The Wolf of Wall Street is not Danny Porush’s story. If if had been, Scorsese wouldn’t have fictionalized his name. It’s Jordan Belfort’s, played by the now middle-aged Leonardo DiCaprio. If Donnie Azoff is the Wolf of Wall Street’s Tommy DeVito, then Jordan Belfort is its Henry Hill. An everyman with a gift of gab, a NYC white ethnic with a degree from a non-Ivy-league university, Belfort is a trainee stock broker at the blue chip Wall Street brokerage house L.F. Rothschild. There he comes under the guidance of the senior broker “Mark Hanna” (history nerds will get the Gilded Age tie in), played by a now middle-aged Matthew McConaughey, learns the over the top machismo of Wall Street, and gets started on his drug habit. He seems destined to become just another broker at L.F. Rothschild making six figures, but then luck intervenes. He passes his Series 7 Exam on October 1987, Black Monday. L.F. Rothschild goes out of business, and he finds himself looking for a new job.

Black Monday turns out to be a happy accident. Belfort winds up in a boiler room on Long Island, Investor Center, a low end brokerage house specializing in pushing worthless “penny stocks” to working class people who don’t know any better. He not only masters the job on the first day, he becomes the dominant broker after the first sale. As the assembled employees of Investor Center gather around his desk in fascination as he smooth talks a sucker out of his money, we see the charisma that will carry him to great wealth and fame.

Soon, along with Azoff, he opens up his own boiler room, and, soon after that, he “rebrands” the company Stratton Oakmont, a newly minted “blue chip” firm, a move that gives him access to richer suckers and bigger bank accounts. An attempted “hit job” by Forbes Magazine backfires. It makes him a household name. They should have hired the NY Post instead. After that comes the Steve Madden IPO, and, by the age of 26, Jordan Belfort is worth 50 million dollars. The rest of the movie is as predictable as it is entertaining. Copious amounts of drugs are taken. Hundreds of prostitutes are fucked. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money are flushed down the toilet, and, eventually, Stratton Oakmont attracts the attention of the FBI.

(Historical Footnote: Before 9/11, the FBI occasionally prosecuted criminals on Wall Street. This may strike the viewer as dated, even fantastical. But it did happen. Even though the Clinton Administration, like the Obama Administration, generally declined to prosecute major financial criminals at large, blue chip firms like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, they would, at times, throw a small time hustler — and 50 million dollars is chump change on Wall Street —like Jordan Belfort to the wolves. Belfort and Porush did in fact wind up doing a token sentences in minimum security, “country club” prisons.)

Judging by the reviews of The Wolf of Wall Street I’ve read online, which include an “open letter” from Christina McDowell, one of Belfort’s employees, and a man he “ratted on” to the FBI, many people are accusing Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio of “glorifying” Jordon Belfort. That’s debatable. While the film is based on Belfort’s memoir, and does indeed read as a “God I was so drunk last night” story that frat boys tell each other on Sunday morning — and who doesn’t love a frat boy with a hangover — I’m equally sure there are as many people on Wall Street offended by their portrayal as sexist, booze soaked, coke addled jerkoffs as there are people pleased by it. Just because Scorsese gives Belfort some charisma, doesn’t present him as a killjoy like Walter or Skylar White, doesn’t mean he thinks he’s a hero. Indeed, Walter White is the hero. He goes down, in a final blaze of glory, taking out a gang of neo Nazis. Jordan Belfort, on the other hand, goes down ratting out most of his friends to the cops.

