That looks like Taylor Swift, I thought to myself, watching the opening moments of David O Russell’s promising looking Amsterdam, his first film since 2015’s Joy.
It actually is Taylor Swift, just one of a galaxy of stars in a cast list so luminous that the likes of Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough and Zoe Saldana could almost be safely removed without harming the texture of the movie.
No, maybe not Taylor-Joy, one of the important components, it turns out, when Amsterdam finally gets round to revealing its nature – an angry political drama, and a good thriller, hidden inside a meringue of deflection, pastiche, jokes, songs, historical factoids, good performances and all the film-making flim-flam that only a writer/director with the track record of Russell (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook) can get greenlit.
To the plot: three amigos meet in the First World War. Soldiers Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington) strike up an all-for-one-one-for-all relationship in Amsterdam with nurse and artist Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie). Voze is also a very rich woman, but Berendsen and Woodman won’t realise this until, years later, they all meet again in 1930s America, where the three of them discover, after much plot tomfoolery, that there is a conspiracy afoot. A mysterious Nazi-leaning group of industrialists called the Committee of Five is hoping to entice war hero General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro) out of retirement to front a coup d’etat.
The Five intend to make America great again, it turns out, with their plan for what they call a Great Nation Society. Interestingly, this part of the story turns out to be based on historical events. In the 1930s, despairing of the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt, a cabal of right-wing magnates hatched and financed the Business Plot, which was intent on toppling the president and replacing him with their stooge. War hero General Smedley Butler is seen over the end credits in archive newsreel testifying that he was promised the top job in 1933 – dictator of the USA – if he’d lead a march on Washington at the head of an army of veterans.
So, very much along the lines of Philip Roth’s Nazi-America counterfactual, The Plot Against America, in which Roth imagined celebrity aviator and Nazi-admirer Charles Lindbergh doing something similar.
But back to the fictional realm, where all Berendsen, Woodman and Voze have to do is thwart the plot. That’s if they can keep the suffering, war-wounded Berendsen in one piece and free Voze from the clutches of her family, who have incarcerated her, it seems, for having invented avant-garde art. A bizarre plot curlicue.
It’s fine and all very entertaining, but if Russell had set his movie in some version of the real world, rather than in a pastiche 1930s movieworld it would be a whole lot more effective as a political thriller. Just a f’rinstance: race relations are all wrong in this movie. Chris Rock pops up now again as a character whose only purpose seems to be to make pronouncements on race, in what feel like trailers for one of Rock’s standup shows. Also, why is it that the good guys are all decidely, affirmedly non- and anti-racist? Maybe this is bien-pensant liberalism done as comedy and I missed the joke.
It’s also a bit late to be arriving at the Trump-hating party (or early, depending on how the election in 2024 goes), though Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy are convincingly dreadful Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump avatars, high-stakes grifters both.
This is a heat-seeking missile that’s lost its co-ordinates. Still, there is always the surface stuff, which is highly entertaining. Russell crashes two styles together – the fast plotting of screwball comedy and the twisted Freudian psychology of later movies like Now, Voyager.
Bale plays Berendsen as Peter Falk doing Columbo, and the fact that Berendsen lost an eye during the war only reinforces the impression. Washington is as adequate as usual (is he ever anything else?). Robbie strobes away as a kind of composite Margot Robbie character – massively competent, invariably cheerful.
The throwaway stuff is particularly good. Mike Myers and Michael Shannon as a pair of hopeful and mostly hopeless secret agents – like the Thompson Twins in the Tintin books. Matthias Schoenaerts as a cop investigating a murder and Alessandro Nivola quietly brilliant as his angry, stupid, racist, bent sidekick.
De Niro is also good. Russell seems able to bring decent performances out of him and the general’s big rousing “the hell you will” speech towards the end chimes with De Niro’s own views on the politics of recent years.
David O Russell has made a fantastic political thriller and then undermined all the good work with phoney scene-setting and a wildly veering tone. For a while it looks like Amsterdam is going to be a wild and noirish ride – Fritz Lang rides again, kind of thing. Turns out it’s all sideshow and no show.
Amsterdam – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
