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‘Amsterdam’ Review: A Madcap Mystery With Many Whirring Parts

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington lead a crowded cast of zanies in David O. Russell’s latest screwball outing.

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By Manohla Dargis

For much of “Amsterdam,” the latest David O. Russell Experience, the movie enjoyably zigs and zags, rushing here and there, though sometimes also just spinning in place. It’s a handsome period romp, a 1930s screwball pastiche filled with mugging performers who charm and seduce as they run around chasing down a mystery, playing detective, tripping over their feet and navigating an international conspiracy that is best enjoyed if you don’t pay it too much attention — which seems to be the approach that Russell himself has taken.

Like all of Russell’s movies, this one is by turns loosey-goosey and high strung. At its center are three American comrades who met in Europe during World War I, formed a tight friendship and — as you see in an extended flashback — lived for a while in Amsterdam, where they recovered (more or sometimes less) from the war and rhapsodically played bohemians until reality called them back home. A dozen or so years and much personal drama later, it’s 1933, and the three have settled into their respective lives. And then Taylor Swift pops up in a fetching hat and red-alarm lipstick, sending everyone and everything scrambling.

The pieces click into place with Burt (Christian Bale), a down-and-out doctor with dubious habits who announces that he lost an eye in France. That’s also where he met a nurse, Valerie (Margot Robbie), and found his best friend, Harold (John David Washington), now a lawyer with a healthy practice and endless patience. Soon, the men are roped into an intrigue via Swift’s Liz, one of those mysterious dames who always stir up trouble. Her father has died under suspicious circumstances, and she’s enlisted Harold for help, which is why Burt soon performs an autopsy alongside Zoe Saldana’s Irma, another Florence Nightingale.

Bale also starred in Russell’s 2013 neoscrewball “ American Hustle ,” a dizzily funny comedy set mostly in the 1970s about a quartet of scammers. For that film, Bale’s good looks were obscured by a furry beard, a monumental gut and a doleful comb-over; for his role here, the actor has slimmed down and effectively come out of hiding, so you can see the planes shifting under his narrow, expressive face. Burt has a small web of scars under one eye and a nest of hair that at times rises to Barton Fink-esque tumescence, and while he slouches and hunches a lot, it’s the face that draws you in with its insistent brow-furrowing, head-bobbing and jaw-dropping.

It’s a suitably showy performance (with an accent that’s pure old-studio cabby) for a brash movie with many whirring parts. If you spend a lot of time scanning Bale’s face, noting how it slackens and tightens, it’s partly because the movie keeps inviting you to do so. It’s an engaging landscape, certainly, and you can feel Russell’s affection for the character (and actor) every time the camera cozies up to him. There’s feeling in Burt’s ravaged countenance, sadness and bewilderment and dark shadows, too. He has been wounded both in battle and in life, you are regularly reminded, even as the movie barrels deeper into nonsense.

“Amsterdam” is a funny movie, though more curious than laugh-laced, despite some energetic slapstick and soft-landing jokes. The humor can feel strained and overly worked to no particular end, as when Mike Myers and Michael Shannon pop up as a pair of tag-teaming spies. Like Robert De Niro’s upstanding, big-daddy general, who enters late to help tie up the messy loose ends, the spies belong to the least satisfying part of the movie, the political intrigue that ensnares Burt, Harold and Valerie. A lot of this really happened, the movie announces early, yet while that’s eye-poppingly true it tends to feel irrelevant.

That truth claim reads almost identically to the one that introduces “American Hustle,” which was inspired by the Abscam scandal, a bizarre episode dating back to 1978 involving corrupt American politicians, fake Arab sheikhs and a con man enlisted by the F.B.I. The historical chapter that “Amsterdam” borrows from isn’t, oddly enough, as well known, but is profoundly more harrowing because it involves a 1930s fascist plot by wealthy businessmen to take over the United States. Yet if Russell was drawn to this material because of the more recent, terrifying threats to American democracy, neither his heart nor his head ever feel genuinely in it.

What fires up Russell in “Amsterdam” and brings out his best is everything involving love and camaraderie, particularly when Burt, Harold and Valerie were young and aglow with possibility. In the unhurried flashback that traces their friendship, Russell evades the horrors of war to instead focus on the characters’ joyfulness, the infectious pleasure that they take in one another’s company and the fast-deepening romance between Harold and Valerie, which both lights them up and appreciably warms the movie. Bathed in soft, caramel tones and at times photographed in radiant close-up, Robbie and Washington have rarely looked more beautiful or conveyed as much visceral sensuality as they do here — they’re an electric duet.

Once the action returns to 1933, alas, the movie sags despite the persistent frenetic action. Characters continue entering and exiting as the low-angled camera zips along. (The cast also includes Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock and a sharp, amusingly clenched Andrea Riseborough.) A gun is fired, jaws socked, someone screams. Throughout, Russell keeps going and moving, moving and going, but the momentum never builds the way it should, and the big reveal lands flat partly because he never seems taken with the history he’s latched onto or comfortable with its heaviness. Or perhaps it’s the contemporary parallels that make him uneasy and why, again and again, he returns to the faces and filigree that he gets just right.

