David O. Russell risks an eccentric vision of American democracy.
Good filmmakers rarely make movies so confoundingly messed up as David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. The title refers to a utopia, a place where three survivors of World War I’s destruction — Burt Berendsen, played by Christian Bale, Harold Woodman, played by John David Washington, and Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie — share a European idyll. It’s when they come back to the United States and are witness to a series of murders that these American eccentrics endure the hazards of race, class, female subjugation, and cultural corruption, presaging the next world war and social debacles to follow.
Having already shot his sharpest arrow by naming his 2013 movie about the political circus surrounding the Abscam scandal American Hustle, Russell couldn’t find a moniker befitting his latest assessment of national ambition, disunity, and disorder. Amsterdam reflects that disorder in the three nonconformists’ dangerous investigation of homegrown fractiousness.
Yet, despite Russell’s being our cleverest satirist (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy), Amsterdam succumbs to the worst ideas now afflicting our nation. Wonderfully humane as it is, Amsterdam can’t surmount the prevailing sense of failure. My perplexity about it comes from Russell’s connecting contemporary American malaise to stylized, period world-weariness — the opening montage of disfigured war veterans suggests a Surrealist death wish; the humor is surprisingly Buñuelian. I expected Russell to be the one filmmaker who saw through the anti-American distaste of media progressives, but this cloud-cuckoo-land tale ultimately clashes with the spoiled cynicism of Hollywood elites.
His wily Americans — kooks and criminals — display endless emotional resources, and this fortitude is more beguiling than the current fixation on victimhood and historical captivity. In fact, Russell teases those obsessed with the sin of generational wealth, who seek revenge against the One Percenters along with the Founders; his eccentrics all seek their portion of America’s former spiritual abundance.
These clown characters are more sophisticated than any represented in Hollywood’s usual cautionary tales. Burt can’t quite escape his ex-wife and her racist Park Avenue parents. Rich-girl Valerie (“She was brilliant and nuts”) is a loner, and ambitious Harold, who, as socially conscious as the other black men who endured prejudice in his Army regiment, is essentially another outsider. The trio is drawn together by what Russell appreciates as their individuality. Russell has the uncommon gift of pushing actors to peak comic expressiveness. Bale, Robbie, and Washington have never been better. When Bale takes on one of Russell’s screwy schemers, he’s prodigious like Daniel Day-Lewis but not so self-serious. And Robbie’s game recognizes game, as sportscasters say. Washington’s the lightweight, yet a black con artist is the object of contemporary liberal piety in the age of Obama and George Floyd.
Burt, Valerie, and Harold reenact the Jules and Jim triangle, but in their own original way. This is when the movie flies high. Russell is better at it than the Europhilia that Philip Kaufman toyed with in Henry and June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Russell fulfills the open-road promise of the American Renaissance directors who were too tied to Sixties sanctimony.
Amsterdam’s race-mixing defines Russell’s cultural intelligence. Valerie and Harold connect, making Burt a third-wheel onlooker — except for his attraction to Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldaña), a Harlem medical pathologist. (Russell’s comic approach to pathology turns veterans of the Great War into existential clowns. Burt’s fake right eye, often crossing waywardly or popping out of his head, is a jokey, incongruous symbol of the idealism others don’t see.) Bale, Robbie, and Saldaña can eroticize anything, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki makes their avid eyes beam.
But something extraordinary happens with Washington’s part in the spontaneous romanticism: Valerie, who dabbles in avant-garde art (she combines shrapnel with tea sets as pacifist commentary and takes Man Ray–style photographs), defends her taboo-breaking by generalizing about Harold’s manhood: “You see the kid they used to be, the part when they were vulnerable.” Russell’s close-up of Washington validates her claim. John David Washington has been an unsatisfactory actor in films like Tenet and BlacKkKlansman, but the poignancy Russell discovers in that weak, sad, boyish face may be the most trenchant example of racial fellow-feeling ever captured in Hollywood’s white liberal history. This moment galvanizes the film’s freewheeling stockpile of leftist attitudes, whether Valerie’s proto-feminist suffrage or Burt’s “half-Catholic, half-Jewish” moral ambivalence. (“We love the world naturally, and we hope it loves us.”)
When Amsterdam is that magnanimous, it feels like a lively American update of both Jules and Jim and The Big Sleep while simultaneously correcting the smugness of Motherless Brooklyn and The French Dispatch. The wonderment stops whenever Russell returns to the crime-film exposition and the suspense becomes both obscure and political.
Partisans Burt, Valerie, and Harold stumble upon a plot hatched by a group of proto-Nazi American legionnaires to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. Russell focuses on a little-known 1933 labor strike at the U.S. Capitol (archival footage resembles the January 6 attack). Here’s where the film becomes petty, unromantic, and ill-humored. It doesn’t help that the plot hinges on retired Army general Gil Dillenbeck, played by Robert DeNiro and based on the real-life Smedley Butler, known for foiling the attempted coup.
Unlike Flirting with Disaster, Amsterdam is not perfectly structured, and DeNiro’s casting is as problematic as Washington’s. (So is casting non-actor Chris Rock as Harold’s belligerent race man. Chris Rock never helps.) We’re made aware of a political bias underlying Russell’s screwball comedy, but he doesn’t keep that straight, either. Reference to a villainous character named Vandenheuvel suggests that Russell is cagey enough to target one of left-wing media’s leading ideologues (the editor, until recently, of the Nation), but even that is inconsistent with the simpleminded Nazi stuff.
Russell, unlike Hollywood dullards, doesn’t go in for macabre crime procedurals or occult debauches; his love for oddballs is more like Leo McCarey’s World War II adventure Once Upon a Honeymoon, which also doesn’t settle on either romance or patriotism. Amsterdam represents the era when patriotism has warped. When Burt says “I’m honing my discernment,” he’s clearly speaking for Russell in his struggle with post-Covid, post–January 6 America. Amsterdam’s narrative wreckage comes from the irrational political mindset that has befallen contemporary pop culture. Russell hits bottom when Burt repeats the Oprah canard “You have to live your truth.”
Amsterdam probably deserves its bad reviews, not for the obvious reasons but for its vexing sense of betrayal. Russell risks an idiosyncratic vision of democracy but recollects history he only half understands. Before wrecking the narrative (loading in swastikas, conspiracy theories, and racist sterilization subplots), Russell’s foray into American melting-pot romance almost matches his peer James Toback’s libertine candor.
Amsterdam is a fanciful version of that disingenuous threat that liberals make to leave America. Its self-defeating escapism is the biggest miscalculation of Russell’s career.
