Amsterdam Review: David O. Russell’s Wacky Picaresque About Taking on Fascism

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam strikes a different chord than the series of popular films that he made throughout the early 2010s, though it wouldn’t appear to be the case at first glance. Nominally, the plot of the film, like that of American Hustle, is based on a true story, in this case the Business Plot of 1933, which sought to instigate a veteran-led coup against the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install retired General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in the mold of Mussolini and Hitler. Butler instead testified to Congress, though none of the wealthy businessmen who allegedly financed the coup were ever arrested.

The film takes this conspiracy as its spine: Butler’s fictionalized counterpart is General Gilbert Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro in one of his most considered and forceful recent performances), and the protagonists, in the process of trying to clear their names, stumble upon a group (whose moniker nods to the real-life Committee of Five). However, Amsterdam is first and foremost a surprisingly indelible portrait of an almost utopic friendship between three World War I participants: Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and the mysterious Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie).

Indeed, Amsterdam’s title is both a feint and the key to unlocking the film. The central narrative doesn’t take place outside of New England, but an extended flashback, which occurs while Berendsen and Woodman are fleeing from unknown assailants, transports the viewer to Europe at the tail end of the war. It’s a detail-rich telling of how the two men became friends in the army and met Voze, a nurse and bon vivant who draws them into her orbit.

This section, which takes up close to half an hour of the film, is in many ways the justification for Amsterdam, observing the simple pleasures of bohemian life in the Dutch capital, full as it is with dancing, excitement, and creativity. For one, Voze is an artist who, among works in many other media, creates small sculptures out of bullets and shrapnel salvaged from the bodies of soldiers—including those of the heavily scarred Berendsen and Woodman—which serves as a perfect metaphor for the kind of earnest subversion that Russell is working toward here.

All three characters revel in their time away from the States. For Berendsen, life in Amsterdam offers respite from his wife and her rich family of doctors, who openly disparage the half-Jewish man attempting to practice on Park Avenue. Woodman’s Blackness and his interracial relationship with Voze are also far more accepted in this cosmopolitan setting. As such, when Amsterdam inevitably leaves this almost otherworldly realm, never to return to it, it’s a wrenching loss for the characters, one which propels the rest of the film.

This isn’t to say that Amsterdam loses all semblance of its curious otherworldliness: New York, where Berendsen and Woodman work together, appears to be more evidently shot on a backlot than any period film in recent memory, and the slightly magical and artificial nature speaks well to the film’s strange qualities, especially as lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki in rich, bright tones.

The expected bevy of notable faces that Russell is able to still assemble helps provide much of that frisson: from the mere presences of Taylor Swift and Chris Rock; to the alien-ness of Anya Taylor-Joy, who pinballs off of Rami Malek, memorably playing up his urbane tics; to the main actors themselves, all of whom are wonderful, especially Washington and Robbie, who handle their characters’ tentative romance with superb sense of control. Stuffed with all sorts of devices—plot fake-outs, timeline shuffling, narration that’s relayed between the three main characters, informative chyrons—the film takes the form of a light picaresque. Throughout, it’s never really in question who the conspirators are, or whether the plot will actually succeed or not.

Indeed, that’s the point of Amsterdam, which recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time. Inequity is, of course, everywhere, and Russell almost risks bringing a too-modern perspective to his story, especially with the threats to democracy that are clearly intended to echo those of Donald Trump. But what lingers most readily are the little privileged moments: an intimate dance in a doctor’s office; the alluringly anachronistic art that Voze creates, including overlapping faces and the prominent use of a film camera as self-portraiture; and above all the use of song, a linking device that speaks to the history and harmony that this film manages to capture in its own earnest, even sentimental way.