Amsterdam Rated R for autopsy, murder, the usual. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Review: David O. Russell goes to war in ‘Amsterdam,’ but this historical farce Nether comes together

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The title of “Amsterdam,” the typically busy and discombulating new movie written and directed by David O. Russell, refers to the events of a memorable Dutch idyll in 1918, toward the end of the First World War. For two wounded American servicemen, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and a nurse, Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), overseeing their recovery, the city of Amsterdam becomes a temporary refuge and playground. The French New Wave may still be decades away, but there’s an invigorating dash of Truffaut (but really, true-friend) energy to these proceedings. For a few tender, spirited moments you might be reminded of “Jules and Jim” or perhaps Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” even when Burt’s shot-up face is wrapped in bandages or when Valerie, an aspiring Dadaist, is molding sculptures from the bloody bullets and shrapnel she’s extracted from her patients’ wounds.

Russell himself pushed the carnage of war to aesthetic extremes in 1999’s “Three Kings,” when he turned his camera into an X-ray and showed us — in squirm-inducing, viscera-rupturing detail — what a bullet can do to the human body. While it features its own lovingly detailed glimpses of torn flesh and lingering scars, “Amsterdam” seems rather less inclined to get too deep inside its characters, physically or otherwise. Like Russell’s splendid ’70s caper, “American Hustle” (2013), the movie is a roving piece of period whimsy and a madcap history lesson, a parade of concealed motives and cunning switcheroos loosely inspired — and just barely held together — by real-world events. (It also shares with that movie a few gifted Russell regulars, including production designer Judy Becker and editor Jay Cassidy.)

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But unlike “Hustle,” “Amsterdam” only fitfully locates the moment-to-moment comic verve — or the bittersweet sense of longing — that would give these characters and their farcical shenanigans the deeper human resonance it’s clearly aiming for. What the movie boasts instead is a lot of surface-level freneticism, done in a now-ritualistic Russell mode of controlled chaos that more often than not turns creakily mechanical. There’s a flashback-juggling structure, a large ensemble cast that seems to multiply by the minute and a lot of drunk and disorderly camerawork (vaguely recognizable as that of the gifted Emmanuel Lubezki) that dances its way through scene after scene of rambunctiously choreographed action.

That action kicks off in New York in 1933; the interwar years are slowly rumbling to a close, and whispers of unrest can be heard beneath the bustling city noise and the notes of Daniel Pemberton’s airily charming score. Joining forces not for the first time, Burt, a doctor, and Harold, an attorney, are quietly brought in to investigate the sudden demise of an Army general, Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who commanded their regiment during World War I. Taylor Swift pops up for a suitably swift cameo as Meekins’ daughter, Liz, hanging around just long enough to voice her teary-eyed suspicions of foul play before leaving the dogged Burt and Harold to figure out what’s going on.

So begins a shaggily plotted whodunit that the movie approaches with a sometimes charming, sometimes tiresome and faintly Raymond Chandler-esque reluctance to solve. Unsurprisingly, Russell crams in as many odd jolts and detours as possible, among them an impromptu autopsy (made bearable by Zoe Saldaña as a nurse who’s stolen Burt’s heart), a few violent ambushes and one or two relaxing conversations on the subject of birdwatching. (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers pop up as charming amateur ornithologists, though as with almost everyone here, there’s a bit more to their identities than meets the eye.) Along the way, Russell slides in that crucial 1918 flashback: We see Burt, who’s part Jewish, being shipped off to war by his status-conscious wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), and her relatives, whose antisemitism is as plain as their Park Avenue address. Burt becomes a medic with a unit modeled on the famous 369th Infantry Regiment, tending mostly to Black soldiers, like Harold, shunned by their white fellow servicemen.

For all the scurrying randomness of incident in “Amsterdam,” there’s nothing accidental about the lifelong friendship that develops between Burt and Harold, both of whom bleed in service of a racist country that despises them. (Burt even loses an eye and will spend much of the story popping a glass one in and out of its socket — an overdone bit that nonetheless packs some metaphorical punch in a movie about not always trusting what you see.) The two men are sent to hospital in Paris, where they meet the captivating Valerie, and then it’s off to those blissful days of recovery and revelry in Amsterdam. It’s here that the movie briefly spreads its wings, animated by the capriciousness of the central performances — Robbie’s mercurial wit, Washington’s seductive cool, Bale’s big heart and frizzy hair — and by a freewheeling sense of la vie bohème possibility. For a few moments, it feels as if the movie really could go anywhere.

