American Hustle: Rotten and Delicious

Rosalyn:  “I chipped my nails moving furniture, it’s my new obsession, moving,  redecorating, it makes me feel better, like exercise.  But there’s this top coat [of nail polish] that you can only get from Switzerland, and I don’t know what I’m going to do because I’m running out of it, and I love it, I can’t get enough of it.  There’s something about it, it’s perfumy, but also – rotten?  And I know this sounds crazy but I can’t get enough of it.  Smell it, it’s true.  Historically all the best perfumes in the world were laden with something nasty, foul, it’s true.  Irving loves it, he can’t get enough of it.”

Dolly: “Carmine, smell her nails.”

Rosalyn:  “Sweet and sour.  Rotten and delicious.”

Carmine:  “It smells like flowers.”

Rosalyn:  “Flowers, but with garbage.  Irving can’t get enough of it.  It hooks you.  He always comes back for it.”

{Click here to see the video}

I went to see the new David O. Russell film American Hustle the past week.  Loosely based on the late 1970’s ABSCAM scandal, it tells the story of two small time con artists loan sharks (Christian Bale and Amy Adams), caught by a sleazy undercover FBI agent (Bradley Cooper).  He agrees to let them off if they help him entrap some New Jersey politicians in a string operation.  The (now) three hustlers, in a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, get the politicians to accept bribes to use their influence to help the new Atlantic City casinos, gambling having just been legalized in the state.  Jennifer Lawrence plays Rosalyn, Bale’s bimbo yet wise Long Island wife.  Carmine and Dolly, in the dialogue above, are the Mayor of Camden and his wife, the con artists’ first victims.

It’s a fun movie and it says a lot about America, and the late 70’s.  Hustle has always been an admired national virtue, in films and in real life.  Bend the law a bit to get ahead.  And be a flashy dresser while doing it. The loveable hustler is often the sympathetic hero. Throw in some Bee Gees songs and Cosmo magazine type female fashion, with a cameo from Robert de Niro as a mafia boss – an enjoyable Christmas movie. 

(For years my daughter and I have gone to the movies on Christmas Eve.  When she was younger it helped fill the impatient afternoon until the Christmas Eve church service.  But even then we tried to be irreverent in our selection, something decidedly unspiritual.  James Bond.  The X Men.  Last year it was Life of Pi, actually quite a spiritual movie.)

Jennifer Lawrence steals the film playing another great American film type – the dumb blonde who is really pretty smart and from whose mouth come many of the film’s wiser points and themes. 

Like the scene about nail polish.  It’s the first meeting between the two couples, Irving and Rosalyn, hustler and wife, and Carmine and Dolly, well meaning Italian American public servants about to be screwed.  Rosalyn (Lawrence) is both out of her league and totally on it.  She knows what her husband is doing is both rotten and delicious, and it turns her on too.

The film is all about not being able to get enough.  The hustlers just can’t stop.  The FBI agent turns out to be a coke snorting hustler himself who bends the rules and gets caught in his own scam.  Of course the New Jersey politicians and the mafia dons are doing the hustle.  But at least towards the characters in this scene, you feel some understanding, sympathy, even forgiveness.  And Rosalyn/Lawrence is simply hilarious.

My daughter pointed out to me that this film would, just barely, pass the Bechdel Test.  The test asks three simple questions:  Does the film:

a) have two or more named female characters

b) who talk with each other

c) about something besides men.

(The test is named for American comic strip creator Alison Bechdel, who in 1985 had characters in her strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” say they would only go see a film that met these three criteria.  Sweden recently started publishing a film rating system based on the Bechdel Test for all films.)

Few films pass the test.  None of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings films do.  Nor does Pulp Fiction, and only one Harry Potter film makes it.  And of those films that do pass the test, in half of them the two named female characters talk only of marriage or babies.

With Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence you can expect some great acting.  And you get it.  But they only share one scene, a surprising and luscious one, late in the film.  It’s in a women’s restroom, where Rosalyn, Irving’s wife and the Amy Adams character, ex-stripper Sydney, Irvings’ con partner and lover, meet for the first time.  But sadly, no passing grade from Bechdel; they only speak of Irving and which one of them he loves best. 

But in the nailpolish scene the two named characters, Rosalyn and Dolly, lacquered and bimbo-ed as they are, talking not about men, but nail polish. 

And they remind us how much of life really is that dangerous and attractive mixture of rotten and delicious.  And how it’s not so bad to want more of it.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter