David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam” is very plush in the looks department. Enjoying the costumes and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s lighting and some of Russell’s shot designs will get you through it. But only if you don’t have to listen to it, or track it, or believe in the people on screen.
This is not an actor problem, even if one of its three leading players isn’t doing much of anything. Some deft flourishes, amusing or affecting or both, pop up in the frustrating narrative’s margins: Zoe Saldana’s meticulous calm as a Depression-era nurse; Mike Myers and Michael Shannon as a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of fastidious bird-watching spies.
At the movie’s core lies a rich and troubling true story. In 1933, a group of wealthy American businessmen plotted to overthrow the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Widely dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense at the time, the fascist-leaning coup never came to fruition. In 1934, U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, whose fictionalized equivalent in “Amsterdam” is played by Robert De Niro, testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee about the existence of the fascist-minded “Business Plot,” also known as the “Wall Street Putsch.”