But that feeling can’t last. Burt returns to awful Beatrice in New York, the mutually smitten Harold and Valerie go their separate ways, Amsterdam becomes a distant memory and “Amsterdam” itself comes crashing to earth. Returning to 1933, Russell does try to keep spirits aloft and the narrative engine going, though more often than not it stalls out. Burt and Harold’s investigation turns up still more supporting players, including Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy as a wealthy, gabby married couple and Matthias Schoenaerts and a memorably testy Alessandra Nivola as two nosy police officers. (I’m still trying to parse Chris Rock’s narrative function, or at least figure out why the actor — reportedly so funny on the set that Bale had to avoid him to stay in character — feels so wasted here.) Amid these and other complications, our heroes will expose the roots of a sinister conspiracy, hatched by industrialists eager to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and hasten the rise of fascism across and beyond Europe.

“A lot of this really happened,” the script declares at the outset, deploying the kind of cheeky disclaimer language (similarly used in “American Hustle”) that allows a movie to pat itself on the back for its partial accuracy and its bold departures from the historical record. The story does jolt to life — and acquire a real center of moral gravity — once Robert De Niro shows up as the distinguished Gen. Gil Dillenbeck, a fictionalized stand-in for Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who ultimately brought the so-called Business Plot to public light. Still, in Russell’s topsy-turvy cosmos, historical accuracy is but one measure of truthfulness: If liberal despair has long been his guiding thematic light (especially in his delirious 2004 farce, “I Heart Huckabees” ), then here it’s the many recent and ongoing threats to global democracy that have him none too subtly wringing his hands.

That gives “Amsterdam” a certain currency in a world still reeling from the presidency of Donald Trump and the attendant rise of far-right politicians all over the globe. But there’s a nagging half-heartedness to these bids for topicality, and something less than conviction in the movie’s semisweet encouragement of optimism in the face of mounting danger. This isn’t the first (or probably the last) Russell entertainment to pull its characters back from the brink of unfathomable chaos, or to encourage its characters and its audience to give peace, love and understanding a chance. But if the memory of Amsterdam hovers over Burt, Harold and Valerie like a beacon from happier, more innocent times, then “Amsterdam” itself is another bittersweet callback, a reminder — and, only fitfully, a reclamation — of a filmmaker’s lost vitality.

‘Amsterdam’

Rating: R, for brief violence and bloody images Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 7 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished, frantic and meandering, "Amsterdam" is one big, star-studded, hot mess of a movie.

Christian Bale , Margot Robbie , John David Washington , Robert De Niro , Anya Taylor-Joy , Rami Malek , Chris Rock , Michael Shannon , Zoe Saldana , Alessandro Nivola and many more major names: How can you amass this cast and go so wrong? Simply putting them in a room and watching them chit-chat for two-plus hours—or say nothing at all, for that matter—would have been infinitely more interesting. Alas, David O. Russell has concocted all manner of adventures and detours, wacky hijinks, and elaborate asides to occupy his actors, none of which is nearly as clever or charming as he seems to think.

Over and over again, I asked myself as I was watching "Amsterdam": What is this movie about? Where are we going with this? I'd have to stop and find my bearings: What exactly is happening now? And not in a thrilling, stimulating way, as in " Memento ," for example, or " Cats ." It's all a dizzying piffle—until it stops dead in its tracks and forces several of its stars to make lengthy speeches elucidating the points Russell himself did not make over the previous two rambling hours. The grand finale gives us some interminable, treacly narration, explaining the importance of love and kindness over the film's images of bohemian rhapsody we'd just seen not too long ago. 

As is the case in so many of the writer/director's other movies, we have the sensation as we're watching that anything could happen at any moment. He typically employs such verve in his camerawork and takes such ambitious tonal swings that you wonder in amazement how he manages to keep it all cohesive and intact. This time, he doesn't. Because "Amsterdam" lacks the compelling visual language of " Three Kings " or " American Hustle ," for instance, and it lacks characters with heart-on-their-sleeve humanity like he shows us in " The Fighter " or " Silver Linings Playbook ." Despite the prodigious talent on display here, not a single figure on screen feels like a real person. Each is a collection of idiosyncrasies, some more intriguing than others.

To put it in the simplest terms possible, Bale and Washington play longtime best friends suspected of a murder they didn't commit. While trying to uncover the truth about what's going on, they stumble upon an even larger and more sinister plot. Russell's script jumps around in time from 1933 New York to 1918 Amsterdam and back again, but he's using this time frame—and the fascist ideologies that rose to prominence then—to make a statement about what's been going on the past several years in right-wing American politics. Ultimately, he hammers us over the head with this point. But first, whimsy.

Bale's Burt Berendsen is a folksy doctor with a glass eye that keeps falling out. He's hooked on his own homemade pain meds, which cause him to collapse to the ground—which also causes his eye to fall out. Bale is doing intense shtick throughout; he is committed to the bit. Washington's Harold Woodman served with him in the same racially mixed Army battalion in France during WWI; he's now an attorney, and the more levelheaded of the two. When their beloved general dies suspiciously, his daughter (a distractingly stiff Taylor Swift ) asks them to investigate.