What’s more, if the American people look up to men like Jordan Belfort and Donnie Azoff, and they do, that’s not Martin Scorsese’s fault. Just because Scorsese attempts to locate the source of Belfort’s appeal, he’s not romanticizing him. Jordan Belfort succeeds because, in the tawdry world of the 1990s neoliberal United States, he was able to articulate the only thing left about the “American Dream.” Make money. Get rich. Fuck hookers and do drugs. It may not be my ideal, but it sure as hell beats “check your privilege.” If Belfort comes off like a smarmy mediocrity and Azoff like a angry little toad, that’s only because we Americans love smarmy mediocrities and angry toads. Indeed, the final scenes of The Wolf of Wall Street show Belfort as a wannabe cult leader, a “motivational speaker” who’s found his place at last, holding forth like a Baptist preacher about the Gospel of Success. If this had been another time, and Belfort had been black, he might have been Reverend Ike. Azoff, post 9/11, might have been Michael Savage or Sean Hannity. If you don’t like it, don’t blame a movie. Change the culture. Overthrow capitalism. But don’t wag your finger at Martin Scorsese for being an honest filmmaker.

I suppose I should also include a “trigger warning” with this review. The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the most misogynistic films I’ve seen in quite some time. Scorsese’s mastery of film allows him to get away with demeaning women in a way a less skilled director couldn’t, but, in spite of a few token female characters with back stories and real personalities, women in The Wolf of Wall Street are largely props. Belfort’s blond, guidette wife is a petty snob — she lets us know that even though she’s got an Italian last name she’s got relatives who are actually British — and a brainless twit who’s too incompetent even to try to Heimlich Donny Azoff when he’s choking to death. She has no job skills, no education, and, as soon as she realizes Belfort is going down, that he’s going to lose most of his money, she files for a divorce. Yes, we are rooting for her to get custody of their daughter “Skylar” but that’s only because Belfort is so drugged out of his mind, we realize he’d probably kill her if he got away. It’s not a hard decision for a family court judge. Between a castrating bitch and a drug addled maniac, the child goes to the castrating bitch. At least she’ll survive into her 20s to go into psychotherapy. In fact, The Wolf of Wall Street is so brilliantly misogynistic that I actually cheered when Belfort punched his wife in the face.

So make of it what you will. Scorsese shows us lots of tawdry, hateful people with tawdry hateful dreams. But ignore it at your peril, Americans. This is the country you live in.

Film, Male Film Directors

The Act of Killing (2012)

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If you watch Democracy Now, you probably know all about Suharto’s monstrous dictatorship in Indonesia. Amy Goodman regularly talks about the genocide in East Timor as being on a par with the Holocaust. Yet the brutal anti-Communist crackdown that took place in 1965 and 1966, a bloodbath that probably killed over a million people, has never gotten the same attention — at least in the United States — as what happened to the Kurds under Saddam or to Bosnia under Milosevic.

A brief glance at the history of Indonesia in the 1960s quickly reveals that compared to Suharto, Saddam and Milosevic were small time thugs barely worth your notice. The most widely accepted estimate, according to Wikipedia, “is that more than 500,000 people were killed.” The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the “New Order”; the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was eliminated as a political force, and the upheavals led to the downfall of president Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto’s thirty-year presidency.” In fact, there were minor league Suharto flunkies who probably killed more people with their own hands than the number of people who died in the Srebrenica massacre.

The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary, is about one of them. In 1965, Anwar Congo, a slight, almost childlike old man, was selling black market tickets to American gangster films in the city of Medan in North Sumatra. A few years later, he was in command of one of the death squads Suharto used to kill not only communists, but anybody who got in his way, including innocent Chinese nationals who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Congo, who’s now revered as a founder of the right wing paramilitary group “Pancasila Youth,” brags that he killed over 1000 people with his own hands. He demonstrates his favorite technique, wrapping chicken wire around the victim’s neck, tying the ends to wooden sticks, and twisting until they choked to death. He introduces us to his friend Herman Koto, an obese man who spends half the film in drag, a monster no Hollywood script writer would have dared make up as fiction, a man so sadistic and flat out weird that he makes Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List look like a boring technocrat.

The Act of Killing is a three hour movie, a complex documentary, half Shoah, half Marat Sade, that I can no more describe adequately in this review than I can hum a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant.” You really owe it to yourself to go see it. Suffice it to say that Anwar Congo deserves to be hauled up in front of a Nuremberg tribunal, then lined up against the wall and shot. That there’s little or no chance of this ever happening, that very foundation of Indonesian society rests upon the death squads he helped found and the mass murders he helped carry out is what gives The Act of Killing so much of its visceral power.

