Tis' the Season for Movie Scam Artists

By The Movie Maven

Scam artists for Christmas. Why not? Is it part of your holiday tradition to see a film after all the presents have been unwrapped? And if not, you have plenty of free time, we hope before the New Year.

Here's two options, based on true stories about that most American of tales – the outlaw who does good – until it all comes crashing down:

"American Hustle" is a heap of fun - for a while. 
One thing about satires though. They rarely land well and "AH" is no different. The bouncy period piece sags at the end, taking some of the air from director David O. Russell's balloon. 

Christian Bale plays Irving, the skilled con artist who's worst move is his inability to hide his receding hairline or his bulging belly. Amy Adams, with virtually every costume cut down to here, plays his girl Friday and Jennifer Lawrence his wife, a ditzy time bomb hiding beneath a crown of blonde curls. 

Bale and Jeremy Renner, who plays his mark, are unquestionably strong actors who each seem miscast in this tale that hearkens back to a famous 70s-80s scandal that took down several corrupt congressmen. The actors hit the right beats, but Bale is too patrician to play a such a sad sack and Renner, so strong as the Irish hothead in "The Town," in no way looks the part of a gregarious and rising Italian pol, no matter how big his hairpiece. Adams, who it seems impossible to miscast, carries the weight here.

"AH" does excels in putting a nice twist on the government-does-everything-wrong theme that is so prevalent in the media. The viewer's sympathies unquestionably lie with the con artists and ne'er do wells in Irving's circle and not with Bradley Cooper's vainglorious FBI agent, whose ambitions exceed his intellect by at least half.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" could be a nice companion piece to "AH." It reaches back to the late '80s, the start of  Jordan Belfort's infamous career, depicted in the book of the same name.

The stock broker built an empire, and if you are to believe Martin Scorsese's film, Belfort's excesses were as great as his successes. You could argue the film follows the same pattern.

At the very least "The WoWS" could surely go down as one of the widest catalogs of the seven deadly sins ever filmed. It is a fascinating failure, and sadly so too, because for the first 90 minutes or so – it clocks in at an excessive and bloated three hours  – Terrence Winter's script lays out the greed displayed by Belfort and his colleagues in a brilliant and often truly un-PC fashion. The only sacred cows for these folks are those with money and Winter ably captures his characters' contempt for all the little people.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays his second charming rake of the year, but while my sympathies always have rested with Jay Gatsby,  Belfort is nearly impossible to resist. But you can't sympathize with him and DiCaprio achieves the balance of capturing his subject's seemingly boundless charm without justifying his outrageous behavior. And the movie star, to his credit, does not shy away from being put in any number of humiliating positions.

The film closely follows Scorsese's  models for felonious rises and spectacular falls, "Goodfellas" and "Casino." Both of the prior films are better, but seriously, if you paid for half of "The WoWS" and left before the two-hour mark, you'd see a pretty good film. Skip the downfall part, which at times even undermines DiCaprio's and Jonah Hill's fine performances, and you will have seen a more streamlined and special piece of work.