Sophia Michaels
Name an actor — almost any working actor you can think of — and there is a fairly good chance they are in David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. Christian Bale, the intense thespian who’s done his best work with the equally all-or-nothing-at-all auteur? No surprise that he’s front and center here. Ditto Russell rep-company regular Robert De Niro. Rising star John David Washington? Yup, him too. Margot Robbie and Anya Taylor-Joy, both current candidates for “It girl” status circa 2022? Present and accounted for. How about Chris Rock, or Rami Malek, or Zoe Saldana, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Ed Begley Jr., Alessandro Nivola, and [checks notes] Taylor Swift? They’re in the cast as well. This isn’t an ensemble film, it’s a SAG meeting.
We speculating here, but part of the reason so many actors of this caliber may gravitate toward working with Russell, despite him having a reputation for being a volatile writer-director (there are receipts and anecdotes and audio/video galore), is that no one makes movies like he does anymore. Big, sprawling, shambling, ambitious, wonky films, bursting with ideas and often bursting at the seams. Movies that give actors things to do besides shout at green screens. Even the ones you might feel tempted to relegate to the “feel-good” section of American moviemaking — we’re thinking specifically of The Fighter (2010) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) here — wriggle away from easy classification, and tend to have a lot of business spilling over into the margins.
And Russell’s best work — we’d nominate Three Kings (1999), I Heart Huckabees (2004) and especially American Hustle (2013) as eligible for this category — reminds you of the sort of loosey-goosey looks at left-of-center lives you associate more with the funky Robert Altman/Hal Ashby corner bungalow of the New Hollywood 1970s. That decade’s shadow looms large over Amsterdam, Russell’s first movie in seven years. Never mind that the bulk of the action takes place between the two world wars. You can detect a strong strain of the Nixon era’s political conspiracy thrillers, mixed and (mis)matched with those ’70s farces that revisited the Art Deco 1930s from a distance. An all-star cast marinating in an anything-goes vibe, which can accommodate everything from intelligence-agency birdwatchers to LSD trips to racial sterilization programs, madcap comedy to melodrama, feels like a page torn from a dog-eared playbook published around the nation’s bicentennial.
Yet this slippery work has more on its addled mind than the distant past, as it ricochets like a pinball between genres and runs its more-than-game players through their manic paces. Russell has taken an epic canvas of a narrative, set in two eras and three countries, with a dozen or so speaking parts, only to drop in a rather intimate, sincere tale of love and friendship amidst the razzle dazzle. It’s Ragtime with a gooey Jules and Jim at the center. It’s also a mystery, a comedy set to a speed somewhere between “daffy” and “screwball,” a war-is-hell drama, a sentimental la vie boheme throwback, a cautionary tale about our present and one beautiful mess of a picture. You can add a “must-see” for good measure as well. There’s nothing quite like it out right now.
We start in 1933, New York City, Harlem, 138th street: This is where Dr. Burt Berendsen (Bale) plies his trade. A veteran of WWI and sporting a glass eye due to a battlefield injury, the good doc treats fellow wounded soldiers for physical ailments and a post-traumatic stress disorder that won’t be named for decades. He also runs an annual gala to celebrate those who’ve served, and is keen on his old regiment’s commander to be this year’s keynote speaker. Only, as his lawyer best friend Harold Woodman (Washington) has just informed him, their former platoon leader has just returned from Europe as a dead man. An off-the-books autopsy reveals he was poisoned; his daughter (Swift) suspects foul play. That notion is immediately confirmed when Berendsen and Woodman are framed for murder by parties unknown.
Cut to: 1918. A younger, more innocent (and dual-eyed) Berendsen has no sooner joined the effort to fight the Kaiser when he’s asked to oversee an all-Black squad of doughboys. They’ve been accused of insubordination because the brass doesn’t want them wearing American uniforms. This is where Burt meets Harold, both of whom end up convalescing in a French hospital after sustaining battlefield injuries.