The way Joshua Oppenheimer organizes The Act of Killing is as baroque as it is gut wrenching. The problem isn’t to get Anwar Congo to open up. Congo thinks of himself as a rock star. He has no more trouble talking about how he killed 1000 people with his bare hands than Mick Jagger has with talking about how he wrote “Satisfaction.” The problem, rather, is getting him to understand what he’s done, to feel any kind of empathy for his victims. This Oppenheimer accomplishes by having Congo and Herman Koto reenact scenes from their days leading the death squads. He has no trouble getting them to do this either. Kongo, in fact, learned how to kill from American gangster movies, and, one suspects, that part of the way he distanced himself from the atrocities he committed was by thinking of it as “role playing.” It’s only when Oppenheimer has Congo play the role of one of his victims, and Koto as Congo himself, that Congo is able to understand the enormity of his crimes. At long last he’s able to express remorse.

It’s impossible to express just how much I hated Anwar Congo, not because he comes off like the stereotypical Nazi, but because he doesn’t. He’s a slight, childlike man. He enjoys dancing. In fact, immediately after he explains how he garroted a man to death with his patented two sticks and a length of chicken wire technique, he talks about how smoking pot, drinking and dancing helped him deal with being a mass murderer. He dances the Cha Cha. Try to imagine Adolf Eichmann dancing the Cha Cha. Congo likes nice clothes. He likes partying. The effect is so powerful, I felt a visceral, racist loathing for the Indonesian people. Congo is a vain little monkey, I thought, a primitive savage who saw a few American gangster movies, and decided to play act them literally. Take the movies away. Get the French or the British to invade Indonesia and put the whole amoral, inferior race back under some kind of benevolent colonialism until they can be taught to understand some sort of Christian, or even Islamic morality. Better yet, just nuke them all. Destroy the whole benighted country.

In other words, the film made me feel as genocidal as the people I was feeling genocidal against. If the justification Anwar Kongo and Herman Koto used to commit mass murder was “communism,” the justification I wanted to use was white supremacy. I do think this was part of Oppenheimer’s intention. How else to explain the almost constant presence of Herman Koto in drag? I was offended not by mass murder, but by the effeminate Oriental. Edward Said take notice. I had moved 20 miles to the right of Joseph Conrad. In my own mind, mass murder was only right and proper when done in high northern European Gothic. Somehow I was able to feel hate for the Pancasila Youth that I had never felt for Hitler’s brownshirts. I had forgotten that banal evil is no less evil and no less banal when done to the tune of Richard Wagner than it is while done in between watching a gangster film and dancing the Cha Cha.

After I managed to dismiss my inner racist, my inner leftist took over. As Adi Zulkadry, another, more intellectual death squad leader asked, how is the United States any better than Indonesia? We exterminated the Indians and created a whole genre of cinema, cowboy movies, to celebrate it. Lieutenant William Calley, who organized the My Lai massacre, never expressed any remorse or spent much time in jail. Hell, I even remembered the “Free Calley” marches from my childhood. Calley, like Anwar Congo, is an American hero. Americans not only stood by while George. W. Bush destroyed Iraq, they “supported the troops.” The winners write the rules, Zulkadry explained. That’s why Americans accepted Gitmo. That’s why he’s not going to apologize for what he did. He’s a winner. The communists he killed were weak when he killed them. They’re weaker now, spirits without bodies. They no more count than do the women and children Lieutenant Calley and his troops machine gunned in that ditch at My Lai.

It’s hard to argue with Zulkadry’s logic. It’s even harder to accept the rationalizations of a war criminal. My inner leftist proved as unable to deal with the issues raised by The Act of Killing than my inner white supremacist. After all, didn’t Hitler condemn British Imperialism? Didn’t the British imperialists condemn King Leopold in the Congo? Didn’t George W. Bush condemned Saddam Hussein? Moral equivalence is nothing more than rationalization, whoever does it. As The Act of Killing demonstrates, there are plenty of monsters in the world who aren’t Americans. That the United States supported Suharto’s regime over the course of three decades means the question is moot anyway. Americans and Indonesians are both part of the same neoliberal world order, founded on mass murder and genocide, stained with blood and guts.

