Busy but dull film loses its way
The trailer for David O. Russell’s latest ensemble romp, “Amsterdam,” seems to promise some kind of 1930s-set caper about a dead body and a trio of friends who are fingered for a murder. Presumably, Amsterdam will figure in, but the premise presented is vague at best. As it turns out, the trailer is sly by design, and the film itself doesn’t even give away its own gambit — and reason for existing — until the very end.
“Amsterdam” boasts all the markers of a prestigious project, including a cavalcade of movie stars, from Oscar-winners (Christian Bale, Rami Malek) to stunt casting (Taylor Swift, Mike Myers). There’s Emmanuel Luzbeki’s desaturated, sepia-stained cinematography, because “historical.” It’s also a new project after many years from an Oscar-nominated auteur who has his own laundry list of personal and professional marks on his record, though that has apparently not deterred many lauded actors from signing up for this film.
At its core, “Amsterdam” is a movie about friendship, and kindness, a theme that Russell underlines and italicizes in its last moments. But it’s a challenge to buy what he’s selling here, when even he doesn’t seem to buy it. It’s the kind of movie where monologues about friendship and kindness play over montages of characters dancing, making art and lying on the floor, which stands in for actual character development and relationships that have been fully fleshed out in the writing.
Bale, in a clownish but capable performance, plays the hapless Burt Berendsen, a doctor and a World War I veteran who has taken to treating his fellow vets in his experimental clinic, creating prostheses and new drugs, and testing them himself. His social-climbing wife (Andrea Riseborough) seemingly detests him, and his glass eye keeps falling out.
His best friend from the war is a lawyer named Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and the pair find themselves tasked with performing an autopsy on a Gen. Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.) whom they knew back in Europe, at the request of his daughter (Taylor Swift), who does not believe he died of natural causes.
Mayhem, mishaps and wrongful accusations of murder ensue, and soon the odd couple are on the run, trying to suss out the nefarious wrongdoers who have them on their heels. They serendipitously link up with their old friend Valerie (Margot Robbie), and Russell takes us for a spin through the 1918 days when they all met in a French war hospital and spent a few years recuperating and kicking up their heels in bohemian, progressive Amsterdam (the friends whisper the name of the city throughout the film like a mantra).
Back in 1933, the pals work their way through a series of mind-bogglingly tedious high jinks as the audience attempts to puzzle through why, exactly, we should care about any of this. Russell eventually comes through with an eleventh-hour reveal that the film is actually about the various “isms” that plague America: the hat trick of racism, capitalism and fascism.
After all that insufferable mugging, a baffling variety show and the villains’ declarations that they would’ve have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t had been for those meddling kids, Russell pivots from irony to earnestness, informing the audience that war is bad and rich men will wage war for their own enrichment. Also, the film is “mostly” based on the true story of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, so no one is allowed to get mad because this really (kind of ) happened.
There’s a lot wrong with “Amsterdam”: the dull writing, its interminable “busy-ness,” the dinner theater caliber of
acting, the fact that the whole thing looks like it’s been soaked in tea. But worst of all it has a bad case of what one could call “Don’t Look Up” disease, in which a film tries to exist solely on movie stars and a desire to lecture the audience about impending doom.
Cinematically, the diagnosis is terminal, and “Amsterdam” is dead on arrival.
Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes Rating: R (brief violence and bloody images)