‘Amsterdam’ review: A comedy of errors, but not the good kind
David O. Russell’s newest film can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy, a political thriller, or a heartfelt exploration of friendship. It ends up just being a mess.
Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam.” Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
There’s a saying about men who drive huge trucks — they’re often compensating for a lack of confidence. The same logic could be applied to “Amsterdam,” David O. Russell’s first film in seven years. “Amsterdam” is populated by a veritable circus of Hollywood’s finest, but this is just a smokescreen for Russell’s ham-fisted writing to cower behind. The film does in 134 minutes what could easily have been done in 90, in a painful, bloated display of the most tonally inconsistent script of 2022 so far.
“Amsterdam” opens with a goofy little voice-over from lead actor Christian Bale, with a mawkishly endearing 1930s Noo Yawk accent. Bale plays Dr. Burt Berendsen, a professorially dishevelled World War I veteran dedicated to helping fellow wounded army men live normal, pain-free lives. Berendsen is lovable and selfless, but isn’t in the best place in life — he suffers chronic pain and is confined in a back brace, he may or may not have had his medical license revoked, and his flighty wife Beatrice alternates between grossly fetishising his war scars and ignoring him completely.
Enter his best friend, John David Washington’s self-assured, upright lawyer Harold Woodman. Well-groomed and charismatic, Harold is a Columbia Law School graduate and an industrious lawyer, who would be unequivocally thriving in life save for the fact that he is a Black man struggling to be taken seriously in pre-Brown America. Burt and Harold, formerly platoon-mates and now business partners, are hired by neurotic scion Liz Meekins — played by the cast’s token musician-turned-actor, Taylor Swift — to investigate the death of her father Bill, who also happens to have been their platoon leader during the war. Shortly after discovering that Bill’s death was indeed foul play, Burt and Harold are framed for murder, and in the process of clearing their names are dragged into a murky political conspiracy.
That’s where things start to go downhill for both our lead characters and the audience. We are introduced to the meat of the situation through, I kid you not, a sudden freeze-frame and a voice-over that might as well be, “You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation,” preceded by a record scratch. Shenanigans ensue, but what actually happens for a good chunk of the movie is borderline incomprehensible thanks to useless minor subplots, dialogue that drastically changes tone with every other sentence, and some incredibly perplexing editing choices rivaled only by Baz Luhrman’s nauseating transitions in “Elvis.”
Margot Robbie is later introduced as quirky, artsy, “I’m-not-like-the-other-girls” Valerie. We are told she is a French nurse, and we are also told very emphatically that she and Burt and Harold are now inseparable — which nobody would have gleaned if it hadn’t been spelled out in bold, because Russell seems to have had no interest in giving the trio any meaningful screen time together. A romance between Harold and Valerie is also shoehorned in despite minimal onscreen development, and Washington and Robbie have as much chemistry as two dead fish slapping against each other. We are treated to one wide shot of Amsterdam, and then we never see the titular city again. The film then spends the rest of its over-long runtime jack-knifing between comedy and political intrigue so hard it becomes almost physically disorienting.
“Amsterdam” firmly orbits around anti-fascist discourse and the historical rise of fascism both in America and the world in the 1930s, which could have lent some heft to the film’s otherwise incoherent narrative. And yet, Russell fails his script and his viewers by spending the first two acts refusing to make any overtures towards anti-fascism whatsoever. In fact, his constant dodging around the subject becomes so balletic that one might be inclined to chalk it up to an attempt at subtlety and give him credit for it. But then the third act steamrollers all that, as a drugged Burt grins stupidly into the camera’s fish-eye lens and delivers an infantile monologue about how fascism is hate, and hate is bad, and what’s the only thing that can defeat hate? That’s right. Love.
The fact that a 64-year-old adult man wrote this script is mind-boggling.
Much like the script, most of the performances in “Amsterdam” are also disappointing. Christian Bale gamely attempts to carry the entire film on his emaciated shoulders but doesn’t even come close, thanks to the glaringly obvious fact that his fellow leads John David Washington and Margot Robbie are all but phoning it in. And who can blame them? Russell’s script hardly gives them, or anyone else, anything to work with. Michael Shannon and Michael Myers appear as American and British intelligence operatives who pop up occasionally as stereotypical comic relief whack-a-moles — but, unlike comic relief whack-a-moles created by capable screenwriters, these two fail to serve the plot in any meaningful way. The same can be said of Zoe Saldaña’s no-nonsense autopsy nurse Irma, who was clearly only written in to serve as an underdeveloped, paper-thin love interest for Burt. Even minor leads Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy are forced to resort to exaggerated facial expressions and slapstick physical affectations to give their roles any hint of personality. Perhaps the only one who manages to come out of this unscathed is Chris Rock, who plays his least irritating character in years, and has the honor of delivering what is arguably the only chuckle-worthy line in the entire film.
What is most frustrating about “Amsterdam” is the fact that it had the potential to serve as a multifaceted study of World War I veterans and deep-seated issues of the race, class, and veteran status divide in post-war America, or at the very least, a meaningful anti-fascist history lesson. What it actually tries to be is too many things at once — a comedy, a political thriller, an exploration of friendship, a screwball whodunit, and a serious period piece. And sadly, what it ultimately ends up being is nothing more than a disorganised, inane mess.