Indeed, Suharto’s “New Order” was, perhaps, the first and most brutal of the neoliberal dictatorships supported by Washington. Chomsky once remarked that after the Communist Party was drowned in blood in Indonesia, Vietnam was little more than a side show. Suharto’s right wing death squads or gangsters —“gangster,” as Anwar Kongo explains, means “free man”— are a bit like Ayn Rand heroes. They live according to their desires and take what they want. What better enforcers for a murderous kleptocrat who became immensely rich stealing from his own people? The gangsters were given a license to steal and murder as long as they kept his regime in power.  Much like the impunity given by our government to our own bankers and “job creators,” the law just didn’t apply to Suharto’s “free men.” Our bankers and “job creators” were allowed to steal billions of dollars through high tech methods like sub-prime mortgages and government bailouts. Suharto’s “free men” stole hundreds of millions through classic, mafia style shakedowns. Give us a cut of your business or we’ll accuse you of being a communist, murder you, and take your property anyway.

I left The Act of Killing feeling drained, not only because of the documentary’s length, but because of the challenge it laid at my feet. Monsters live among us. Adolf Eichmann ended up exactly where he deserved, dangling at the end of a rope. The Italian people hung Mussolini from a meat hook. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher died comfortably in their sleep. And Anwar Kongo, for all the remorse he felt at the documentary’s end, is probably still doing the Cha Cha.

Film, Male Film Directors

Killer of Sheep (1977)

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In John Ford’s great cinematic rendering of The Grapes of Wrath, the old truck that carries the Joad family from Oklahoma to Southern California becomes more more than a truck. Overloaded, off balance, constantly breaking down or running out of gas, the Joadmobile is one of the iconic characters in film history, the embodiment of the determination of the American working class to survive the Great Depression. In what is the film’s, and perhaps even John Ford’s climatic scene, the Joad family some how, some way makes it across the desert from Nevada to Southern California, a journey as perilous as the one their forebears made 75 years before, the old truck, part motor vehicle, part covered wagon, bridging the gap that separated New Deal America from the pioneers.

In Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” we have a very different kind of family, and a very different confrontation with poverty. Killer of Sheep may not be as well known as Grapes of Wrath. Filmed through the 1970s when Burnett was a film student at UCLA, its release was delayed for years because of copyright issues with the soundtrack. After its restoration in 2007, however, it was chosen by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 Essential Films. In 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Stan, the film’s Tom Joad, is a young black man who lives with his wife and two kids in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles of the 1960s. Poverty for Stan and his family isn’t the life threatening poverty of the Joad family. There’s no danger they’re going to starve to death, break down in the middle of the night in the desert, or get beaten to death by strikebreakers. Everybody in Charles Burnett’s Watts has enough to eat and a roof over their heads. Poverty in Killer of Sheep pretty much comes down to “lacking pocket money,” but, if the Grapes of Wrath is about purgatory, Killer of Sheep is set in hell. Burnett’s Watts may be geographically located in Los Angeles, which was, last time I checked, a major American city, but it seems like a lost village of the damned. Time doesn’t exist. Place doesn’t exist. There is no government, no police, no postal service. There are no newspapers or magazines, and the only time we see a television set is when it’s being stolen. Stan has a job in a slaughterhouse, thus the title “Killer of Sheep,” but his neighbors all seem to be shiftless layabouts or petty thieves. There is quite literally no way out.

