David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a whodunit that can’t stop tripping over its own borrowed shoes, a picture so prodigiously crammed with stars and incident you’d swear the “business plot” at the heart of the movie was actually some meta-industrial scheme to drive a stake through the heart of Hollywood ensemble films. Oh, how they come: Bale, Robbie, Washington, Rock, Taylor-Joy, De Niro, and (lest we forget, though the film nearly does) poor Taylor Swift, scattered about like confetti thrown before a funeral. Amsterdam is an impeccable study in grandeur curdling to the merely grandiose, a gathering of so many fine elements and name-brand trappings that one finds oneself—slack-jawed, faintly bored—wondering what on earth happened.
Russell, whose once-manic, percussive energy made even minor works a little dangerous, seems to have modelled his latest on some plodding algorithm that mashed together screwball, political thriller, Wes Andersonian whimsy, and a soupçon of Oscar-season “importance.” What we get is a film that never settles into a rhythm, never lets chaos meet chemistry—only a grinding procession, as if Russell felt simply moving the camera (Lubezki’s camera, no less, all silky balletic movement and candlelit shimmer) could conjure the heart he himself neglected to supply. Stand back and behold: there are dazzling frames everywhere, but no pulse animates them. You keep waiting for all this visual invention to matter, for Amsterdam to uncork some life. But it sits inert, as decorative as a Fabergé egg (and just about as emotionally nourishing).
Ah, but the premise! I’ll admit—the first forty minutes dangle the promise of a madcap clockwork: three postwar outcasts thrust into a plot of murder and conspiracy against the backdrop of a “hidden” American fascism. A medical man with a glass eye (Bale, so hunched and jittery you worry about his vertebrae), a beautiful nurse (Robbie, who could read a Maine weather report and still transfix you), and their lawyer friend (John David Washington, exuding both dignity and a sort of studied cool) chase the tendrils of a vast conspiracy. For a moment, it almost sings; you sense echoes of Huston, even a capful of Lubitsch — but Russell hasn’t learned that talky eccentricity needs something beneath, not just on the surface. Soon, the film splinters into a parade of incident and name-drops, a mystery with more false leads than actual suspense.
There are pleasures. The cutaways to the trio’s romantic idyll in Amsterdam allow Russell brief respite from overplotting. Here is where the movie pines for a more relaxed, openhearted self—lovers under the European sun, camerawork alive with the spirit of possibility. One suspects these sequences were dashed off exuberantly and then, faced with the “all-important” political plot, Russell pushed them aside like a guilty confection. The rest is bludgeoned by exposition, and—worse—by Russell’s belief that endless talk, twitchy digression, or the mere sight of Michael Shannon and Mike Myers goofing it up with glass eyes will stand in for actual wit or surprise.
It doesn’t help that the heart of the thing—what should be the humming chemistry between Robbie and Washington—lands with a faint, apologetic thud. They try, oh how they try: Robbie seems to be working in a more nimble, sparkly picture, and Washington does his level best to ground things, but together they seem marooned, each playing to a different era’s idea of “movie romance.” It’s Bale (bless him) who comes closest to giving the film a pulse, his every tic and wound revealing more texture than the script provides; but you can see the desperation breaching the surface. Even the supporting cast, radiant with promise, are whittled down to cogs: Anya Taylor-Joy, given only shrillness to play; Chris Rock, whose hard-bitten asides seem piped in from a different, possibly better satire. Shannon and Myers amuse, but what does it get us, aside from length?
The film’s greatest asset is Lubezki’s camera—which is to say, a cinematography reel with a story appended as an afterthought. Every shot glows lovingly, and you’re seduced for brief intervals into thinking this must add up to something more than a prettified slog. There’s an occasional zinger, a glimpse of verve when Robbie glides into frame, or when the film’s daydream interludes briefly hint at the fun Russell once could conjure. And yet, the narrative remains doggedly overstuffed and underfelt—a tangle of genres (is it a thriller? a comedy? a caprice?) that not only resist harmonizing but seem never to have met.
I might be accused of being cruel—Amsterdam isn’t unwatchable and it’s far from the debacle some would have you believe. It’s closer to the definition of a missed opportunity, the bitter knowledge that, with all this talent, “almost good” is the worst sin of all. I enjoyed myself enough, in the way you enjoy overdecorated cakes or political costume dramas with just enough fizz to distract from the nutritional deficiencies. But when the credits rolled, I was left with the same feeling as when the Committee of the Five are frogmarched offscreen: a bewildering sense of anticlimax, and a longing for a Hollywood that once knew what to do with all this razzle-dazzle.
It should have soared and instead, it sighs—painfully, perplexingly mediocre. But in 2022, maybe that too is a kind of social document.