But soon, they're on the run, inspiring a flashback to how they met in the first place. This is actually the most entertaining part of the film. Russell luxuriates in the duo's wistful memories of their post-war years in Amsterdam with Robbie's Valerie Voze, the nurse who cared for them when they were injured and quickly became their co-conspirator in all kinds of boozy escapades. The celebrated cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki , a multiple Oscar winner for his work with Alfonso Cuaron (" Gravity ") and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (" Birdman ," " The Revenant "), eases up on the sepia tones that often feel so smothering in an effort to capture a feeling of nostalgia. There's real life and joy to these sequences in Amsterdam that's missing elsewhere. Robbie, a brunette for a change, looks impossibly luminous—but her character is also a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a secretly wealthy heiress who turns bullet shrapnel into art. It's a heavy-handed metaphor for the healing presence she provides in Burt and Harold's lives.

That's what's so frustrating about "Amsterdam": It'll offer a scene or an interaction or a performance here or there that's legitimately entertaining and maybe comes close to hitting the mark Russell is trying to hit. Several duos and subplots along the way might have made for a more interesting movie than the one we got: Malek and Taylor-Joy as Valerie's snobby, striving brother and sister-in-law, for example, are a bizarre hoot. (And here's a great place to stop and mention the spectacular costume design, the work of J.R. Hawbaker and the legendary Albert Wolsky . The period detail is varied and vivid, but the dresses Taylor-Joy wears, all in bold shades of red, are especially inspired.) Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts as mismatched cops who can't stand each other can be amusing, and it seems like they're really trying to infuse their characters with traits and motivations beyond what's on the page. Shannon and Mike Myers as a pair of spies are good for a goofy laugh or two, nothing more.

But despite these sporadic moments of enjoyment, "Amsterdam" is ultimately so convoluted and tedious that it obliterates such glimmers of goodwill. It's so weighed down by its overlong running time and self-indulgent sense of importance that its core message about the simple need for human decency feels like a cynical afterthought. And whispering the word "Amsterdam" throughout, as several of the characters do, doesn't even begin to cast the magic spell it seeks to conjure.

Now playing in theaters. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Christian Bale as Burt Berendsen
• John David Washington as Harold Woodman
• Margot Robbie as Valerie Voze
• Robert De Niro as General Gil Dillenbeck
• Anya Taylor-Joy as Libby Voze
• Rami Malek as Tom Voze
• Chris Rock as Milton King
• Zoe Saldaña as Irma St. Clair
• Mike Myers as Paul Canterbury
• Michael Shannon as Henry Norcross
• Timothy Olyphant as Taron Milfax
• Andrea Riseborough as Beatrice Vandenheuvel
• Taylor Swift as Liz Meekins
• Matthias Schoenaerts as Detective Lem Getweiler
• Alessandro Nivola as Detective Hiltz
• Ed Begley Jr. as General Bill Meekins
• Daniel Pemberton
• David O. Russell

Cinematographer

• Emmanuel Lubezki
• Jay Cassidy

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The Persuasive Potency of “Decision to Leave”

You’re a cop, on a rooftop, facing a guy with a knife. You have no weapon, so what to do? You reach into your pocket and pluck out a glove, made of fine chain mail, as was once used to cowl the heads and necks of medieval knights. Pulling on the glove, you grab—without fear of injury—the blade that your enemy thrusts at you, make a fist of your free hand, and punch his lights out. A nice move, and just one of the practical lessons to be drawn from “Decision to Leave,” the latest film from Park Chan-wook . Other tips: when interviewing a suspect at a police station, order in two boxes of premium sushi to feed the friendly mood. Also, as one of the characters says, “Killing is like smoking. Only the first time is hard.” Sensible advice, though I need to know how easy it is to quit killing. Do you wear a patch? Or chew anti-homicidal gum?

The begloved cop is Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), who, during the week, lives in the Korean city of Busan. On weekends, he goes home to his wife, Jeong-Ahn (Lee Jung-hyun), who works at a nuclear power plant in another town. Hae-joon is bright, polite, punctilious, fit (outpacing his young deputy during a chase on foot), skilled at cooking, and, you might think, difficult to fool. If only he could sleep. One day, Hae-joon is called to inspect a dead body, at the foot of a towering rock, and we are treated to a demonstration of the visual wit—frequently grand, yet etched with a cunning forensic precision—in which Park and his director of photography, Kim Ji-yong, like to deal. From a distance, we spot two tiny figures being hauled to the top of the rock, on an electric pulley; in closeup, we see the cracked face of a Rolex, its hands now motionless, and ants slaving over an eyeball. Something about this case is starting to crawl.

