American Hustle (2013) 3/4
Deviously antic, deliriously energetic, and unrepentantly jumbled, American Hustle is a stereotype-drenched piece of cockeyed comedy and a pratfall-ridden work of dazzling showmanship. It’s juicy, relentless, dizzying, diverting, and works from the feet up, leaving you revved and tickled. Writer-director David O. Russell has mashed up a larcenous cast from his last two films with elements from GoodFellas and Boogie Nights into a buoyant, glorious mess.
A loose version of the Abscam scandal, Christian Bale is balding, bloated con man Irving Rosenfeld, coasting on dry cleaning and art forging and loan sharking when he meets Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) at a party. She prods him on to bigger things, leading to a run-in with an FBI agent named Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who makes them a deal: he’ll drop the charges if Irving and Sydney assist in busting some bigger targets. Eventually, Richie has Irving going after a good-hearted New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) and other politicians while involving the mafia in a fake scheme to revitalize Atlantic City.
As Rosalyn Rosenberg – a pathetic-appealing sexpot mingling of Carole Lombard and Lady Macbeth – Jennifer Lawrence is a rara avis with beautiful plumage: she’s semi-clueless, opinionated, fearless, spoiled, and unafraid to say whatever to whomever, even if it’s casino mobsters in dark suits. Near the end, she performs a bracing interpretation of “Live and Let Die” that’s instantaneously catchy. Even with two Oscar nominations and one win under her belt already, it’s hard to see her not getting a supporting actress statue for the wild energy she brings to this role.
Of course it delivers less than it promises: it’s a hustle of superficial pleasure rather than deep impact. It sells sparkle with an overloud and overlong story, and it’s hammed up beyond comprehension. For all its restlessness, it’s comparatively risk-averse. Helping to distract from the mediocre accents are a succession of outrageous plunging necklines and illustrious costuming.
American Hustle is an urban eruption of fun, a cleavage-infused feast of ensemble wiles, and a carnival-saturated essay on the brilliance of corruption. It makes you glad you were fleeced. It’s a fable of delusion and entropy, pure razzle-dazzle, that’s pulling a long con of its own and suggesting that American life is a colorful, meaningless shell game. It’s a capitalistic thrill, and a hell of a good time.
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Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) 3.5/4
Effusive, beautiful, foreboding, soulful, and darkly funny, Inside Llewyn Davis is a portrait of the artist as a failed man. It is a magpie’s nest of surrealism, a resplendently crafted time capsule, and an evocative vision of self-destruction. It throbs with melancholy, hunches under heavy skies, and leaves you dangling. In it and through it, Joel and Ethan Coen celebrate the hard road that can inspire great art. It is a downright radical achievement.
Steeped in remorse and irresolution, Inside Llewyn Davis is a valediction to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, whose eponymous man of constant sorrows is a couch-hopping songster caught between the Scylla of selfless devotion to tradition and the Charybdis of crass commercial success, roaming across a desolate landscape of insult and invective.
Snide and world-weary, Llewyn may rank as the most unlikeable Coen character since Barton Fink. Yet Oscar Isaac demonstrates that he’s a titan with an angelic voice, and turns a potentially insufferable character into a relatable, unmistakably human presence, with a reminder that humility and genius rarely make for comfortable bedfellows.
The periphery players – Carey Mulligan is a snotty, forthright vixen; Garrett Hedlund is a taciturn chauffeur; F. Murray Abraham is a demoralizing gatekeeper – are imbued with texture and virtuosity due to the superlative writing and acting. John Goodman, in his sixth collaboration with the Coens, latches onto another indelible part as the snarky Roland Turner.
Under T Bone Burnett’s supervision, the score is amazing. The anti-Space Race novelty tune “Please Mr. Kennedy,” complemented by Adam Driver’s backing vocals and sound effects, is unforgettably hilarious, and it only gets better from there: both the opener “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” and the duet “500 Miles” are manifestly lovely. Using The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as a visual touchstone, Inside Llewyn Davis is shot in wintry grays with no warming ambers.
With Inside Llewyn Davis, the sibling auteurs hone a black valentine to both its hero and his milieu. It is laced with their revitalizing absurdist humor, the brunt of it aimed at the conceits and depredations of the music business. While not as solemn as A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis bears a significant resemblance to its narrative nihilism. With this study of a man spiraling into the forgotten, they have made an acerbic bookend to that near-masterpiece, and a companion piece to Barton Fink. It may not be their funniest, prettiest, or strongest film, but it is uniquely rewarding.
Innocent, bleak, singular, and deeply felt, with an impeccable sense of period and an acidulous aftertaste, Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie about the fear of failure and mediocrity that, as if a cunning Coen-esque joke, is a tumultuous, stupefying success. If it is ultimately my sixth favourite Coen oddball comic-tragedy – behind No Country for Old Men, Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, and its two precursors above – damn, that’s pretty great company.
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Her (2013) 4/4
Doleful, fervent, mirthful, heady, and seriously smart, Her is a penetrating, perceptive look at modern relationships; a legitimately grown-up, existential meditation on what it means to be human; and a wistful, whimsical musing about where we are and where we might be going. It is part dark satire, part metaphysical comedy, part bittersweet romance, part brain-bending sci-fi, and wholly the handcrafted product of a visionary.
It’s Los Angeles, around 2040. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), common wearer of high-waisted trousers and orange shirts, lonely, wounded, stammering, and warm-hearted, spends his days working for BeautifullyWrittenLetters.com, where he composes letters for and to strangers, putting their doting thoughts into words. He may be awkward in his personal life, but in this domain, he’s capable of being expressive and eloquent.
Theodore is stalling the signing of his divorce papers after his marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara) has disintegrated. In the wake of heartbreak, he talks with his best friend (Amy Adams), engages in cybersex with SexyKitten (Kristen Wiig), and goes on a blind date with a nameless beauty (Olivia Wilde). None of these encounters bring lasting gratification, until he meets Samantha. It seems to be true love. The only complication? She’s an operating system.
If Her sounds like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Lars and the Real Girl, with elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, you wouldn’t be far off, and Her is as good or infinitely better than its ancestors, even if their influences are detectable. Its plot sounds like a gimmick or a brilliant conceptual gag, but ends up haunting and oddly wonderful.
As Theodore, Phoenix delivers a herculean performance, at least equal to – and the inverse of – his belligerent Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 head-scratcher The Master. Scarlett Johansson, as the voice of Samantha, is equally convincing – sexy, sultry, husky, and delicate – in her greatest feat since Lost in Translation.
Writer-director Spike Jonze is one of the most lyrically fanciful and cockeyed filmmakers around. His flair for approaching big ideas from oblique angles enables him to take what could have been a glib narrative and infuse his screenplay with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling. Exquisitely conceived and executed, and disturbingly spot-on, the film exhibits Jonze’s gift for understated poetry intertwined with intimations of philosophy. Silent, flickering inserts of Theodore and his ex-wife recollected in tranquility are sublime, engineered with dreamlike flourish.
Impossibly handsome, solipsistically daring, and profoundly transcendent, Her is a strange and poignant love story that measures the emotional toll of living within the virtual world. Jonze invites us to leave his film ready to connect and communicate. Deeply insightful and attuned to the risks, fears, surprises, and wonders of intimacy, its strikingly ephemeral satire regards the way we’ve become tethered to technology as being past the point of no return, but with intense curiosity, Her asks us to never forget that we’re still very much alive.
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