It all starts with a murder. Or possibly two murders. One is unequivocal: a young woman is shoved into the path of oncoming traffic on a busy street in 1930s New York, just as she reveals a crucial piece of this deliberately confounding, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle of a movie. The second murder is the suspected poisoning of the woman’s father, a military hero and formerly the commanding officer of Burt, a doctor (Christian Bale, overacting wildly), and Harold (John David Washington, practically inert), a lawyer. Burt and Harold find themselves in the crosshairs of the law, accused of the woman’s death.
But just as you start to get to grips with David O Russell’s elastic approach to a real-life conspiracy in the US in the 1930s, the story rewinds. We find ourselves in 1918, in the aftermath of the first world war; wounded brothers at arms Burt and Harold bond with Valerie (Margot Robbie), a nurse in a Belgian field hospital who collects their bloody shrapnel to incorporate into her mixed-media conceptual art pieces. Magnetic, well-connected and bohemian, she’s the reason that they all end up living in postwar Amsterdam for a spell, the closest of friends and, in the case of Valerie and Harold, lovers. If you’re still following the story, congratulations: you’re doing better than most audience members.