The widow of the fallen man, who was an experienced climber, is Seo-rae (Tang Wei), and she is far from prostrate with grief. “I worry when he does not come back from a mountain, thinking he might die at last.” At last? Is she relieved  ? To be fair, we shouldn’t read too much into her phrasing, because, as she says, “I’m Chinese, my Korean is insufficient.” Like Park’s previous film, “The Handmaiden” (2016), “Decision to Leave” is rich in linguistic slippage. At one point, on a snowy night, Seo-rae speaks Chinese into her phone, which, in turn, thanks to the dangerous miracle of Google Translate, talks in Korean to Hae-joon. He is standing in front of her, adrift in the blizzard of words.

Gadgetry is everywhere in the new film (how lonely Hae-joon looks, dictating his thoughts into the phone on his wrist), yet it’s only one cog in the ticking machinery of Park’s plot. The whole thing is engineered, we realize, to tell a tale of obsessive love. Thus, as Hae-joon, sitting in his car with binoculars, observes Seo-rae at work—she is a caregiver, who believes that “living old people come before dead husbands”—he magically appears in the room beside her, like Kirk beaming up next to Mr. Spock. The imagery answers to Hae-joon’s desire, granting him a proximity to Seo-rae that life, even the life of a prying detective, cannot supply. All the while, of course, he is supposed to be establishing whether or not she pushed her husband off that rock. The quest grows more urgent in the movie’s second half, as Hae-joon, “completely shattered,” gives up the job in Busan and goes home. You really think the case is closed? Open wide.

One way to size up this singular film is to enumerate all that it lacks. Of the nastiness that spattered Park’s early works there is no sign; any violence here is brisk and fleeting. As for the glistening carnality of “The Handmaiden,” forget it; Hae-joon does have sex with his wife, on the red-hot principle that, as she says, “new research suggests it’s good for cognitive ability,” but his rapport with Seo-rae is hilariously chaste. See her fumble through his raincoat and find a tube of lip gloss! Wait two hours for a kiss! Fans of Tang Wei, who recall what she brought to the erotic candor of Ang Lee’s “ Lust, Caution ” (2007), will note the demureness with which, as Seo-rae, she raises her skirt to display a mark on her thigh. Compare Lauren Bacall, in “The Big Sleep” (1946), scratching the itch on her knee.

Despite such restraint, or because of it, “Decision to Leave” bears the persuasive potency of true romance. It should be called “Love, Recklessness.” Having been twisted into bewildered bits by the convolutions of Park’s narrative, I was astonished, toward the end, to find it brushing against the tragic. The entire movie has swarmed, often farcically, with aquatic details; poor Hae-joon even had his finger bitten by a turtle. Now, however, he staggers alone along a beach. The sun, on the horizon, is ready to call it a day. Amid the crash of breakers, you can just about hear him crying out for Seo-rae. Whether she turns up, and what waves of crime have or have not swept her to this shore, I leave you to discover.

In another life, the director of “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012), David O. Russell , would have made disaster flicks in the nineteen-seventies. The purpose of that noble genre was to stuff as many stars as possible, exquisitely mismatched, into a confined space; on board the deadly-virus-bearing train in “The Cassandra Crossing” (1976), for example, were Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Richard Harris, and Martin Sheen, plus an unusual pairing of Ingrid Thulin, so often the purveyor of agony for Ingmar Bergman, and O. J. Simpson. Too much? Not by the standard of “Amsterdam,” Russell’s new film, which features Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Zoe Saldaña, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, and—hold the phone—Taylor Swift. If ever a cast cried out for a bug on a train, or a skyscraper on fire, it’s this one.

Bale plays Burt Berendsen, who is badly hurt in the First World War, as is his pal, Harold Woodman (Washington). In Belgium, their wounds are tended by a nurse named Valerie (Robbie); her surname shifts as we go along, and is best kept under wraps. Initially in hospital and then, once the conflict is over, in the gilded leisure of Amsterdam, the three of them form an unbreakable pact of friendship. Before long, needless to say, it is broken. Burt, sporting a glass eye, returns to New York, to the icy disdain of his wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), and to his career as a doctor, much of it spent relieving the pain of other ex-combatants. Harold, too, finds himself in the city, practicing as an attorney. But where, pray, did Valerie go? And what will connoisseurs of early-twentieth-century romantic threesomes learn from “Amsterdam” that they don’t already get from “Jules et Jim” (1962)?

Russell’s plot quickens, thickens, and stalls. Burt, at the autopsy of his old military commander, meets a fellow-medic, Irma (Saldaña), who views the death as suspicious. The trail leads to a mansion, home to the flighty but fearsome Libby Voze (Taylor-Joy) and her husband, Tom (Malek), who seems to be as pliably soft as his sweater. Appearances, though, are calculated to deceive, and Burt and Harold soon happen upon a hideous—yet unmistakably daft—conspiracy to inject Fascism into the American bloodstream. The fate of such an evil scheme depends on a speech, to be delivered to veterans by a retired general (De Niro). The latter stages of the film are chewed up, interminably, by the prelude to this major event.

