American Hustle

You’ve seen smoother, more elegant con movies than “American Hustle,” but probably none quite so big-hearted or so rudely, insistently entertaining. As directed by that master of modern farce,David O. Russell, this sprawling fictionalized account of the notoriousAbscam case is less a dramatic FBI procedural than a human comedy writ large, ringing a series of screwball variations on themes of duplicity and paranoia against a dazzling ’70s backdrop. Deliriously funny and brilliantly acted by a cast of Russell returnees, the film is also overlong, undisciplined and absent the sort of emotional payoff that made “Silver Linings Playbook” so satisfying, which could affect its otherwise solid theatrical prospects. Still, this star-studded Sony prestige release is a near-continual pleasure to spend 135 minutes with, repeatedly hitting that comic sweet spot where corruption and buffoonery collide.

After putting his sharp but crowd-pleasing stamp on the boxing drama with 2010’s “The Fighter” and the romantic comedy with last year’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” Russell has taken appreciable risks with “American Hustle,” as he and co-screenwriter Eric Warren Singer (“The International”) chart a shaggy, meandering journey across a sweeping and colorful true-crime canvas. Notably, this is Russell’s first foray into period filmmaking (not counting his First Gulf War drama “Three Kings”), and he and his collaborators — particularly production designer Judy Becker, costume designer Michael Wilkinson, composer Danny Elfman and above all music supervisor Susan Jacobs — have hurled themselves into their mid-’70s New Jersey milieu with a palpable delight in the garish excesses of the era.

Loud fashions and outsized shades abound from the first scene, in which paunchy, middle-aged Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) fusses with an elaborate hairpiece — a perfect intro to a movie about the joy and, for these professional tricksters, the necessity of donning false identities. The screenwriters may have changed their characters’ names to protect the not-so-innocent (“Some of this actually happened,” notes an opening title card), but knowing viewers will recognize Irving as a stand-in for Mel Weinberg, a Long Island scam artist who joined forces with the FBI to avoid prison time. Out of that unlikely partnership emerged Abscam, an audacious sting operation that pushed federal undercover work to controversial new levels of manipulation and entrapment, resulting in the bribery convictions for seven congressmen and various other government officials in 1981.

Given Russell’s instinctive affection for loudmouths, outcasts and head cases, it’s neither a surprise nor a stretch for him to identify with Irving, a relatively honorable small-time hustler and a sort of dilettante among frauds: He owns a legit dry-cleaning business but moonlights as an art forger and loan shark, bilking desperate applicants out of a few thousand dollars at a time. But things change when he falls hard for smart, beautiful redhead Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), an unlikely kindred spirit who, adopting the seductive, worldly alias of a British businesswoman named Lady Edith, swiftly moves Irving’s scam into the big leagues.

Irving is married (more on that later), but he and Sydney/Edith make such splendid, sexy partners in crime that they soon draw the attention of ambitious FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper, rocking a dark brown perm), who catches them mid-fraud and strongarms them into working undercover for the bureau. It’s typical of the film’s topsy-turvy moral universe that Richie comes across as no less shady, demented or reckless than his reluctant informants, throwing caution to the wind — and riling his straight-laced boss (a wonderfully surly Louis C.K.) — as he strives to root out corruption in high places, even if it means planting the means and opportunity himself. Soon Richie’s using Irving to target Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the popular mayor of Camden, N.J., by dangling a $2 million foreign investment that will supposedly help rebuild Atlantic City’s casino-resort scene.