If the Joad family make it across the desert against all the odds, Stan and his neighbors fail at the simplest of tasks. In a particularly painful scene, for example, Stan and one of his friends buy a used engine from a neighbor to transplant into a non-working motor vehicle, a possible way out. They negotiate the price. They pick up the engine and carry down two flights of stairs.  After a long, harrowing struggle, they manage to get the it out to the street and their pickup truck, which is parked on a steep incline. They’ve made it, success, but no. Stan’s friend has injured his hand. They don’t have enough strength left to push the engine all the way up into the pickup truck’s bed. They leave the hard won engine hanging right on the edge. We wince because we know what’s coming. Stan gets behind the wheel of the car, and the engine crashes down onto the street as they lurch forward. They crack the block and waste what’s probably close to a week’s salary at the slaughterhouse. A later attempt at escape, a day trip to a local race track fails just as miserably. Just like the Joad family, Stan and his friends overload their car and blow out one of the tires, but, unlike the Joad family, they lack the ingenuity and the determination to continue on their way. Instead, they just turn around and ride the rim back to Watts. We can only imagine the shape the car was in when they got back home.

Whether or not you enjoy Killer of Sheep probably depends on whether or not you see Stan’s failure to escape, or even try to escape from the hell of his Watts neighborhood as a strength or a weakness. Film critics love Killer of Sheep. They see the Burnett’s refusal to plot out an overarching, central narrative as part of an honest attempt to recreate the conditions of urban poverty in the 1960s.

Killer of Sheep is certainly an effective expression of despair. The hangdog expressions of the men, the hostility of the women, the vicious aimless quality of the children testify to what life was like in one of those ghettos. But I’m not a film critic. Like John Ford’s audience in the 1930s, I don’t watch a film to recreate conditions I know in real life. I don’t want a film about poverty to be governed by a poverty of the imagination. The fact that Charles Burnett has managed, with great skill, to recreate a small corner of hell may testify to his skill as a film maker, but it doesn’t mean I want to spend 80 minutes of my time watching it. I know what poverty is like. I know what bedbugs are like. Does that mean I want to see a film that reminds me what it’s like to sleep on a mattress infested with bedbugs? In fact, far from bringing us closer to the reality of the poor, the lack of a plot brings us into the world of bourgeois indulgence, almost certainly not Burnett’s intention, but probably a hint about why it’s been so lavishly praised by the critics.

For the Joad family, survival is the overarching narrative. They don’t have the luxury of aimless meandering. That would be for the rich, the film critics who think Killer of Sheep is a “slice of life.” For the Joad family, it’s make it to California or die. They keep that truck working because they have to. Stan, by contrast, for all his failure at buying a spare engine or getting to the race track, somehow manages to get to work everyday. How does he do it? Does he take the bus? Does he car pool? Does he ride a bike? It’s Los Angeles, after all, not New York. There’s no subway and commutes in southern California often involve vast distances. But we’re never told. It’s an interesting story. It’s the story the film calls for, but Burnett never addresses it. He denies us the pleasure of any narrative arc, even if that narrative arc is about getting to work every day, something the poor, in real life, do with great skill and ingenuity.

Indeed, the weakest scenes in Killer of Sheep involve Stan’s job at the slaughterhouse. Unlike most of the film critics who have put Burnett’s film up on a pedestal, I actually know what the inside of a slaughterhouse looks like, having worked in fish canneries in the 1990s. In spite of one striking image of sheep after they’ve been slaughtered, these scenes fall flat. They capture none of the smell, the noise, the chaos, or the violence of a slaughterhouse. For that, go to Jennifer Lawrence’s squirrel skinning scene in Winter’s Bone,where she viscerally recoils from the blood and guts. The abattoir in Killer of sheep is arty and contrived, a clumsy attempt at symbolism. Yeah, we get it. Stan and his friends, the working class as a whole, are just like sheep, aimlessly milling about, waiting to be slaughtered. But if you’re going to film a scene in a slaughterhouse, it had better be messier. Slaughterhouses aren’t bloodless.

