Big Picture Big Sound

"Hustle" & Show

"American Hustle" has a whole lot to offer: a lot of hair, a lot of polyester, a lot of skin, and a lot of A-list firepower. While these things could be just smoke and mirrors for a lesser script, in this case, there's also a solid story to accompany the glitz. With Christian Bale (most recently, "Out of the Furnace") and Amy Adams ("Her") taking the lead, David O. Russell weaves a fine story of con men and corruption and, ultimately, the American dream, set against a backdrop of glittering 70s excess.

Christian Bale is out of shape and remarkably unattractive as Irving Rosenfeld, a con man with a dry cleaning business, but when Irving and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) meet at a pool party, sparks fly. Irving is already married to Jennifer Lawrence's Roslyn, and father to her son, but no matter - he quickly settles into a double life with Sydney, where together they deal in counterfeit art and investment fraud.

It all goes well until it doesn't - Irving and Sydney tangle with the Richie DeMaso (Bradley Cooper) of the FBI and end up in jail, then are forced to help him orchestrate a con to expose government corruption. Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) of Camden is the mark, and they painstakingly set him up. All the while, Roslyn has decided she's bored of playing second fiddle to Irving's mistress and stirs up trouble of her own.

The kitschy "period" props, like Christian Bale's combover, are truly a delight. The film actually opens with him putting it all together: rubber-cementing a puff of hair onto his bald pate as a base, teasing his own hair around it, artfully folding everything into place and finishing it off with prodigious amounts of hairspray. Most of the rest of the cast is seen in rollers at one point or another - clearly these hairstyles were not easy to maintain. Likewise, the costumes are fabulous: sequins and synthetics abound, and Amy Adams rarely wears anything that doesn't plunge to her waist.

The film was penned as well as directed by David O. Russell, and is based on the Abscam scandal from the same time period, but only loosely. The cast are all Russell-favorites: with Mr Cooper and Ms Lawrence reuniting after "Silver Linings Playbook" and Mr Bale and Ms Adams reuniting after "The Fighter". There's a whole lot of chemistry and the script gives everyone a lot to work with. While there are points in which you wonder if you're being bamboozled by the nostalgia, overall it's an enjoyable, well-paced movie in the hands of some very talented people.