American Hustle

Rating: 80%



(www.fanpop.com)

Also Known As:

Unknown

Year:

2013

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Crime

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

Premiss:

A petty con-man and his seductive partner are blackmailed into working for a maverick policeman who pushes them into bed with the mafia.

Themes:

Alienation | Coming-of-age | Compassion | Corporate Power | Courage | Destiny | Emotional repression | Empathy | Ethnicity | Family | Friendship | Guilt | Identity | Individualism | Justice | Loneliness | Love | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Personal change | Political | Role modeling | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Solipsism | White culture | White supremacy

Similar to:

Unknown

Review Format:

DVD

Blind Leading the Blind

Summary: Half-smart White people outsmarting themselves by pretending to be what they are not.

Comedy crime caper which, for a change, is not exclusively from the point-of-view of the criminals; emphasizing the moral grayness of people who believe survival requires game-playing and dishonesty. Here we have the self-reflexive sense of actors portraying real people who are always acting - to avoid the emptiness inside by convincing others of the fullness.

Also a clever disquisition on the political nature of White marriages (allegedly all about love) and their implication that they are better than the arranged marriages of other cultures. Married compatibility, here, is focused on shared neurosis rather than shared values, so that no matter the dreams of the central characters of ending-up as far from where they started as possible, they can only take their inner child out of the street but not the street out of the inner child.

(https://cinemathon.wordpress.com)

The political game-playing gets so involved and complicated in the process of working-out what others’ dreams are so that the con-men can pretend to satisfy those dreams, that the police become enmeshed in the criminal and political corruption they are sworn to detect.

The conflation of the Personal with the Political - so common among Whites - is what makes the criminal and police plots unravel. Control over others is far more important as a means of feeling successful than making lots of money; such that it becomes necessary to prevent others from being successful as the only means of being successful oneself. The inability to thus separate Business from Pleasure is the ultimate undoing of White culture.

As usual with Whites, two Caucasian actresses are cast in roles either too difficult for them to play convincingly - or that they are simply unsuitable for - simply because they are more White than talented or versatile; ie, they are Affirmative-Action babies. This distracts from the themes of the film; reducing its entertainment-value by making the audience struggle to evade their own political-correctness in wanting these performers to be doing good work when they manifestly are not.

If directing is mostly casting, this film suffers from a director who may have been forced to use certain performers to get the movie funded, with actresses who either should not be actresses or who need acting lessons to hone any pre-existing their ability to represent others (compare with Bullets over Broadway). In this movie, this weakness is simply too noticeable to ignore (as one frequently does in other films) because there is more than one weak link present in the performance chain.

Bradley COOPER is a superb character actor who also happens to be a movie star and is ably-supported by Jeremy RENNER and Robert DE NIRO. The comparative weakness of the other performances lessens the necessary affect of being surrounded by people who are not what they seem; compounded by some of the characters being underwritten and, so, unconvincing. The attempt to recreate the 1970s is over-the-top and perfectly-supports the humorous, self-parodic Martin Scorsese-style direction.

---

Copyright © 2015 Frank TALKER.
Permission granted to reproduce & distribute this posting in any way, shape or form - provided you mention this Blog.
All other rights reserved.