Perhaps it’s best to look at Killer of Sheep exactly as what it is, a brilliant student film made by a gifted cinematographer.  In a purely visual sense, Killer of Sheep is a triumph. Burnett may not know how to write a story. His actors, non actors, may seem wooden and clumsy, and the sound maybe incompetently mixed, but as a still photographer he has to rank with some of the greatest. The lighting is perfect, not just in one scene, but in every scene. The framing, while simple, is also deceptively simple. Every scene, every moment, has the palpable feel of reality. I suspect that if a professor of photography at Pratt Institute diagrammed Killer of Sheep scene by scene, he’d find that every frame is perfectly composed. Killer of Sheep looks as good as any black and white film by Jim Jarmusch. Frame by frame, the black and white photography in Killer of Sheep is as beautiful as the black and white photography in John Ford’s most beautiful film, “My Darling Clementine.” Killer of Sheep looks as good as the collected works of Henri Cartier Bresson.

It’s just too bad that whatever Burnett’s motivations, Killer of Sheep never quite rises above the level of poverty porn.

Film, Male Film Directors

American Hustle (2013)

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People believe what they want to believe

Near the beginning of David O. Russell’s fictionalized treatment of the ABSCAM scandal (more on that later) a small-time con man from the Bronx named Irving Rosenfeld, played by the almost unrecognizably balding and overweight Christian Bale, has brought a woman back to one of his offices. The woman, named Sydney Prosser, is stuck at a dead end job as an administrative assistant at Cosmopolitan Magazine. He’s madly in love with her, not only because she’s played by Amy Adams, who, although born in 1974, seems to embody a vision of 1970s cool, but because he feels that she’s the one person in his life with whom he can be honest. He’s ready to tell her the truth, that he’s a con man who runs what might best be described as an analog version of the Nigerian e-mail scam. What’s more, he wants her to join him, to become his partner in crime.

“How do you get them their loans?” she says.

“These guys are lousy risks,” he replies. “I can’t get them a loan, but I get my fee, five thousand.”

Sydney understands almost what he’s asking her to do almost immediately. It’s not the Bush years, where easy credit can be had from legitimate banks, but the late 1970s, in the aftermath of the oil shocks, in the middle of a recession, where, because of stagflation, the dollar is getting less and less valuable. While clearly interested, she has a moment of hesitation.

“Everybody at the bottom crosses paths eventually in a pool of desperation and you’re waiting for them,” she says, before walking out the door.

But it’s only a moment of hesitation. Soon Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser, who has re-christened herself “Lady Edith Greensly” and has started speaking in a phony British accent, are working as a team. In addition to bilking people out of the last of their savings with the promises loans never delivered, they sell stolen, and, more importantly, forged art. “Who’s the master?” Rosenfeld asks, showing off a copy of a fake Rembrandt, “the painter or the forger? People believe what they want to believe,” he adds, and we believe it.

I never even bothered to ask whether or not Adams’s fake British accent was credible because she so perfectly embodied the ideal of aspirational WASP sexiness that every NYC male, heterosexual white ethnic male falls prey to at one time or another. It worked for me. It works for Rosenfeld, and, more importantly, it works for Richie DiMaso, a strange, ethically compromised undercover FBI agent played by Bradley Cooper who lives with his butch Italian American mother, and who maintains an elaborate white boy afro by putting his hair up into hair curlers every night.

By the way I’ve described them so far, you might not think that Irving and Sydney are particularly likable. At best, you may think, they’re a complex pair of anti heroes like Walter and Skylar White, sympathetic only because they’re honestly corrupt in a dishonestly corrupt society. They are indeed that, but there’s more. By the end of American Hustle, we genuinely like Sydney and Irving. We even root for them to get away with it all, and live happily ever after.

Enter ABSCAM.

To explain exactly what ABSCAM was is far beyond the scope of this review. So I suggest you go to Wikipedia and look it up. Even after you do, you’ll still be left scratching your head, but suffice to say, it was a sting operation by the FBI against a United States Senator, Harrison Williams, a Mayor of Camden, Angelo Errichetti, and several other members of Congress, an attempt to catch them accepting bribes offered by a phony Arab Sheik. Remember, ABSCAM took place right after the oil embargo. Looking back, neither Williams nor Errichetti, or any of the other members of Congress the FBI attempted to bribe seem like particularly bad guys, and, in fact, the sting operation bordered on entrapment, so much so that there are even conspiracy theories about how the FBI was trying to exact payback against Congress for the Church Committee Hearings.

