American Hustle (2013)
Directed by David O. Russell
A conman and his seductive partner are forced to work for a wild FBI agent, who pushes them into a world of Jersey power-brokers and the Mafia.
48 connections found
View:
48 films that influenced American Hustle
What critics say influenced American Hustle
Stylistically and spiritually, American Hustle belongs in the same camp as vintage Scorsese and Saturday Night Fever .
Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon : manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another.
Sprucing up like John Travolta getting ready for the disco in “Saturday Night Fever” (which came out in the same period in which this movie is set), Cooper wears a medallion on his exposed chest.
It evokes both the Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas” and “Saturday Night Fever”.
If you used the word “hustle” in the period when this caper movie is set – the “Saturday Night Fever” ’70s – you would have been referring to a dance, not a con.
There’s similar all-in commitment by Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence, who all dress and comport themselves as if they wandered off the set of Saturday Night Fever .
(Its surreal level of energy, akin to that of “Goodfellas,” makes for one of the few valid reasons to compare Russell’s romp to any work by Scorsese.)
American Hustle seems to be getting compared to Goodfellas , but I see it more in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven .
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Further complicating it all are the con man's mercurial wife (Jennifer Lawrence from The Hunger Games, deftly shooting insults instead of arrows) and the mayor of Camden, N.J. (Jeremy Renner, his hair channeling Joe Pesci's in Goodfellas), a basically decent man ensnared by the scam.
Unlike Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), a film to which American Hustle is being compared, Russell’s film never breaks through the razzle-dazzle of the surface.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
While many a filmmaker have ripped off Goodfellas (including Scorsese himself with his 1995 crime thriller Casino ), O. Russell has delivered a spiritual cousin in American Hustle that while tapping the same themes of capitalism & the pursuit of happiness the “American way”, it beats a stronger heartbeat thanks to the conflicted, sincere nature of these characters, and features a larger, sweeping scope where the hustlers, the government, the feds and the mob all fall for the same hypocrisy.
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Jennifer Lawrence, ( The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) perfectly channels a Casino -era Sharon Stone.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
Though American Hustle resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino in certain particulars of plot and milieu (but not in its visual style, which is more functional than Scorsese-ecstatic), the real touchstones for its outer-borough shenanigans are Saturday Night Fever and the Sidney Lumet films Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon : manic street operas, in which the arias were Italians and Jews shouting at one another.
David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” is about that kind of superficial subterfuge, both in the fascinating story it tells and even in its filmmaking, as Russell clearly cribs from Martin Scorsese films like “GoodFellas” and “Casino” like a forger copying a Rembrandt.
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights , with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning.
The vicarious enjoyment of being bad that American Hustle provides gives it a vague kinship with Goodfellas , while its buoyant narrative energy and disco-era setting recall Boogie Nights .
When the film ventures off into back stories and character origins, it plays like a parody of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights , lacking any emotional connection.
While the film may invite comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights or Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Russell's is a singular, irrepressible and intriguingly off-kilter vision.
Advertisement
The scene that follows this unabashed request, with Adams and Cooper gyrating to “I Feel Love” at a strobe-lit disco, is more than simple era-evoking: It conveys the feral energy between the two, with Richie never certain whether or not he’s being played by Sydney (whose British alias, Lady Edith Grassley, is clearly a nod to the title flimflammer in Preston Sturges’s peerless 1941 screwball comedy, The Lady Eve) and too turned on to really care.
She left Phoenix, adopted what she thought sounded like a posh English accent and, perhaps in tribute to Barbara Stanwyck’s aristocratic alter ego in The Lady Eve , called herself Lady Edith Greenley.
In that respect, there’s a dash of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (Adams’ on-and-off British accent plays like an homage to Barbara Stanwyck) in a picture that otherwise suggests an Altmanesque spin on “The Sting.”
There are whiffs of Preston Sturges in the strong, willful female characters and rumbustious physical and interpersonal comedy, as well as the element of the virtuoso scammers scamming other scammers hailing toward both Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” and the definitive comedy clockwork of Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson’s “Trouble in Paradise.”
The film is also what we would like to call a scam-edy, a mix of jocularity and plot twists, of the type that has powered starry Hollywood vehicles like “The Sting,” movies in which the acting, characters and glamorous patina are so distracting that viewers won’t notice till the end—if they even care—that they’ve had their reality hijacked by a brilliantly constructed con game ABOUT a brilliantly constructed con game.
In that respect, there’s a dash of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” (Adams’ on-and-off British accent plays like an homage to Barbara Stanwyck) in a picture that otherwise suggests an Altmanesque spin on “The Sting.”
Unlike other films about confidence men such as “The Sting” or “Paper Moon”, the humor in “American Hustle” is conceptual rather than so old-fashioned as to rest on witty dialogue or farcical situations.
The Sting (1973) had a satisfying payoff.
Cowriter (with "The International's" Eric Singer)/director David O. Russell ("Silver Linings Playbook") gives his latest, loosely based on Abscam, a tone of cocaine-fueled conning that plays like an updated screwball romantic comedy version of "The Sting" structured like Scorcese's 70's set "Goodfellas."
The result is an entertaining screwball caper film that wants you to think of "The Sting," Preston Sturges and that Scorsese fella.
American Hustle seems to be getting compared to Goodfellas , but I see it more in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven .
Dexterously plotted and laced with choice dialogue, the film is a crime drama infused with the spirit of a caper comedy, its frisky insouciance at times not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake.
While the same can obviously be said about those played by the likes of George Clooney and his pals in the super-slick remake of "Ocean's Eleven," the ones here feel far more human, warts and all.
Hey, Soderbergh ("Ocean's Eleven"), you want a shot at this?
It’s one part Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and one part Ocean’s Eleven to two parts Boogie Nights ; it takes a while to find the film beneath all that familiarity.
The screenplay abounds in convolutions that undercut expectations and take matters in new directions, including a major one toward the close that Russell and Singer might have borrowed from Peter Stone’s “Charade.”
Advertisement
Mr. Scorsese once called Walsh’s 1939 post-World-War-I crime film, “ The Roaring Twenties ,” a “twisted Horatio Alger story,” a thumbnail description that also fits “American Hustle.”
The true story is bizarre enough, yet it's clear from the outset that director David O Russell's primary touchstones are cinematic, most notably, Scorsese's Goodfellas as seen through the refractive prism of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights , with a smidgen of Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco sprinkled in as seasoning.