Amsterdam First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

David O. Russell shouldn’t be the kind of filmmaker who needs championing. Notoriously verbally abusive on set and accused of molestation by his transgender niece, he was nevertheless a veritable force in early 2010s Hollywood, hoovering up considerable success at both the box office and the Academy Awards and continuing to attract some of the most star-studded ensembles outside of a superhero movie. His films are unabashedly commercial, black comedies where the abundance of familiar faces and slapdash plots can start to feel like little more than glitzy table shuffling. But Amsterdam, Russell’s first film since 2015’s Joy, strikes a different chord than the glut of films that made him both admired and despised, though it wouldn’t appear to be the case on first glance. Nominally, the plot is, like American Hustle (2013), based on a true intrigue: the Business Plot, which in 1933 sought to instigate a veteran-led coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install retired General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in the mold of Mussolini and Hitler; Butler instead testified to Congress, though none of the wealthy businessmen were ever arrested. The film takes this conspiracy as its spine: Butler’s fictionalized counterpart is General Gilbert Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro in one of his most considered and forceful recent performances), and the protagonists attempt to clear their names and in the process stumble upon the mysterious “Committee of the 5.” However, Amsterdam is first and foremost a surprisingly indelible portrait of an almost utopic friendship between three World War I participants: Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and the mysterious Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie). Indeed, the title is both a feint and the key to the film: none of the “central” narrative takes place outside of New England, but an extended flashback (that occurs while Berendsen and Woodman are fleeing from unknown assailants) reorients the audience’s view, telling the story of how the two men became friends in the army and met Voze, a nurse and bon vivant who draws them into her orbit. This section, which takes up somewhere close to half an hour of the film, is in many ways the justification for Amsterdam, observing the simple pleasures of bohemian life in Amsterdam, full as it is with dancing, artistry — Voze is an artist who, among works in many other media, creates small sculptures out of bullets and shrapnel salvaged from the bodies of soldiers, including those of the heavily scarred Berendsen and Woodman, as perfect a metaphor for the kind of earnest subversion that Russell is working towards here — and most importantly time away from the United States. For Berendsen, this offers a release from his wife and her rich family of doctors, who openly disparage the half-Jewish man attempting to practice on Park Avenue. For Woodman and Voze, his Blackness and their interracial relationship is far more accepted in this cosmopolitan setting; when the film inevitably leaves this otherworldly realm, never to return to that enchanted town, it is a genuine loss, one which propels the rest of the film. Amsterdam isn’t the only great thing about Amsterdam of course; even in that city there are undercurrents of the outside world, signaled by the presence of two “birdwatchers” (spies) played by the pleasingly incongruous duo of Mike Myers and Michael Shannon, and those notions only expand. New York, where Berendsen and Woodman work together, appears to be more evidently shot on a backlot than any period film in recent memory, and the slightly magical and artificial nature speaks well to the strange qualities of this film. The expected bevy of notable faces that Russell is able to still assemble help provide much of that frisson: the mere presences of Taylor Swift and Chris Rock; the expected alienness of Anya Taylor-Joy, who pinballs off an unexpectedly strong Rami Malek playing up his urbane tics; and of course the main cast, all of whom are wonderful, especially Washington and Robbie, who handle their tentative romance with superb control. Stuffed with devices as it is — plot fake outs, timeline shuffling, narration that’s relayed between the three main characters, informative chyrons — the film takes the form of a light picaresque; it is never really in question who the conspirators are, whether the plot will actually succeed or not. Indeed, that’s the point of Amsterdam, which recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time. Inequity is of course everywhere, and Russell almost risks taking too modern of a viewpoint, especially with the threats to democracy that certainly deliberately echo Trump. But what lingers most readily are the little privileged moments: an intimate dance in a doctor’s office; the enchantingly anachronistic art that Voze creates, including overlapping faces and the prominent use of a film camera as self-portraiture; and above all the use of song, a linking device that speaks to the history and harmony that this film manages to capture in its own earnest, even sentimental way.