David O. Russell makes movies the same way that McDonald’s makes Big Macs: His movies, like their burgers, are big, sloppy, abundantly caloric, and altogether irresistible for the American appetite.
Since graduating from the funky low-key comedies with which he began his career, including Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996), Russell has churned out a series of bold, baggy, ungainly movies that capture something of the weirdness and wildness of the American experience. I Heart Huckabees (2004) was a shaggy dog tale that improbably sent up both continental philosophy and homegrown consumerism. The masterly American Hustle (2013) was a cacophonic praise of swindlers everywhere. In his best films, Russell gorges on characters, incidents, stylistic excess, and narratives, twists, turns, and reversals.
Russell only falters when his subjects lack the sufficient size to support his expansive vision: Accidental Love (2015), a troubled production from which Russell removed his name, was a feeble look at pre-Obamacare healthcare, while Joy (2015), the most recent David O. Russell film before Amsterdam, was an admirable but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to wring something meaningful from the story of the home shopping pitchwoman Joy Mangano.
If Joy was artificially inflated, however, Russell’s latest film is positively overstuffed: Commingling the seemingly incompatible genres of war movie, murder mystery, screwball comedy, and Frank Capra-style ode to the U.S. of A., Amsterdam, which Russell wrote and directed, gives us the lives and times of oddball physician Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), upstanding attorney Harold Woodsman (John David Washington), and off-kilter nurse Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), who first intersect in 1918 during the bloody waning days of World War I. They diverge in the decade that follows and converge again in 1933, when American democracy faces a test in the form of challenges to the legitimacy of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
None of this is told chronologically, but Russell grounds the movie in a series of warmly rendered, moderately paced flashbacks set during and immediately after the war. Like few films in memory, Amsterdam captures the way that bonds can form during periods of duress: When brothers in arms Burt and Harold are injured and exiled to a hospital, they are looked after by Valerie, a faux Frenchwoman who is actually a member of American mid-Atlantic aristocracy. Her penchant for avant-garde art — she might be a future Gloria Vanderbilt, a “poor little rich girl” who fancies herself an artiste — includes accumulating the shrapnel shards she extracts from her patients for later use in mixed-media projects.
The duo officially becomes a trio when Burt, Harold, and Valerie make a beeline to postwar Amsterdam, touted for its tolerance of unconventional living arrangements. Although Valerie, who also smokes a pipe and sings “nonsense songs,” comes a touch too close to being a carbon copy of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, the relationship between the three is genuinely lovely. “Never again should I pour two without a third,” Valerie says of sharing drinks not just with Harold but also with Burt — a charming, heartfelt precis of the film’s vision of friendship. (Get ready for some of the movie’s most satisfying ASMR when, in a neat little montage, Robbie drops those shrapnel pieces in metal containers.)
At the end of the interregnum in Amsterdam, Valerie disappears, but Burt and Harold maintain their fraternal feeling back in New York. Given the heave-ho from his father-in-law’s medical practice for his insistence on tending to the needs of returning soldiers, Burt, who is married, operates a kind of ersatz clinic in which medications are liberally dispensed and false body parts, including Burt’s own fake eyeball, proliferate. Harold supports Burt in this venture, which is rooted in Burt’s simple rhetorical question. “How can I not help the veterans?” he asks, sounding not unlike a certain former president who often proclaims: “We love our veterans.” (This is a resonance likely not intended by Russell, but there it is.) In any event, here is a film that nakedly displays the horrors of war — seldom has a comedy shown so much blood and so many lost limbs — while also celebrating the alliances that can form in its aftermath.
The film is realized at a very high level. Christian Bale, who seems to love shape-shifting changes in body type, sports a skeletal face and gangly frame that bring out his character’s energy and enthusiasm. The closeness between Washington and Robbie credibly suggest what Kurt Vonnegut would have called “a nation of two.” Surrounding them at all times are a gaggle of supporting characters conceived with ample imagination and played with relish, including Mike Myers as a gregarious MI6 official, Michael Shannon as a pragmatic CIA operative, Zoe Saldana as a sweet-natured autopsy nurse, and Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy as Valerie’s inscrutable brother and ditzy, jittery sister-in-law, respectively. Delightful, too, is Russell’s whirling, prowling camera, which bobs and weaves and picks up on little details or bits of action, from the American flags flapping in the air outside the Waldorf Astoria to the innards of a corpse.
Russell sees history as a series of idylls, like the trio in Amsterdam, interrupted by periods of strife and struggle. This thesis is more or less enunciated by the characters, and it’s certainly a valid perspective. Yet the way it plays out in the film proves almost fatal. Amid Burt and Harold’s efforts on behalf of veterans, they step into a tangled conspiracy orchestrated by the fascist Committee of the Five, which is openly inspired by the real-life Business Plot of 1933 involving well-to-do tycoons seeking to bring down FDR. The Committee of the Five’s evil efforts result in two deaths, nearly lead to murder charges for our two innocent heroes, and come close to entangling a noble pro-democracy general, Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro).
The assorted plotting, scheming, and double-dealing are right up Russell’s alley, but the film becomes unusually solemn and self-serious during this stretch. The Committee of the Five’s undemocratic shenanigans are clearly meant to evoke trite modern-day MSNBC talking points on purported threats to democracy from MAGA Republicans, and the story nearly grinds to a halt to indulge Dillenbeck’s sermonizing. De Niro, a proud Trump critic who seems to imagine the American public needs late-career actors to swear at them about how to vote, often seems to be giving not so much a performance as a public-service message to camera. Those of us who admire De Niro as an actor are willing to set aside his politics, so why can’t he?
We don’t want a lecture in a movie from the great Russell. We want the sort of picture that finds room for Taylor Swift and Chris Rock in cameo performances, and Mike Myers turning up with a box full of fake eyeballs — the crazy quilt of surprises and gimmicks and fun that makes up two-thirds of Amsterdam. By being of a small world of neurotic political obsessives for a small part of its run time, Amsterdam undercuts its own ethos. But what an ethos! Chaos, fun, and beautiful absurdity are still on offer for most of this film by a director unlike any other.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
