Talk About Being Conned, Everybody! Come on!

Rating: 5/10 (4 January 2014)

The opening scene of Irving Rosenfeld, arguably Christian Bale's furthest left-field role so far, refining his comb-over and crowning it with a spray of aerosol heralds the start of something great. Alas, it was all drivel thereafter.
David O. Russell's raid on grifters and graft in the late 1970s is full of smug put-ons. Though he has selected a cast entirely comprised of hype-magnet zeitgeist stars to draw the crowds, it only exacerbates the self-seriousness of the script, which is pandemic with high camp and laughable pageantry. These people talk way too much. About nothing. Just for Russell's pride in his own riffing.
Beginning with the title card, "Some of this actually happened," the film unceasingly reminds us---often through various characters in carelessly derivative voice-over---that life is a con game, and we all lie. We lie to others, we lie to ourselves. And that it's the American way. And American Hustle isn't clever about making this point. It makes it, makes it again, and in case you didn't get it the first few times, a character says it out loud. Then another one does. And before you know it, you find that it's the self-congratulatory Russell and his overrated cast, not to mention the hordes of critics raving about it, that are conning themselves.
Like Russell's other films, there is quite a bit of humor, but in this case, not all of it is intended. One scene has Jennifer Lawrence going on and on about her nail polish over an important dinner with Irving and Jeremy Renner playing an Italian-American mayor. What initially is marginally charming descends rapidly into a maddening sequence, much too long and breathtakingly vain. And symbolic of the movie in its entirety.
The dialogue is so labored, so artificial and pretentious that everyone involved must've felt too highly of themselves to probe as deeply or use thinking as critical as they all have in past work. Certain scenes seem either pedantically constrained, just have no purpose, or both. Take for instance a particularly eyeroll-inducing ladies room showdown between Adams and Lawrence, while numerous lines are groaners. "After Vietnam and Watergate, we're just starting to trust politicians again." Seriously? "I just want to be loved!!!" What is this, Clifford Odets? "My dream was to be anyone but myself." Thanks for telling me, you self-mythologizing drama queen.
Meanwhile, when you didn't think the GoodFellas and Casino procurements were transparent enough, there's De Niro in a fleeting cameo as a vicious mobster which has no more effect than that of a gimmick of a declining legend riffing on his career staple.
Even the essentially perfect casting of comic genius Louis C.K., in just the kind of bit role I could really get used to seeing him play, can't relieve the film of its hollow ego trip. Once you've unraveled the movie's trendy gloss-over, you've got an overblown wannabe of an undertaking, stuffed with nothing more than the bluster of hand-me-down inspiration, gaudy artifice and lugubrious schtick.