American Hustle

Amy Adams’s breasts should be nominated for an Academy Award. Would that there were a category for best supporting (or in this case best unsupported) mammary? The character she plays, one Sydney Prosser from Albuquerque aka Lady Edith Greensley from London says at one point, “My dream was to become anything else than I was.” Reinvention is the theme of American Hustle, David O. Russell’s brilliant take on the American dream and it bears some resemblance to The Wolf of Wall Street in the way it uses the transformation of outer borough type personalities who rise through a roguish form of identity politics. After all what is America about but reinvention? Everything in the movie is a con and one could say that American history whether it’s the Louisiana Purchase or the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians by Peter Minuit for the equivalent of $24 is about getting over on someone. Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) meets his match in Sydney/Edith and they are off to the races. “We’re all conning ourselves one way or other to get through life,” Irving tells his protégé, who would have been the perfect Galatea were she not the true agent the sophisticated persona she radiates. “I created Edith since I needed to survive,” Sydney tells Rick DiMaso  (Bradley Moore), the FBI agent who falls for her. The movie, which is partially based on the ABSCAM scandal in which convicted con artists were used to entrap a number of congressman and a senator, sports a number of iconic scenes of American life in the 70’s, a studio 54 type disco, an Italian restaurant in the still undeveloped Atlantic City, even the Chelsea Hotel. But there is one which tells it all. Irving has a legitimate business, a chain of dry cleaning establishments, whose unclaimed items act a kind backstage wardrobe. Pressing the conveyor belt, his eyes light up at the prospective guises. Even DiMaso and the US attorney who is running him are con artists and they in turned get conned. They look on in disbelief when they’re informed that  “You got conned by the very conmen you forced to con in the first place." At one point during the movie Rick and Irving visit a museum and gaze up at a masterpiece which Irving knows is a fake. “Who is the master? The painter or the forger?” Irving asks. If an Oscar isn’t given out for breasts, there’s certainly one awarded for screenplays and gems like this definitely put American Hustle in the running

The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street is a minor work by a great filmic novelist. It’s a long movie, like one of those tomes by Dickens or Balzac that had never even heard of the jump cut. The direct address to the viewer  and the interior monologues which are novelistic modes of disquisition might also derive from the fact that the movie is based on an autobiographical work by Jordan Belfort (played in the movie by Leonardo DiCaprio). Belfort’s scam was the underwriting and selling of so-called penny stocks. His career begins on Black Monday, October 19, l987, the day the stock market fell 508 points and the old line firm L.F. Rothschild, where he’d been hired for his first legitimate job, tanked. “I want you to deal with your problems by becoming richer,” Belfort tells the employees of Stratton Oakmont, the auspicious sounding firm he later creates. Actually his story is one of addiction to both money and drugs, specifically Quaaludes and cocaine. There’s an image that’s used in the ads for the film, of DiCaprio on his knees licking the high heel of a blond. That blond turns out to be his second wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie), and the scene is one in which she takes her vengeance on his repeated infidelity with prostitutes by both depriving him of sex and threatening to increase the torture by walking around the house without underpants. There are a number of other scenes like this which tell the whole story in microcosm including one where Belfort is so paralyzed by Quaaludes that he can’t warn his cohort Ronnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) that the F.B.I. is bugging their conversations. Here the particular little device has to do with a piece of telephone wire which acts as a noose. So what is Scorsese getting at as he flourishes these metaphors of submission and entrapment? Besides the addiction leitmotif, it’s hard to tell. The canvas is large, but also unutterably small, reducing human existence to the striving for money and power. Scorsese triages his users, but the result is antiseptic and emotionless. There's something missing in this tale of avarice among the cast of outer borough characters. Maybe it’s just the pubic hair on Jordan’s second wife. Along with Black Monday, the advent of Brazilian hot waxing is another of the losses which the film records.