The Cinematic Tangent - American Hustle/"Based on a True Story..."

On a new episode of The Cinematic Tangent podcast, Chad and I argue about this awards season's darling, American Hustle. While he declares it one of the year's best, I call bust on this overhyped, meandering mess of hollow razzle-dazzle. Also... Where does a film's responsibility lie when telling a story it claims to be true? Must it adhere strictly to the facts, or take liberties in order to entertain its audience? We try to get to the bottom of it, and leave Lincoln and Captain Phillips flailing in our wake.

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American Hustle - **1/2

David O. Russell is a guy who obsesses over the details. Most great directors do… It’s necessary to create atmosphere in a film, or really anything else for that matter, considering filmmaking is creating something out of nothing. Props, costumes, sets, everything: chosen specifically. So having an eye for detail is nothing new; it’s a necessity, expected, and not really worth mentioning. David O. Russell really obsesses over details, which has generally produced some truly amazing and unique films in the past. But in his latest, American Hustle, Russell loses the forest in the trees, focusing so intensely on getting every tacky prop and every bad hair piece just right, that it feels more like a retro fashion show we’re meant to gawk at and applaud for its bold styles than a narrative film in which we can really immerse ourselves.

A loose retelling (“Some of this actually happened”, we’re told at the start) of the ’70s Abscam scandal, American Hustle is an ensemble period piece that reunites Russell with virtually every actor he’s ever worked with, as well as a few new additions. It’s a marvelous cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner; the list goes on. It’s a who’s who of Hollywood’s best and brightest, and they all lose themselves in their parts, creating beautifully nuanced characters with brilliant performances (Russell also has a way with actors).

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - **

Looking back on the story arc of Catching Fire leaves one wondering where the hell the rest of the film is. For all its flash and grandiosity, not much really happens, and it leaves very little to ponder beyond how we got suckered into making this series the phenomenon that it now is. Maybe that's because, like the first Hunger Games, about halfway through, the characters are again thrust into an unsatisfying fight-to-the-death which contributes relatively nothing to the film's already convoluted narrative, and manages to be about as thrilling as a group of toddlers playing hide-and-seek in the backyard.

Director Francis Lawrence takes over directing duties, surpassing the lackluster Gary Ross, and he provides more edge to the action, while handling the drama with a subtler touch, focusing on some interesting details the first film glazed over in its broad-strokes approach, and yet he still turns out a film that couldn't accurately be described as better than average. If Lawrence, whose films include I Am Legend, and Water For Elephants, has a trademark as a director, it's that he makes a great first half that is negated by the absolute mediocrity of the second, and while Catching Fire's narrative woes can hardly be ascribed to him, it nevertheless falls in line with his seeming lack of follow-through.

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Winter's Bone - *1/2

Loads of broken-car-and-unused-toy-littered yards and wolf print sweatshirts are an earmark of the stark reality of the desperate, poverty-stricken world in which Winter's Bone is set, but no amount of dirty, abandoned Playskool slides can make you forget that you're watching an average popcorn thriller, although maybe it's because you can feel all of the actors playing bad guys (and there are many) trying their hardest to act villainous, coming off most of the time like goons waiting for their close-up in which they get roundhouse-kicked in the face by Steven Seagal in an early-90s action flick. And oh yeah, there aren't very many thrills in Winter's Bone. I kept waiting for it to take off, but it really never does.

In the film, Ree Dolly has to find her father, a meth-head drug-dealer who put up the family house for bail. If she doesn't find him, she'll lose the house, and her brother and sister. So she spends most of her time asking neighbors to borrow their trucks in order to drive to a destination to which she could have just as easily walked. This is evidenced by the fact that nobody lends her a truck and she does walk everywhere, though one nice neighbor gives her a doobie for the road (Thanks!). So these inquiries basically amount to narrative laziness, ploys to introduce characters that will be important later on.

Winter's Bone took home some major awards at Sundance, and many of the people who see it will tell you it's a work of art, that it has something to say, or that it paints a portrait of those forgotten and left behind by society and rarely seen at the movies, but the truth is that none of these characters is anyone you haven't seen in a dark alley in a typical Hollywood thriller. The only difference here is that they're transplanted to the redneck countryside of Nowhere, Missouri and drive a twenty year-old pick-up truck instead of a ten year-old Cadillac Cutlass.

In fairness, Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Ree, is very good, but hers is the only fleshed-out, seemingly real character in the film. And the scene in which she discovers the truth about her father is also very good, but at that point the boredom of the bleak, washed-out, banjo-strumming, squirrel-hunting world in which the film is set has already closed in and suffocated any desire you have to care about what's going on.