Film Carew: American Hustle, The Gilded Cage

AMERICAN HUSTLE

American Hustle's original screenplay title was American Bullshit; and they're variations on the same theme. The latest film for David O. Russell is a tenuously-based-on-a-true-story tale (“some of this actually happened,” a title dryly announces on opening) in which everyone is hustling someone, bullshit their weapon of choice. The theme is often spoken aloud: “we're all conning ourselves, one way or another, just to get through life,” says Christian Bale. Bale's character, like the rest of the principle cast, are pretending to be something they're not. The film's populated by grifters, goons, undercover cops, and crooked politicians, but Russell pushes the falsity forward with a winning run of high-comic hijinks: Bale sporting an elaborately-assembled combover, out to dupe the world on his baldness; Amy Adams finding upward-mobility by way of a staged English accent; Bradley Cooper a perm-junkie with bleached-out teeth; Jeremy Renner a mob-tied mayor posing as pillar-of-the-community; Michael Peña a Mexican FBI Agent dressed up as an Arab sheik. Such falsity is, of course, endemic to a frontier nation: these the ersatz symbols of a place where personal reinvention is merely a tanning bed - or plastic surgeon - away. It's business-as-usual in evangelical America: to hustle is human, to bullshit divine.

Russell goes to town with the lurid late-'70s setting: all flared polyester, and plunging, wide-collared necklines. He's unafraid of the era's clichés because his characters would be those willingly clinging to them: American Hustle throwing itself passionately into a brightly-cinematic sequence - perhaps the most cinematic of Russell's career - in which Adams and Cooper tear it up on Studio 54's dancefloor, strobes flickering to the arpeggiated glamour of I Feel Love. Throwing photogenic stars together rarely guarantees generated sparks, but the amped-up cast - populated by past Russell collaborateurs - are up to the task: Adams' oozing sexuality making her a walking honey-trap; Cooper a babble of anxiety and idiocy; Bale a buffoon with a bruised heart.

Which is to say nothing of Jennifer Lawrence, who follows on from her cliché-defying, film-raising turn in Silver Linings Playbook with something wilder, more electric, and ridiculous; to the point where it feels like she's born to be Russell's demented-screwball muse, and is utterly miscast as Hunger Games heroine. There's a recurring gag where she keeps starting accidental kitchen fires, and at times Lawrence threatens to burn down the film; but that just makes the moments when she pulls back - like when she half-whispers “I don't like change” in a stilled silence; a punchline delivered with the tenor of emotional terror - all the more sublime. This shows how well she matches the filmmaker: for all those familiar moments of people screaming at each other, Russell still finds still moments amidst the chaos; as in an arresting scene in which Adams and Bale lay down quietly in a car at the most shit-hitting-the-fan of moments.

After blazing through the Oscars all of 9 months ago, you can smell Russell's confidence. In other hands, American Hustle might've been a minor work, but here it just hums: the production design, soundtrack, and editing all beyond that with which a Big Studio product usually delivers. Even minor characters are both smartly penned and sharply performed: Robert De Niro washing off decades of phoned-in mafia clichés with a single scene of gentle menace; Elisabeth Röhm so good as a minor wife character that she shines even when placed in the background; and Louis CK, so self-effacing of his own acting talents, bringing to life a hilarious senior-cop-as-disproving-father figure, whose attempts to tell a constantly-derailed anecdote becoming a recurring storytelling device. Each time Cooper interrupts him, he guesses a different moral - and outcome - to the tale; a smirking piece of writing that speaks of the film's themes. Stories, like identities, are fluid, permeable. Someone else might've made a film about real-life undercover stings as a gritty thriller, but thankfully Russell didn't; his ridiculous take on 'reality' a veritable symphony of bullshit.

THE GILDED CAGE

There's a beautiful moment in The Gilded Cage in which the son of a Parisian family of Portuguese immigrants (Alex Alves Pereira), is fleeing from a teenage party sent scattering when his parents have unexpectedly come home. He sees his mother (Rita Blanco) on the stairs, and though there's recognition between them, he gives her an air of indifference, a cold shoulder. Instinctively, Blanco knows to pretend not be Mum, but merely the concierge: a gesture at once beautiful, sad, proud, and pathetic; and one that captures the shame - of where they've come from, of being forever immigrants - that persists through generations.

Ruben Alves' first film is a personal one: a valentine to his workaholic parents, who fled Dictatorial Portugal for Paris, where they've toiled unglamorously ever since. At its core, the sincerity of emotion and the specificity of the cross-cultural clash give The Gilded Cage an individual air. And there's a universality to its portrayal of the life of émigrés, at that feeling of being caught between places, of being 'home' neither here nor there. Around this emotional and thematic core, however, Alves has hung a broad face: populated by a vast ensemble of kooky caricatures, hinging on sitcom contrivances. It's a mounted crowdpleaser - huge in France, earmarked as arthouse sleeper for the local summer - that will duly please the easy-to-please.