AMERICAN HUSTLE

Did you get the memo? January is ensemble drama month, people! Gather ye high-quality cast lists while ye may – or at least before the Oscar nominations come out. Before 12 Years A Slave and August: Osage County (stars Meryl and is based on a Pulitzer-nominated play), we have American Hustle, which gives a lovely vision of how the BBC’s Hustle might look if it went into a time machine with 10 times the budget.

David O Russell’s film sticks its tongue firmly in cheek from the off, with a title card reading, ‘Some of this actually happened’, and from there it’s a giddy see-saw of laugh-out-loud comedy and drama that occasionally feels like a tribute to the crime classics of the 1970s.

Russell digs into his own archives, as well as Hollywood’s, reuniting The Fighter’s Amy Adams and Christian Bale, and bringing in Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence from last year’s Silver Linings Playbook, all of whom do tremendously well in not being upstaged by neither the stellar supporting cast list nor their hair.

Bale (traumatically bad hairpiece, self-grown gut) and Adams (almost makes the 1970s looks desirable) are con-artist lovers Irving and Sydney, caught by Cooper’s creepily off-the-wall FBI agent Richie DiMaso in a sting that forces them into framing criminals in exchange for avoiding jail time.

DiMaso, a loser who lives at home with his mother, part-time fiancée and a decrepit fish tank, gets carried away by the thrill of the con. What initially looks like a straightforward bit of framework is complicated by a New Jersey mayor, some major league mobsters and Irving’s glamorous, neglected wife Rosalyn (Lawrence, narrowly beating Adams to best hair).

Russell co-wrote the script with Eric Singer, and for whatever reason there’s a feeling of two different scripts that don’t always mesh, with characters jumping between both; there’s a quirky comedy, best seen in Cooper’s scenes with the comedian Louis CK as his nervous boss, where the ongoing bit about an ice-fishing anecdote jars with the scenes where everyone seems to suddenly remember they’re in a big-budget thriller and should therefore lower the concept a bit; and then there’s the other script – an on-the-nose procedural that plays as though the scriptwriters have had a night in with a ‘best of the 1970s’ box set, and which feels constrained next to its exuberant other half.

Cooper and Lawrence’s characters may dominate – Lawrence gets a momentary reprieve from being appalling in a hilarious sing-along to Live And Let Die while cleaning – but Bale and Adams do the straight work that keeps everything going. Bale conveys a sense of put-upon despair despite the best efforts of his costume (a replica of Tom Cruise’s burly cameo in Tropic Thunder), while Adams is flashy but subtle.

American Hustle feels overlong and confused – but then, isn’t that what everyone says the 1970s were like?