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Amsterdam


It's been a few years between drinks for madly inconsistent David O. Russell. His last film before this was Joy in 2015, and he has the pretty great Silver Linings Playbook under his belt. Now, as Thom Yorke once sang, ambition makes you look pretty ugly, and this lyric applies to Amsterdam. This is not to say it's a terrible film - it has a few very good moments - but Russell has bitten off more than he can chew with this one. And there's a lot to chew. The film is based loosely on The Business Plot of 1933 in the US, a failed attempt to overthrow the Franklin Roosevelt government and install a fascist dictator, in line with Italy and Germany.

The ambition is manifest in the breadth of the story and the amount of characters involved. Russell has at least 15 'names' to his disposal but many of them (Timothy Olyphant, Ed Begley Jr., Chris Rock, Taylor Swift, etc) get very little to do. I'll try to unpick some of the threads - it begins with a suspicious death; followed by an autopsy; another less suspicious death; then, whammo, backstory covering WW1; the coming together of the three stars; their post-war idyll in the city of the title; blam, return to present (1933) where investigation leads to rich business leaders, a retired general, sterilisation clinics, the Committee of the Five and the webbing of the reality-adjacent plot (above). Shit dude, I get it. You've so many pieces on the board that by the end, the need to smother the audience with exposition was too tempting to avoid. 


I guess the main reason people will see this film is the cast, and for the most part, they don't disappoint. Christian Bale (as Dr. Burt Berendsen) is fun - almost caricature but good enough to keep it off the ledge, Margot Robbie (Valerie Voze) brings an earnest naturalism to her role, and John David Washington (Harold Woodman) has an oddly mannered style of reading his lines but just about matches the other two. These three carry the film - there's a kind of Cabaret vibe going on with their time in Amsterdam, and they even get a bit of dancing to do, à la Godard's Band of Outsiders. This is all top larks but the film needs to move on so flash-forward they must.

The message delivered is fine - rich businessmen will work with dictators or go to war with them, whichever brings the most profit - but De Niro's climactic speech was overly simplistic, in fact his entire role was blatantly cardboard. The film really needed a tighter edit (probably at the script stage). It's way too long and we're spoon fed the answers to the 'whys' of the story, especially the unravelling of knots at the end. Perhaps worst of all though is the absolute waste of the film's one allocated 'fuck'. Seems to be a trend that American films, in order to mollify the censors, use their 'fuck' in the most egregious, most pointless spots. If a well-placed 'fuck' can't be achieved, then what hope the rest of the film?

Amsterdam is showing at Palace and Luna cinemas

See also:

As mentioned above, Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) and Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders (1964) are great '2 guy, 1 girl' trio films.
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