“Amsterdam” is, or is meant to be, a caper: an easygoing endeavor, you might think. But capering is as tricky on the silver screen as it is on the dance floor, and the tone of the tale keeps losing its footing. To and fro we trip across the years. A couple of ornithologists-cum-spies (Shannon and Myers) pop up in postwar Europe, and again, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, in the U.S.A. The screams of bloody soldiers, on stretchers, are overlaid by a merry musical score. Burt describes his duties as “fixing faces, raising spirits, singing songs,” and the strain of that mingling tells on Bale, whose performance is unhappily redolent of late-period Al Pacino, complete with hiccupping speech patterns and loony stares. What we see in Bale is a tremendously serious actor proffering a considered essay in comedy—which is not, alas, the same as being a funny guy.

Only in its milder moments, when Russell is not trying too hard to be madcap, or to badger us with dark political portents, does “Amsterdam” stir and convince. An early conversation at the hospital, between Harold and Valerie, isn’t exactly a heart-to-heart, yet we do feel, by the end of it, that we have witnessed two people falling—calmly, not crazily—in love. She shows him scraps of art that she has made, from spent bullets; her later efforts include collages, photographs, wire sculptures, and X-rays, many of them created for the movie by the British artist Linder Sterling, and riffing beautifully, I’d say, on the work of Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray. In short, you should go to Russell’s film, but not for fun. Go for the art. ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified the character who is married to Hae-joon and the actress who plays her.

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Amsterdam Should Feel Intoxicating, But It’s Exhausting

How we deal with our brokenness is the idea not so secretly at the center of most of David O. Russell’s films. In Amsterdam , he’s conjured up perhaps his most overt treatment of the subject: It opens with images of physical wounds and scars, and as the film proceeds, we realize how spiritually broken the characters are as well. Our ostensible hero is Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), a doctor who specializes in “fixing up banged-up guys like myself” — veterans of the First World War who struggle with missing limbs and faces, “all injuries the world was happy to forget.” The year is 1933, and a new war is on the horizon, but Burt will always be defined by the last one, whose marks he carries on multiple levels: He lost his eye and part of his cheek, wears a back brace, and now is constantly on the lookout for the latest advances in mind-altering medicine to get him through the day.

Many wounds loom over Amsterdam , but the film moves with the devil-may-care verve of a comic romp. Burt and his lawyer friend Harold Woodman (John David Washington) get yanked into a bizarre mystery involving the death of a senator and beloved ex-general, which the man’s daughter (Taylor Swift) suspects to be murder. Pulled into the shenanigans is gorgeous artist Valerie (Margot Robbie), whom Burt and Harold last saw in Amsterdam many years ago: In an extended flashback, we see the blissfully hedonistic idyll the three of them lived in the years after the war when Harold and Valerie were madly in love, Valerie was making beautiful shrapnel-art, and Burt had not yet returned to New York to resume his toxic marriage to the wealthy Beatrice Vandenheuvel (Andrea Riseborough). A yearning to return to the Eden of Amsterdam animates these characters.

It’d be easy to get bogged down with the story of Amsterdam , which manages to be heavily adorned with incident and character but not particularly elaborate, despite a couple of twists at the end. At its heart, the film wants to be a hangout movie. Russell loves to fill his casts with big names — this one includes Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, and Rami Malek, among many others — not because he needs them to get the movies financed (though I’m sure it helps) but because he clearly loves to give actors space to strut. And strut they do. Bale’s commedia dell’arte antics contrast nicely with Washington’s straight-man stylings, while Robbie seems to be in a constant state of transformation, from French nurse to American bohemian to New York socialite, perhaps embodying the existential restlessness of the period between the wars. Michael Shannon and Mike Myers show up as a couple of spies. Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts show up as a couple of cops. I could happily watch entire movies about some of these side characters.

Russell’s style is one I would call aggressive empathy : He insists on reminding us that everybody lives their own life, but his films aren’t patient or generous in the ways we associate with empathy. If Jean Renoir’s famous dictum that “everyone has their reasons” was, in that director’s eyes, a gentle but melancholy truth about the world, Russell seems to regard that same reality with alternating shockwaves of wonder and horror. His movies are both indulgent celebrations of and anxious nightmares about the fact that other people exist.

Amsterdam is filled with slapstick, wordplay, proto-musical numbers, and moments of broad, actorly abandon — so much so that, despite the fact that the story often feels like it’s on a predictable path, you never know if the movie itself will just stop and go in a completely different direction. Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.

And Russell has difficulty tying everything up. For all its shaggy-dog qualities — and this should come as no surprise given the setting, the characters, and the premise — Amsterdam ’s tale is leading to something profound. It has big, timely points to make about spiritual injury, the specter of war, longing for lost utopias, and the rise of fascism. By the time the picture starts to lock back into its story, however, you might realize that it has become a totally different movie. A more serious movie but not necessarily a better one. Still, at least we had Amsterdam.

