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).
