Joyce Glasser reviews Amsterdam (October 7, 2022) Cert 15, 134 mins.
David O. Russell invites Christian Bale and Robert De Nero (from his successful ensemble comedy American Hustle) to a reunion: not in Amsterdam, but in 1930’s New York where he spins a yarn around a dark episode in America’s interwar history that has parallels with the Trumpian era today. “A lot of this really happened,” an opening caption tells us, although we spend the rest of the film realising that a lot of this overloaded, meandering story did not really happen.
The trigger scenes take place in depression era New York when partners Dr Burt Berendsen (Bale), and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) attend to an SOS for an urgent, clandestine autopsy. The corpse is that of Senator Meekins, under whom both men served in WWII, when he was a General. The suspicions are those of his daughter Elizabeth (ironically played by Taylor Swift) who believes her father was murdered.
A glass-eyed, “half Catholic-half Jewish” doctor with a back brace – from the war – Burt, is on probation with the medical board for experimenting with unlicenced medicine. To appreciate another Bale transformation, not to mention the film’s humour, you have to find an unruly glass eye rolling across the floor and a Frankenstein-type scar under the eye funny. Harold, (Washington plays the straight man to Bale’s Dr Strange), who is a partner in a reputable law firm, lends Burt a hand, out of a friendship forged in France and Amsterdam at the end of WWI.
Although Berendsen loves his wife Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), his marriage is on the rocks ever since his ultra-conservative in-laws encouraged him to enlist in The Great War to get rid of him. They either hoped that he wouldn’t return or that he would return a hero with adoring patients flocking to the Park-Avenue practice.
It is easy for Burt to fall for the attractive pathologist Irma St Claire (Zoe Saldaña) who leads the autopsy when a queasy Burt admits his experience is limited. Sure enough the autopsy report shows General Meekins had been poisoned. Taking this top secret report to Elizabeth, Burt and Harold has stood them up at the meeting and is about to flee the city in fear for her own life.
Before they persuade her otherwise, Elizabeth is murdered on the busy street and Burt and Harold, who are covered in her blood, become the main suspects. Fortunately, they know the detectives, played by Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola respectively, and they embark on a quest to clear their names.
This quest leads us past some more terrific actors with one dimensional roles, and entangles us in a web of relationships, lies and traps, few of which are strictly necessary. But first, we are taken on a long, meandering flashback that has less to do with the conspiracy than with the kind of whimsical self-indulgence we last saw in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.
The flashback is set in France and Amsterdam, 1918 where newly enlisted Burt and veteran soldier Harold form a pact to protect one another. A bit of true history here, African-American soldiers had to wear French army uniforms as the US forces were not integrated.
Harold and Burt (who has lost an eye) end in a French war hospital where bi-lingual nurse Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie) takes shrapnel out of both soldiers. She shows them how she turns the metal into art objects after they sing songs together in harmony. Valerie suggests they travel to Amsterdam where she knows someone who will fit Burt with a glass eye. She is good at forging papers, so off they go.
In Amsterdam they meet eye-supplier Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers) and bird watcher Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon) who are identified by captions as British and US government spies respectively but have a similar comic purpose to that of Charters and Caldicott, the cricket enthusiasts in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The three friends bond for life and Harold and Valerie fall in love. Then Burt breaks up the party when he announces he is returning to Beatrice in NYC. Valerie disappears, and Harold, distraught, returns to America where he gets his law degree.
O. Russell now has to cover the fifteen year gap when, in circumstances that strain credibility (and will be a spoiler of sorts to divulge), Valerie shows up and becomes an integral part of Burt and Harold’s quest to clear their name. In no time she explains away her disappearance to Harold, and they resume their love affair. Neither have married in the fifteen year gap and neither have aged.
As the plot thickens, so does the list of stars (who include Rami Malik and Anna Taylor-Joy). Saving the best for last, Robert De Niro’s man of the hour General Gill Dillenbeck, introduces some much needed tension with his “will he or won’t he” role.
There really was a plot by a cabal of Nazi sympathisers to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government and replace him with a populist ruler. This kind of cabal was operating during Trump’s time in office with Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage meeting with right wing leaders across Europe to discredit and destabilise democracies.
De Niro’s character is based on the testimony of a respected marine, General Smedley Butler, who, in 1933, told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Roosevelt. Butler had been selected to rally a group of war veterans to back the so-called “‘Business Plot” and become its dictator, similar to the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.
