“We will always have Paris” says Rick to his beloved Ilse as he sends her on a plane with her husband and says goodbye to her forever in the final scene of “Casablanca”. Amsterdam is the Paris of “Amsterdam”, which takes place in the years after the First World War. The love story of Valerie the White and Harold the Black could only exist outside their social, class and family circles, so they went to Amsterdam. But when their friend Brett returned to New York and got into trouble, Valerie followed him to help him, and disappeared from Harold’s life (until he came back and met her a few years later). That is, the plot similarity to “Casablanca” does not amount to the sentence with which I opened, although the tone of “Amsterdam” is very different.
“Amsterdam” grows out of a fascinating and startling historical story that echoes events from recent American history, but the film only reaches it towards the end, and until then the script written by David O. Russell weaves a fictional plot that combines suspense, mystery and romance, and tries to spice them up with humor. It does not work. This is Russell’s first film in seven years, and I almost wrote that it was his weakest film, until I remembered 2015’s “Disturbed Love” (Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Biel and Nail) which was so bad that Russell disowned it and dropped the His name is from the movie. Russell has a reputation as a gifted (if antipathetic) filmmaker, and has five Oscar nominations for writing and directing The Fighter, Optimism Is the Name of the Game, and The American Dream. As mentioned, this time too he puts a real case with political and economic echoes into a meat grinder in an attempt to produce a black comedy, and he got a meatball that crumbles between his hands.
Christian Bale (who is his third collaboration with Russell) plays Brett, a doctor who lost his eye in the First World War. Together with his good friend from the war Harold (John David Washington from “Tent”) he enlists to investigate the suspicious death of the good senator who was the commander of their regiment. The two get involved when the senator’s daughter (Taylor Swift) is murdered and the blame falls on them. In their search for an advocate of honesty, they reach one of New York’s richest men (Rami Malek from “Bohemian Rhapsody”). Sometime in the middle, Brett takes us back to the war days and tells how he and Harold met nurse Valerie (Margo Ruby) who treated their wounds and became a sort of trio. He also tells how Valerie introduced them to two spies, designed as a comic duo (quite successfully) by Mike Myers and Michael Shannon.
Another comic duo are police detectives Alessandro Nivola (“Newark Saints”) and Mathias Schoenaerts (“Rust and Bone”), who investigate the death of the senator’s daughter. And I haven’t mentioned Chris Rock (what is he doing here?), Zoe Saldana (in a non-role role), and Timothy Olyphant (unidentified), and Anya Taylor-Joy (surprisingly good), and Robert De Niro who plays the army man Smedley Butler ( Smedley Butler) – the one real character in the film.
Just as he flooded the screen with too many stars (behind every door another star emerged), Russell flooded the script with plot twists, too many of which are indicated without being developed. Even more problematic is the oppressive humor. The third time Brett’s glass eye jumped out of his face and rolled on the floor I really hoped it wouldn’t happen again. Still, Bale invests himself in the role and succeeds in shaping an interesting character – he is again thin to such an extent that it gives him the appearance of a caricature of Honora Dummier. The young Washington, on the other hand, is pale as in most of his roles so far, and I have a hard time understanding why he is being cast in leading roles in high-end, high-budget projects. The lack of passion between him and Ruby (she’s also stubborn) creates a void in the heart of the film (what a shame Michael B. Jordan pulled out of the film due to, it was reported, a conflict with another production).
A period film not only needs matching costumes and scenery, but is also required to build a world and create a sense of time and place. “Amsterdam”, most of which takes place in closed spaces (like “Casablanca”) was not able to do this, so I remained indifferent to the story and the characters throughout the entire viewing (the length of the film is two and a quarter hours – it felt more). In the closing credits, I discovered to my surprise that the photo was signed by Emanuel Lubetzky, the virtuoso photographer who won three consecutive Oscars (“Gravity”, “Birdman”, “The Man Born Again”). His failure to weave an atmosphere sharpens the not new insight that the quality of photography depends on the director as much as the photographer. And Russell directs this film like a novice director, lacking a sense of rhythm and a grasp of the whole work.
“Amsterdam” was created with a budget of eighty million dollars (before advertising expenses), which is a lot for a movie without superheroes that is apparently aimed at a mature audience, all the more so in the era after the corona lockdowns. At the end of the first week of its screening, it was already declared a massive box office failure. What a waste of (so many) talented people.
2 stars
Amsterdam Directed by: David O. Russell. With Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro. USA 2022, 134 min.