An historic event altered into a good screwball thriller.

Rating: 9/10 (18 May 2017)

Real facts stories always have attracted filmmakers. Historic tales offer some feeling of truth to the cinema stories. Always will be controversy among moviegoers about fidelity and treason to the historical truth. Whenever a historical person o era is portraits somebody will question the fidelity to the facts. Warren Beatty was probably aware of this and populated REDS with interviews to a gallery of real people, as they were at the real time of the movie-making. They were present, somehow, during the life of John Reed. They commented about those times with their own thoughts. Watergate turned to be a wonderful thriller about the work of two journalists and not about Nixon. Both journalists were credited with William Goldman as responsible by the script. Serious, committed filmmakers have realized good movies out of historic events and moviegoers have shown to be attracted by them. Actual facts give a structural base to the script, a generating point from where it could come up an interesting, brilliant movie. Now the important thing in this genre is to deeply develop such factual themes and relate them to the movie story, which by now will probably become tinted with the filmmaker's ideas. American hustle has been successful in processing the material of a once newsworthy event from late 70,s early 80, which now is not totally installed in the country's collective memory. The real Abscam was in itself an official cover operation and its planning notes could have been the synopsis of a B-spy movie. American hustle used the blueprint of the scam as the movie line and from it created a cast of characters and sub-plots very complex, rare and chaotic converted into a web frame from where develops a story that is credible thanks to the intelligent construction of scenes with characters moving and talking organically and in unison with the screwball spirit of the story. Apparently there was a real Irving (Bale character) and a real mayor Polito (Renner character) who were functional to the factual story both with personal traits and history to nurture these great actors' work but the final product was the task of profoundly creative study of characters and its integration to the story. Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams are extremely accurate in their roles. Bradley Cooper had a great composition of a FBI agent unlike to most typical portraits of Intel agents. He is success- hungry, probably to vindicate his own history as a person and have not scruples and little dignity in achieving the goals he is setting for him and the operation. At one point early in the movie we have forgotten the actual history and we are immersed into a movie rich in textured characters and attracting script with an organic discourse of tension and fear, going much faster and complicated than the characters and spectators have asked for. The film's look expresses with precision an era and an event that it is not to far removed in time. David O. Russell was able to organize a chaotic storytelling by keeping a consistent atmosphere directing a cast of odd characters in a space that is dangerously edgy. As moviegoers we sense the climate and fell the uncertainty of the unknown next step. American hustle is a film that proposed an unusual historic thriller and it was accomplished.