American Hustle: Retro Film About the Abscam Scandal and the Disco Era

In the late 70s six U.S. Congressional House Representatives  and a United States Senator were caught on camera taking bribes from FBI agents who were posing as wealthy Arab sheiks. The elaborate sting in which the disgraced Congressmen became ensnared was code named Abscam, a contraction of Arab Scam.
American Hustle is a fictionalized account of that embarrassing chapter in the nation’s history. Set in New York and New Jersey in the Disco Music era, the film was written and directed by David O. Russell, who has been blessed with the golden touch in Hollywood in recent years.
His earlier movie Silver Linings Playbook received eight Academy Award nominations, including 2013’s Best Actress Oscar for Jennifer Lawrence. That picture arrived close on the heels of The Fighter, which had earned seven Oscar nominations which included trophies for both Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in acting categories.
In this film, Russell has produced another engaging and entertaining production featuring a plethora of powerful performances. The movie co-stars Christian Bale as con artist Irving Rosenfeld and Amy Adams as his mischievous British mistress, Sydney. They play a pair of small-time crooks who help the Feds catch bigger fish in exchange for avoiding prosecution.
Reluctantly, they cooperate with Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), a flamboyant and ambitious FBI agent who draws attention to himself by curling his straight hair and wearing trendy clothes. Sydney flirts with the fashionable G-man, feeling little loyalty towards her partner Irving, who’s dragging his feet about filing for a divorce from his wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence).
But when Rosalyn realizes that her husband has been cheating, she decides to get even by seducing a shady character (Jack Huston) who, unbeknownst to her, is under government surveillance. Generating great hilarity, these tawdry love triangles escalate into attention-grabbing distractions that threaten to ruin the FBI’s covert operation.
Meanwhile, the naive Mayor of Camden (Jeremy Renner) is being manipulated by Irving to introduce a notorious mob boss (Robert De Niro), as well as the aforementioned corrupt politicians, to Sheik Abdullah (Michael Pena). However, the FBI looks more like the Keystone Cops when the agent trying to pass as an Arab can’t even speak his native language.
Who knows whether any of these ridiculous incidents shown here ever actually transpired? But you don’t really worry about the truth when the laughs just keep coming and the witty repartee remains so inspired.
Excellent (****). Rated R for sexuality, pervasive profanity, and brief violence. Running time: 138 minutes. Distributor: Sony Pictures.