THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
The now unchallenged reign of superheroes will have led to an inflation of the Hollywood show, a passage to the superlative which concerns all strata of production, including that intended for a more adult audience. Thus appeared a category of super-authors adopting a demiurgic posture and whose figurehead could be Christopher Nolan, cantor of cerebral fictions reached saturation with tenet (2020), his most abstruse film. David O. Russell, after the two Oscars won for fighter (2010) and the subsequent public successes of happiness therapy (2012) and american bluff (2013), also seems to have reached these inflationary spheres. And proves it with his latest feature film, amsterdama luxurious vehicle for three-star casting that looks like a big off-axis machine, without steering or guardrails.
The story takes place in 1933, the year the Nazis were preparing to take power in Europe. In New York, two former regimental comrades and veterans of the Great War, doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), prosthetic surgeon, and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), lawyer, work together on plastic reconstruction and rehabilitation. social of broken faces. Contacted by a wealthy heiress (Taylor Swift), they carry out the autopsy of her father, General Meekins – under whose orders the two men served in Europe – who may have died of poisoning.
But in the process, the young woman is thrown in front of them under a car, so that the two friends are considered suspects. On the run, pursued by two surly agents, they find Valerie (Margot Robbie), a former nurse they had known in post-war liberated Amsterdam. The three of them lead the investigation within high society where business circles supporting Nazi theories seem to conspire.
Great Monstrous Fair
Inspired by a real coup attempt hatched by fascist sympathizers close to Wall Street, amsterdam adopts a somewhat deserted register: that of frank zaniness, put to the test of a labyrinthine reality whose secret signs get carried away. Here, the reference to the 1930s – economic crisis, rise of extremes – comes into tension with the whimsical treatment and always a little “second degree” of the action. A wide gap between paranoia and the grotesque embodied in itself by the patched silhouette of Doctor Berendsen, a broken face stuck in a glass eye that Christian Bale, all in deformed postures, interprets with a Frankenstein-like expressionism. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s on-board camera completes the transformation of the whole thing into a big rickety and monstrous fair, a distorting reflection of an America on the verge of chaos (any reference to the Trump era will not be completely coincidental).
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