David O. Russell’s take on ABSCAM is much less conspiratorial. For him, ABSCAM wasn’t so much payback for the Church Committee as a sign that the only difference between the FBI and the New York City underworld, between Irving Rosenfeld and Richie DiMaso is that one lives by his wits and another draws a government salary. Richie DiMaso is no Eliot Ness. Rather, he’s an ambitious hustler who wants to make a name for himself by, ideally, bagging a mobster played by Robert DeNiro, or, if that fails, a few members of Congress and a Mayor of Camden.

After arresting Sydney and Irving, locking Sydney up for three days in solitary confinement, and coercing them into becoming FBI informants, DiMaso realizes that he feels more for Sydney than disgust at a petty criminal and scam artist. Just like Irving Rosenfeld, he falls madly in love with her, but unlike Rosenfeld, and this is the important difference, he has the power of the state on his side. He can make her requite his affections because he can also lock her up in a cage if she doesn’t. There’s nothing heavy handed about the way Russell introduces it. Indeed, it’s so subtle, we barely notice it happened. While DiMaso isn’t exactly Prince Charming, he’s no comic book villain twirling his mustache while he ties the damsel in distress to the railroad tracks. Sydney’s no damsel in distress and DiMaso, for all his faults, unlike Rosenfeld, at least has all his hair, and at least goes to the gym once in awhile. But the sex DiMaso wants, and never gets, would in fact, be coerced sex, and that, in the end, is what makes Sydney and Irving, for all their faults, the heroes we root for, and DiMaso, for all the sympathy we may feel for his hopeless lust for Sydney, the villain.

The rest of it unfolds from there. Irving Rosenfeld, heartless scam artist, begins to realize he may have a soul after all. The FBI’s mark, a liberal New Jersey politician named Carmine Polito, played by Jeremy Renner as a bit of a fop with a puffy hairstyle (this film is all about hair and cleavage), may not be the second coming of Lincoln. He may be involved in some low level corruption, but only because “that’s the way things are done” in his world. What’s more, he genuinely cares about the people he governs. He likes black people. He hates racism. He considers his constituents not only his constituents but his extended family. He may be willing to bend a few rules to build Casinos in Atlantic City — gambling in New Jersey has just been legalized — but he’s doing it to get jobs for the people of his state, not to line his own pockets. So Rosenfeld decides to turn the tables on the FBI, and, when he does, the movie has so effectively conned us all we never see it coming.

Final note: Jennifer Lawrence, the current Hollywood mega star, plays Irving Rosenfeld’s wife Rosyln. She’s far too beautiful, far too Anglo Saxon, and at least ten years too young for the role. Debbi Mazur or Joan Cusack in her early 30s would have been perfect. But, whatever her faults, Lawrence earns her pay, throwing herself into the role of a 1970s New York City guidette with such abandon, we almost begin to believe her Jersey accent is authentic. Her looks also contrasts with Adams’s. Where Adams is slim, elegant, cool, Lawrence is loud, fleshy, an out of control loose canon. At times, so much energy does Lawrence put into the role of blond Snooki, you can almost forget Adams is 5’4” and Lawrence is 5’11”. Adams just seems taller. What’s more, Russell shows us all the flaws in Amy Adam’s skin. She’s sexy because she’s real. Lawrence, by contrast, comes off like a perfect, almost too perfect wax doll, a 1970s Playboy Playmate a few years later, neglected, feeling left alone, and determined to push herself into the action by any means necessary (even if it means getting her husband kidnapped by mobsters).

Final verdict on American Hustle: Maybe not a great movie or even a very good one, but a thoroughly entertaining, and genuinely anti-authoritarian one, worth seeing for Christian Bale’s toupee, if nothing else.