Enter the nurse. This is Valerie Voze (Robbie), part-time caretaker for the maimed and mutilated and full-time eccentric. Her hobbies include smoking pipes, drinking illicit hooch and making art from the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ bodies — a repurposing of mass-destruction debris into Dadaist art. She’s not really French, either, but an American ex-pat tooling around Europe in search of adventure. Valerie and Woodman have eyes for each other, but it’s quickly established that this will be a trio: “Never again shall I pour two without a third,” our lady of the perpetual avant-garde zaniness declares. The three head to Amsterdam, where they live and laugh and love among fellow artists, misfits, outcasts. For a while, this three-person Lost Generation make a lovely garden of Eden for themselves. Then Burt decides to return home to the States and the spell is broken. By the time they’re all reunited back in New York years later, corpses and conspiracies have made the stakes of their bonding a lot higher.
There’s more — dear lord, a lot more — as Russell takes us down an American history wormhole of fifth columnists, political chicanery and the rancid rich. An opening disclaimer informs us that “a lot of this actually happened,” and it does not take a college professor to measure the distance between the past threats to the democratic ideals we hold near and dear and what our current future may bring in light of the past few years. (Homegrown Nazis — now more than ever!) You couldn’t be blamed for thinking the filmmaker might be mounting a call to arms cloaked in period duds, especially when the voiceover dips into the didactic during a third-act showdown between the clearly drawn good guys and the corrupt. (“What could be more American than a dictatorship built by American business?”) The commentary nudging is actually the least effective aspect of Amsterdam, not because it isn’t pertinent or that Russell doesn’t share the same concerns many of us do, so much as the fact that his heart clearly lies elsewhere.
Specifically, it pitter-patters for his actors, one in particular. Both Russell and Bale have talked about wanting to build a film around the Berendsen character, and that the script went through over a dozen drafts during the movie’s long gestation period. And while it’s tempting to think that almost everything from all of these drafts ended up in the final version — did we mention there’s a good deal of funny business and true-story flotsam and jetsam packed in here? — the one thing that seemed constant is Bale’s gloriously cracked performance. Affecting a just-south-of-caricature New Yawk accent and a Coen-brothers worthy hairdo, his good doctor has a way of turning every scene into something comic, yet not at the expense of the maze-like narrative’s detours or emotional beats. It’s a great physical turn, notably in the way that he consistently leans forward and enters spaces headfirst; you’re constantly worried he’s on the verge of toppling over. (Which, occasionally, he does.) Bale has never been one to shy away from diving into the transformative characteristics of acting or feeling content to stop at over-the-top when he can take the elevator a few more stories up. Yet you’re reminded of how simpatico he and Russell are when it comes to throwing themselves into a project at the expense of common sense or sanity. This is as much a love story between a star and his director as it is anything else.
The generosity extends to the cast at large. Some have issues with Washington’s somewhat recessive take on Goodman, legal eagle and lover of Robbie’s aristocratic kook. But when seen in tandem with what Bale is doing, it fits the bigger picture better — he’s the ballast that allows Bale to boing off him and bounce around the sets. Robbie understands that her third party is one part daffy-dame screwball archetype and one part romantic ideal, yet doesn’t let herself be confined by either role. The supporting cast either gets to play very straight (De Niro’s patriotic military man, Swift’s grieving young woman), very broad (Riseborough’s elitist wife, Olyphant’s racist thug) or take part in wonderfully oddball double acts (Shannon and Myers intelligence-agency handlers, Nivola and Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts’ dim-witted cops; Malek and Taylor-Joy’s unscrupulous One-percenters). It would be unkind to note that not all performers are equal here. It would also be accurate.
And then there’s Amsterdam itself, the country that acts as a sort of symbolic title in the same way that Casablanca does for its classic ensemble drama. It’s the paradise lost, the moment before history and “the dream” repeats themselves. It’s what Robbie calls “the good part,” when these three can be what they call “their true selves.” It’s the geographical representation of a deep, lasting, sustaining friendship. And much like Casablanca, this movie will end with a sacrifice that attempts to right a handful of wrongs on both a macro- and a micro-level. There is no shortage of movies that still traffic in shameless, manipulative uplift (see: this year’s Oscar winner). Yet Russell, to his everlasting credit, has made a film in which having cockeyed optimism, at this moment in the world, somehow feels like a radical act. For a movie that is all over the place, it’s determination to get back to a bygone moment isn’t just wishful thinking. It suggests, in own roundabout way, that a return to the past can also signal the beginning of a fresh start.