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Amsterdam film review — history goes haywire in a starry screwball lark

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“A lot of this really happened.” And with that non-specific preface, so begins Amsterdam , the zany new comedy or thereabouts from director David O Russell ( American Hustle , Silver Linings Playbook ). The movie is a fiction with a nugget of fact attached, a dark news story from 1933 wrapped inside a screwball lark. Or maybe vice versa. Either way, talk of history abounds: being on the right side of it, getting stuck repeating it, everyone having their own.

The last part is certainly true of the three-sided friendship at the centre of the story. Pals one and two are a luminous free spirit ( Margot Robbie ) and a self-possessed lawyer (John David Washington). The third is Burt Berendsen (outsize creation of Christian Bale ), a doctor with a ripe Noo Yoik accent and specialism in cosmetic surgery. Pause your preconceptions. His work verges on the saintly, fixing the faces of penniless first world war veterans. He only survived the conflict himself with a glass eye and a fondness for the taste of his own medicine. Another thing about history: it’s hard to escape.

All this is conveyed in the breathless manner of a child running in from an eventful playground. The plot is thick from the get-go, a woozy whodunnit. With 1930s Manhattan the backdrop, old soldiers Bale and Washington are drawn into a murder mystery. The finger of suspicion points straight at them. An early casting coup involves Taylor Swift .

Believe me, I’m summarising. Within 10 minutes, Bale’s artificial eye has popped out a thousand times, or at least it feels like it, a slapstick touch the movie never tires of. It takes a war for the mood to settle down. In an extended flashback to 1918, we meet the male leads again as wounded American troops under the care of Robbie’s character, a French nurse who turns out not to be French at all, and more often a Dadaist artist. A triangular bond develops — one side romantic, the other two platonic — a union the movie never quite makes plausible. Still, after the armistice, all three find a gently decadent home in Amsterdam. If the Dutch capital is under-seen, put it down to being mostly symbolic: the site of precious, fleeting good times.

Chaos reigns again when the movie fast-forwards back to New York. Scenes sprawl, the cast balloons. Make room for Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy as a society power couple; Chris Rock’s sardonic veteran; Andrea Riseborough playing Burt’s estranged wife; Robert De Niro in the guise of military hero. Good lord, is that really Mike Myers? “OK! Everything all at once!” Bale exclaims. Indeed.

Between the massed ensemble, a thematic blizzard too: bittersweet asides on war, class, race, religion, fragile human goodness. But the cast drown many of them out, a collective shagpile of overexcitement. The film has its own back-story, Russell and the headliners honing the characters through years of development. Finally let loose, the actors have such a blast you feel like you’re looking in at a party from outside in a drizzly garden. As a professional voyeur, I often had fun regardless. But I’ll be honest: at a particularly high-pitched moment, the friend I saw the movie with briefly fell asleep.

Real, sobering history crashes back into the third act. Despite the title, Amsterdam proves to be about one place only: America. It makes for yet another mixed message in a movie filled with them, wilfully silly then grandly portentous. In the end, you can only paraphrase the beginning. Whatever just happened, the film is a lot.

In cinemas from October 8

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Amsterdam review: A great film is fighting to get out

David o russell’s first film since ‘joy’ is stylish and full of charming performances, but feels longer than a three-day mini-break, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

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Dir: David O Russell. Starring: Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie, Robert de Niro, Rami Malek. Cert 15, 134 minutes

“A lot of this really happened” goes the title card for David O Russell ’s starry, stylish, caper-ish Amsterdam . Emphasis on “a lot”. In its relentless, pinballing plot, there’s a fascist coup, an unsolved murder, an entire world war, shady figures aplenty, many cunning plans, and… a love story. It runs to just over two hours, but I felt like I’d been watching it for three days. Which, coincidentally, is the same duration as my most recent – and far less eventful – trip to actual Amsterdam.

This is Russell’s first film since the intriguing mob boss biopic Joy in 2015. In those seven years, he seems to have had a lot of ideas and put them all of them into one film. Largely set in New York in the 1930s, his script hinges on a curious true story, in which a cabal of businessmen attempted to overthrow Franklin D Roosevelt and replace him with a popular war veteran who they could puppeteer for their own malevolent ends. This, though, ends up feeling like the Any Other Business section of a film you could describe as a comedy. Or a thriller. Or a mystery. Or a historical drama. It is, as I say, A Lot.

In fact, it functions best as a buddy movie. Christian Bale , John David Washington and Margot Robbie form our plucky trio. Bale is the zany doctor Burt Berendsen who “left my eye in France”. He likes coming up with experimental medicines and his hair gets more unkempt as the film gets wilder. Washington, largely the straight man, is the smart, sensitive lawyer Harold Woodman, who faces a lot of racism with quiet dignity. And Robbie, as nurse Valerie, smokes a pipe to let us know she’s ballsy. They meet and form a friendship pact during the First World War, in which Burt and Harold are blown up and stitched back together by Valerie, who makes arty sculptures from the shrapnel she removes from their bodies. When the conflict ends, they go to Amsterdam, where they emerge as a kind of Bloomsbury Group but with better-moisturised skin. We see them tangled up together on the floor, having heady nights out dancing, making art, supporting battle-torn veterans and wearing silly hats. The contrast is bluntly drawn: Amsterdam is a haven of free love, while America is a nest of prejudice and corruption. Unfortunate, then, they should end up dispersed and back in nasty old America, where Burt and Harold are falsely accused of murder.

