There’s usually no more heartbreaking way to start a film than with the snippy, risqué announcement, “Mostly based on true events!” or “What follows is all true—sort of!” It usually means the film falls between the two chairs of “creatively interesting.” and “factually informative” falls. However, David O. Russell begins his elaborate screwball mystery Amsterdam by declaring, “A lot of this actually happened.” A cabal of wealthy American businessmen conspired to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in hopes of getting a retired Major General named Smedley Butler to lead their veterans’ fascist organization. (Perhaps the closest British equivalent was Lord Mountbatten, who was approached by a group of establishment tycoons to overthrow Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1968.)
Amsterdam envisions three innocent veterans getting sucked into these spooky shenanigans. Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a disabled ex-soldier who lost an eye in World War I; This is Bale’s second “glass eye” role after The Big Short. Burt is a doctor in New York who provides painkillers and prosthetics to veterans on a pro bono basis. Burt’s army buddy, Harold Woodman (John David Washington), is now a qualified attorney and helps him organize a morale-boosting gala dinner for ex-soldiers. And the soulmate of the two men is the spirited and brilliant Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie, who was a World War I volunteer nurse and Dadaist artist who salvaged all the splinters she dug out of the soldiers’ shattered bodies to create a bizarre objet to create trouvé works of art.
Valerie took Burt and Harold to a bohemian glorious retreat in Amsterdam, where they did nothing but carouse, but then she mysteriously disappeared. And now, back in New York in 1933, Burt and Harold witness the bizarre death of a prominent US general’s daughter and find themselves caught up in a murder mystery. They need the help of another top soldier, General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), and Valerie reappears dramatically.
There are some great supporting twists here that regularly break the surface of this film’s soupy strangeness. Rami Malek is very funny as Valerie’s wealthy brother Tom with a silky voice, always charming and racy. Mike Myers is hilarious as MI6 agent Paul Canterbury performing the ‘Sand Dance’ of Wilson, Keppel and Betty in one scene for no good reason, surely the first time this has been done in cinemas since the opening scene of Julien Temple’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ see is. Andrea Riseborough is sleek and stylish as Burt’s snobbish wife, Beatrice, and Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola provide laughs as two rag cops.
Among the leading actors, the best is John David Washington, who pursues a policy unfamiliar to his peers: less is more. His appearance is cool, calm and his address to the camera is very seductively underplayed. Bale and Robbie make bigger, fuller comedies, and often there’s not quite the material in the script to back that up – although Bale gets a fair bit of it when Burt takes a new, cutting-edge morphine pain reliever via eye drops, which he starts to talk about talking about how unreliable these things are, and then suddenly stops himself, “Oh, that’s fast!”
But there’s something oddly heavy and foggy about Amsterdam that feels like it counteracts the lightness and agility required for a caper. It’s the reality of the story that the film makes clear in the credits: the grim fact of proto-fascism in the US understandably means the comedy won’t be all that light-hearted, although the darkness of this story means it isn’t. t immediately clear. Well, there are some very good performances, and Washington has taken another step toward A-lister greatness.
Amsterdam releases October 7th in the US and UK.