2014: awards season


American Hustle has been nominated for ten Oscars and Baftas, as well as seven Golden Globes (three wins), two Screen Actors Guild awards (winning best ensemble) and a host of others. It’s still not entirely clear why.

Maybe because of its look? The film begins with a dishevelled Christian Bale painstakingly glueing on a hairpiece, and fashion-wise it boldly continues in this vein with all manner of alarming coiffures, ill-fitting suits, optimistic dresses and many other aesthetic atrocities. David O Russell and his production designers have clearly had a ball recreating the Seventies in all its shambolic glory and the actors lap it up too. But it surely can’t just be down to spectacle or else all manner of terrible films would be up for gongs too.

Perhaps it’s the story. Con artist capers are a Hollywood mainstay and usually guarantee audience engagement thanks to the twists and turns. Hustle’s plot keeps expanding as Bale and Amy Adams’s small-time swindlers, once they fall into the clutches of of Bradley Cooper’s eager-beaver detective, find themselves increasingly out of their depth when Cooper’s ambitions start to involve prominent politicians and, inevitably, mobsters. There’s also a love triangle plot between the three leads, with alliegances and affections shifting around, and complicated further by the ever-impressive Jennifer Lawrence as Bale’s brassy missus.

However, the character stuff tends to get in the way of events at times, the shifts in focus derailing and bloating the film. It’s hard to become overly attached to these flawed people, so when they were fishing for sympathy I was really just waiting for the plot to move forward.

The dialogue never quite reaches blow-away levels either. The best it gets are the conversations revolving around ice-fishing between Cooper and his harassed boss (Louis CK on good form); elsewhere the wry moments (many involving Lawrence) don’t quite come consistently enough.

Maybe it’s down to the directing? As noted, Russell must have had fun making Hustle – perhaps a bit too much, as the overall mood is one of indulgence. What he does well is capturing fine details – his camera is unafraid to zero in on the characters’ physical imperfections as well as the period gaudiness. It sounds a bit silly to describe this as brave on his and the cast’s part, but this is Hollywood we’re talking about.

So then, is the acting attracting all the awards? No doubt this is solid all-round, with the supporting cast like Jeremy Renner all contributing their share. Bale completely disappears into his role, one of those brillaintly chameleon-like actors who you nonetheless want to take to one side and explain that extreme weight gain/loss isn’t all that necessary, what with the state of prosthetics and CGI these days. Cooper is effective at being a bit of a jerk for a change, and Adams bares if not all then the vast majority of herself for her art, and essays an English accent to boot.

Perhaps the main reason is that David O Russell appears to have hit on an award-friendly formula, making mainstream-friendly films with an indie sensibility that attract a reliably starry stable of actors. Hustle isn’t a brilliant film by any stretch of the imagination, but gongs have been won by stuff that’s an awful lot worse. Not bad for a guy who not so long ago was mostly famous for the impenetrable I Heart Huckabees and for twatting George Clooney (allegedly).


 No such doubts surround the nominations for 12 Years A Slave. A controversial issue, one mostly ignored or skated around by Hollywood in the past, an almost too-good-to-be-true story, heavyweight backing from Brad Pitt – this could have ended up as a great stodgy pudding of an Event Movie.

The reality, as helmed by Steve McQueen, is about as far removed from that theoretical schmaltz-fest as you could imagine. McQueen does not do half-measures. His third film is as uncompromising as his earlier works, only even more brutal in its depictions of a corrupt and depraved ideology.

If you somehow aren’t aware of the story by now, Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Upstate New York until one night in 1841 when, with his family away, he was lured to Washington DC with the promise of work in a touring show, only to be drugged during a night on the booze. He then experienced the hangover to end them all – 12 years of servitude, passed from owner to owner like a piece of meat, and suffering all manner of degradations along the way.

Even if you didn’t know that McQueen was (and still is) an artist, you would have your suspicions after watching his films. Not a frame is wasted here, and of the many poetic images that stay with the viewer long afterwards, plenty are simple yet beautiful establishing shots – a paddle steamer chopping through the seas, or a worm inching its way along a cotton plant.

The centrepiece scenes are by turns eerie (Solomon on a noose, his feet barely scraping the ground, while everyone else carries on as normal in the background) and downright horrifying (Solomon forced by his master to whip a female slave). McQueen has been criticised in some quarters for focusing on the purely visual at the expense of narrative, which rather misses the point. His direction demonstrates the exact opposite of style over substance, in that (pretentiousness alert) the style provides all the substance. The sense of oppression and despair never really lets up, looming grimly over any moments of respite like the bonds formed with his first master or Lupita Nyongo’s doomed slave girl Patsey. We don’t need Brad Pitt to pop up rather indulgently toward the end to tell us about the evils of slavery - we’ve been wincing at them for the last couple of hours.

McQueen doesn’t do much to establish motivation or backstory, instead he trusts his actors to delve inside their characters’ heads and bring all that emotion to the screen. Once again Michael Fassbender puts himself through the psychological mill for the director, his slaveowner Edwin Epps is a seething ball of contradictions, a man in thrall to ideology of slavery yet tormented by his attraction to Patsey.

Meanwhile, Chiwetel Ejiofor, who for years has been putting in great performances while patiently waiting for his big break, should finally get to reap the rewards after his showing here. Playing a man who gets stripped of all his humanity and dignity is a big ask, especially as he’s front and centre for pretty much the whole film, but Ejiofor invests Northup with real pathos, frustrated anger and terror whenever required.

Aside from the lashings and degradations, the very worst thing you take away from 12 Years is the everyday banality of slavery. The casual way a trader puts his wares on display like performing animals. Its unquestioning acceptance by nearly all the white folk - even Benedict Cumberbatch’s more educated soul still owns slaves by the housefull. The awfulness of it all hangs as heavy over everyone as the relentless Southern heat.


Not a film to enjoy then, perhaps not even one to watch again. But certainly one whose power renders concepts like awards rather irrelevant. And one that deserves to be seen. 

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