The music is scampery. The vibe: hijinks. Sometimes it’s as though Wes Anderson were running a speakeasy, with the cast to match. Top-tier actors come and go at such a rate that it starts to feel a bit obnoxious. Look, it’s Chris Rock! Michael Shannon! Zoe Saldana! Anya Taylor-Joy! Mike Myers! Alessandro Nivola! Rami Malek! Robert de Niro! Taylor Swift is in a car crash within the first 10 minutes, which is to say she comes out of it a lot better than she did in Cats . After a while, these beautifully lit appearances make the film feel stilted, like when you’re playing a computer game and a new character pops up with some expositional dialogue to send you on a mission.

But the central performances are charming, and stretches of the film are enjoyable. Everything looks stylish and wonderful, and everyone has nice hair. Seriously, Rami Malek, what conditioner are you using? The thing is, there is a great film in here fighting to get out, but it’s drowned out by manic plotting, self-indulgence, and a thickly laid-on, twee message about love and art. Things start to unravel about halfway through as the plot gets denser and the point becomes foggier. Even the characters start to tell each other that they don’t know what’s going on. Who killed Taylor Swift’s dad? Who is running a set of inhumane sterilisation clinics? Who are the “Committee of Five”? Is someone drugging Valerie? Will Christian Bale’s wife ever let him move back in? In a handful of scenes, you can feel the creaky levering of the plot. It’s bizarre that so unwieldy a film should also feel so tightly manipulated.

One of Amsterdam ’s most intriguing elements is its sheer number of slightly broken men; so many of them are scarred and stitched together, bearing the wounds of the war on their bodies or behind their eyes. The film hints at some sophisticated ideas about the weaponisation of veterans and the complicated thread between masculinity, service and patriotism. There’s an unspoken understanding between those who fought, and shame directed at those who didn’t (Nivola’s detective character is teased about the “flat feet” that excused him). But the film skims past them in its pursuit of so many other things. It wants to address racism, intolerance, conspiracy theories, class, and plenty more besides. Eventually, it rolls over to give us its saccharine message about “art and love – that’s what makes the life worth living”. It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow, given Russell is allegedly a director who doesn’t treat people with a whole lot of love when he makes art. The main problem, though, is that this is a richly overstuffed concoction, and not many of us are inspired to creativity or kindness when we’re full. We tend to just need a lie-down.

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Time Out says

American Hustle director David O Russell’s breezy period caper is not, by any traditional metric, A Great Movie. The plot is bananas, despite being loosely based on a real-life fascist conspiracy in 1930s America, the ending is a dud and the outsized performances won’t be for everyone. And I kinda liked it. Because what Amsterdam lacks in tight storytelling, it more than makes up for in exuberant, happy-go-lucky spirit. It’s the kind of whole-hearted celebration of goofy camaraderie and friendship of which there are all too few on our cinema screens. And for all its flaws, it leaves you feeling better about the world.   That baggy plot involves three old Great War friends caught up a byzantine scheme to instal a Nazi-sympathising government in Washington. It begins with a postmortem and takes in Great War veterans’ leagues, a couple of ornithologically fixated spies (Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), more murders, two dimbulb cops (Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts) and Rami Malek’s slippery one-percenter. It’s, well, a lot. Amsterdam ’s well-stocked ensemble inhabits its lushly constructed and lit Jazz Age world ( Gravity ’s Emmanuel Lubezki is cinematographer) with gusto. Christian Bale delivers a joyously leftfield performance as a caring, glass-eyed Jewish doctor struggling to win the approval of the snobbish Park Avenue family of his wife (Andrea Riseborough). To say he goes ‘full Columbo’ is very much meant as a compliment. 

What   Amsterdam   lacks in tight storytelling, it more than makes up for in exuberant, happy-go-lucky spirit

Alongside Margot Robbie’s sparky nurse/artist and John David Washington’s level-headed lawyer, he’s the heart of the movie. Diving back to 1918, the threesome are a tight-knit posse of war veterans – her, a nurse; the other two, wounded soldiers – who seek a bohemian post-war life in Amsterdam. Fast forward a decade or so, and they’re reunited in New York and wanted for the murder of a general’s daughter. They’ve been stitched up, but by who?  Cramming Amsterdam ’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim. In cinemas worldwide now .

Cast and crew

• Director: David O Russell
• Screenwriter: David O Russell
• Taylor Swift
• Christian Bale
• John David Washington
• Margot Robbie
• Matthias Schoenaerts
• Michael Shannon
• Andrea Riseborough
• Zoë Saldana
• Robert De Niro
• Anya Taylor-Joy
• Alessandro Nivola

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