A bunch of Hollywood A-listers – plus Taylor Swift – in a self-satisfied period movie nostalgic for freedom and idealised notions of liberal America? Ah, it must be the dawn of awards season!
The first feature in seven long years for Oscar-winning writer-director David O. Russell (American Hustle; Silver Linings Playbook) brings together an all-star acting cast – Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Chris Rock and Anya Taylor-Joy among them – for a freewheeling screwball caper largely set in an East Coast America of 1933, where the swinging Jazz Age has given way to economic depression and the spectre of global fascism on the rise.
With a shock of wavy hair, old-timey accent and glass eye, Bale is going ham as Burt Berendsen, a former Park Ave doctor whose World War I injuries have left him with a morphine addiction and a sketchy hustle as a quack surgeon, helping out fellow veterans alongside his old army buddy – and now lawyer – Harold Woodman (John David Washington).
Like a femme fatale from a gumshoe noir – or a nightmare dressed as a daydream – into their lives walks Taylor Swift's Liz Meekins, whose dad, their former army general turned senator Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr), has just turned up in a pine box. An autopsy performed by Burt's on-off crush, Irma St Clair (Zoe Saldaña), points to foul play – and pretty soon Burt and Harold are the prime suspects.
Russell's first movie since the dramatically messy Joy explodes with much of his former exaggerated comic momentum, with giddy camera moves, performances leaning hard into eccentric caricature, and even a touch of nonsense singsong. The sight of the erstwhile Patrick Bateman and Miss Americana warbling an off-key refrain is a good indication of how charmingly pitched – yet rustily executed – so much of the film turns out to be.
A buoyant flashback sequence reveals the genesis of Burt and Harold's friendship on the Western Front in 1918, where the two soldiers – convalescing from injuries in a makeshift hospital – fall in with a livewire nurse, Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), a bona fide oddball who makes surreal sculptures from the shrapnel she salvages from wounded men.
Robbie, one of the true movie stars of the modern era, is in her element as a zany enigma, less a muse to her men than they are to her.
Burt, Harold and Valerie take up a postwar residence in Amsterdam, where – at least for a fleeting moment – their utopian ideas about art, love and the future flourish in a dreamy pas de trois.
Yes, Amsterdam is both a location and a state of mind, a word that will become a kind of mantra for our heroes when they reconnect in the dark times of 1933, where the search for Meekins's murderer will lead to a secret cabal of American industrialists who've aligned themselves with the rising tide of fascism in Europe – though admittedly, as is the expedient way of capitalism, with a view to turning a profit rather than pursuing any specific ideological agenda.
Russell's direction here isn't as loose as his Scorsese-biting antics of American Hustle, in which the camera seemed inches away from clocking the actors on the skull at any given moment, but his loopy energy behind the lens – goosed by the virtuoso stylings of Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant; Gravity) – helps push the film over some of its bumpy narrative structure.
As usual, his rapport with the performers shines – something of an enduring miracle, considering his infamous blow-up at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees – and Bale, in particular, is having a ball affecting a creaky veteran's hunch and toggling his eyes in homage to Peter Falk's Columbo (let no one say that the man doesn't give his demented all, irrespective of the material).
Right at home in the movie's rogues' gallery are a moustachioed Rami Malek, sneering his way through a Mid-Atlantic-accented version of his Bond villain, and Anya Taylor-Joy as his gooey society wife, an upper-crust couple who may or may not be connected to the fascists' fiendish plot; Chris Rock, as an army vet on hand to deliver some trademark rants about white people; and the great, genuinely odd Andrea Riseborough, as Burt's old-money, Park Avenue ex.
But their collective commitment to the bit can't always overcome Russell's often flat screenplay, which is both comedically undercooked and dramatically over-determined. The actors sparkle, even as the would-be witty repartee and screwball bon mots miss the mark.
Occasionally it all aligns – Michael Shannon and an extremely plummy Mike Myers, playing two birdwatching-obsessed spies, are a comic highlight – but more often you're waiting for the jokes to land, and wondering why, when the performances are this zesty, something about it all feels a little off.
Spare a thought for Robert De Niro, as decorated war veteran and man of indefatigable principles Gil Dillenbeck, whose dependable performance becomes a pulpit for Russell's rusty harangue – a no doubt well-intentioned warning about the rise of the far right that feels like it was cooked up in a screenwriting fever during the November 2016 US election.
Russell's moral indignation spins the movie away from messy, spirited caper and toward an astonishingly corny final act, where the filmmaker's former spikiness – the acidic absurdism that powered his best work, like Huckabees and Three Kings – gives way to a "Love Trumps Hate" sentimentality, and a climax that basically plays like the recently resurfaced, much-lambasted #resist clip of Hollywood actors in their favourite off-duty mode: political protest.
(Amsterdam's pleas for a kinder, better world might give some audiences pause on account of Russell's own extracurricular notoriety, something that gets re-litigated – and not without good reason – every time he resurfaces with a new film.)
The filmmaker's heart-on-sleeve hopefulness is less convincing than his way with pratfalls and off kilter comic asides, and while it's tempting to give the film's corniness the benefit of its Capra-esque sentiment, the screenplay doesn't sparkle to earn it.
Still, Amsterdam's ending – a fetishised utopia of American liberalism – is so on the nose that Academy voters (or at least those in the less discerning Hollywood Foreign Press) may well lap the film up. After all, the last time an all-star comedy with a head-hammering message dropped, critics were apparently out of touch – and the awards nominations came rolling in.
Amsterdam is in cinemas now.
