Directed by: David O. Russell
Starring: Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek
Rated R, 134 minutes
It’s been seven years since David O. Russell last released a film, and a lot has happened since then. The entire Trump presidency; a pandemic unmatched in scope and severity since the 1918 influenza pandemic; the creation of TikTok. The ensemble dramedies that made Russell a household name a decade ago—movies like “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle”—now seem like quaint relics of a simpler time, a time when there wasn’t so much constantly at stake, when the pace of life was a little slower, when you could just film four A-list actors shouting over each other and call it acting. “Amsterdam” sees Russell changing ever so slightly with the times.
A zany mystery-thriller set in the 1930s (and loosely based on real events), “Amsterdam” follows three close friends, Bert and Harold and Valerie, as they clear their names in a murder case and, in the process, uncover a fascistic conspiracy to overthrow the American government. If David O. Russell has capitulated to the modern pressure on artists to take more overt political stances with their work, it’s in the movie’s eventual contention with the rise of fascism in America; nonetheless, snappy scenes between wayward characters have always been Russell’s bread and butter, and that much hasn’t changed. Despite the severity of the crimes the three friends uncover and the tense dread we feel knowing what real-life horrors fascism would eventually wreak upon the world, “Amsterdam” never loses its lighthearted atmosphere. It’s more buddy-movie territory than agitprop.
As Bert and Valerie, respectively, Christian Bale (“The Dark Knight”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) bring out a lively energy in each other, which makes their scenes together engaging, even if their characters are sometimes intolerably quirky, their ramblings distractingly cutesy or slapstick. By contrast, John David Washington (“Tenet”), as Harold, Bert’s best friend and Valerie’s lover, looks half-asleep for much of the movie, lagging behind his co-stars. Around them, famous faces pop in and out of the movie like a game of celebrity whack-a-mole; ever the glutton for star power, Russell has gathered enough big names—everyone from Chris Rock to Taylor Swift to Mike Myers—to populate a small town. It’s the ensemble to end all ensembles, proof positive of Russell’s enduring stature and, simultaneously, evidence of his lack of restraint. With all these stars in the mix, it’s hard to know who actually matters to the story at hand.
It seems that even Russell, who wrote the screenplay, didn’t quite know what the story was about. In one scene, the three friends compose a song by pulling nonsense lyrics (in French, for added panache) from a hat; many of Russell’s storytelling decisions seem to have been made the same way. There’s a subplot involving birdwatching, though what connection it has to the central conspiracy remains unclear. There’s a romantic subplot between Bert and the nurse at his clinic, which sees them flirting during an autopsy, their hands brushing coyly against each other inside the dead man’s stomach. In scene after scene, characters change the subject of conversation mid-thought, or make bold claims out of nowhere, or sometimes just pass out. The film ends with a long voiceover monologue that explains the plot back to us, along with the movie’s themes; either David O. Russell didn’t trust us to get it, or he wasn’t sure that he himself understood what he’d written.
It all adds up to a scattershot mess of a movie, though not entirely without its charms. In flashbacks, we see Bert and Valerie and Harold in the aftermath of World War I, living together in the titular city, dancing and singing, seeking out the honest and innocent pleasures of life. Eventually circumstances pull them back to America, but the city of Amsterdam hangs dreamily over the rest of the movie as a reminder of what peace and happiness look like, as a stand-in for any tantalizing memory we cherish when we find ourselves stuck in the mire of poverty or personal demons or literal fascism. “Amsterdam” bombards us with antics and madcap plots, but at its core it’s a wistful movie, nostalgic for the peacetime between two world wars and haunting in its suggestion that we could ourselves be living in the last peaceful days before the next one. Stop and smell the flowers, Russell says; they may be trampled underfoot tomorrow.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 10/21/22.