David O. Russell signs a big wacky production, full of stars, in turn pleasant and aberrant.
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The now without sharing reign of superheroes will have led to inflation of the Hollywood spectacle, a transition to the superlative which concerns all the strata of production, including that intended for a more adult audience. Thus appeared a category of super-authors adopting a demiurgic posture and whose figurehead could be Christopher Nolan, cantor of cerebral fictions arrived at saturation with Tenet (2020), his most abstruse film. David O. Russell, after the two Oscars won to Fighter (2010) and the public successes met consecutively by Happiness Therapy (2012) and American Bluff (2013), also seems to be in these inflationary spheres. And proves it with its latest feature film, Amsterdam, luxurious vehicle for three-star casting with the looks of a big machine off, without direction or safe.
The story was in 1933, the year when the Nazis are preparing to take power in Europe. In New York, two former regiment’s comrades and veterans of the Great War, Doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), Prosthetist surgeon, and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), lawyer, work in concert in plastic reconstruction and reintegration social of the broken mouths. Contacted by a rich heiress (Taylor Swift), they carry out his father’s autopsy, General Meekins -under the orders of which the two men served in Europe -perhaps poisoned.
But in the process, the young woman is thrown in front of them under a car, so that the two accomplices pass for suspects. On the run, pursued by two snarling agents, they find Valerie (Margot Robbie), former nurse whom they had known in Amsterdam released after the war. At three, they conduct the investigation into high society where people seem to conspire partisan business circles of Nazi theories.
Great monstrous fair
Inspired by a real attempt at putsch hatched by fascist sympathizers close to Wall Street, Amsterdam adopts a somewhat deserted register: that of a wacky frank, testing a labyrinthine reality whose secret signs get carried away. Here, the reference to the 1930s – economic crisis, mounted from extremes – comes into tension with the fanciful treatment and always a little “second degree” of the action. A big gap between the paranoia and the grotesque that in itself embodies the fluted silhouette of Doctor Berendsen, broken mouth filed with a glass eye that Christian Bale, all in deform postures, interprets with a Frankenstein expressionism. The on -board camera of the leader Emmanuel Lubezki completes transforming the whole into a large bruising and monstrous fair, a distorting reflection of a America on the edge of the chaos (any reference to the Trump era will not be completely fortuitous).
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