Amsterdam (2022) Review
4/10
Two veterans and a nurse meet in a field hospital in 1918, make a pact, and spend a period in Amsterdam living well. Fifteen years later two of them are framed for a murder in New York and pull a thread that leads somewhere considerably larger. The 4 is for a film with a real subject and no discipline. The Business Plot is real, is barely known, and would make a superb picture, and this one keeps interrupting it to be charming.
Nothing wastes a night like a bad movie with a great one trapped inside it. Amsterdam is exactly that. A decorated general, a plot to overthrow the government and a committee that let everyone walk away, and Russell buries it under a birdhouse and a bit about a hat.
I’d enjoy the whimsy in some other film. Here it smothers a true story that deserved his full attention, and I resent that.
What it has is a cast that reads like a prank. Bale, Robbie, Washington, De Niro, Rock, Shannon, Myers, Taylor-Joy, Malek, Saldana and a pop star, most of whom get three scenes each and never get the chance to matter.
The Real Story Is Better
In 1933 a retired Marine Corps general testified before a congressional committee that a group of wealthy men had approached him to lead a march of veterans on Washington and install an authoritarian government.
The committee found his account credible in substance. Nobody was prosecuted, the names were largely redacted from the published report, and the whole episode has sat in a corner of American history for ninety years being mostly ignored.
That’s the material. A soldier with enormous credibility among veterans, approached to betray a government, who goes to Congress instead and is then disbelieved into obscurity. It’s a story about how a country handles an attempt on itself when the people involved are respectable.
Smedley Butler is also one of the more interesting figures in American military history. A decorated Marine who spent his retirement arguing publicly that his career had been spent protecting business interests, and who was approached because of the credibility that came with saying so. The film contains all of this and gives it perhaps twenty-five minutes. The preceding ninety are a murder mystery, a romance, a running joke about eye injuries, and a great deal of business with a birdhouse.
That damn birdhouse is where my patience ran out. I think the history deserved a straight telling, and every cute detour tells me the filmmakers didn’t trust it to hold an audience.
If your real material is stronger than your invention, cut the invention. The test is which section a reader would describe to somebody else afterward. Here it’s the congressional testimony, which the film treats as the conclusion of something else.
A true story with a gap in the record is an opportunity and the gap is where your fiction goes. The redacted names are the novel. Ask what your story is about in one sentence. If the sentence describes twenty minutes of a two hour work, the proportions are wrong.
The Tone Never Settles
It’s playing a screwball comedy, a noir mystery, a war drama and a political thriller, and it switches between them without transition and often within a scene.
A character describes removing shrapnel from a man’s back in graphic terms and the film plays the scene for laughs. A body is dissected on screen and the pathologist is a comic figure. An attempted coup is discovered and the film delivers the discovery in a bit about a hat. The autopsy played as comedy is where I gave up on the tone. I’ll laugh at a corpse in the right movie. This one can’t justify the joke, and the gag reads as indifference.
That approach can work. Some of the best films alternate tones deliberately, and the alternation lands when the audience knows which one is governing. Here nothing governs. Every scene is negotiating its own tone from scratch, so the audience is never certain whether to be worried.
The narration makes it worse. Bale’s voiceover runs through the film in a bemused tone that flattens everything it describes, including the parts that should be alarming. Compare what Badlands does with the same device. Holly narrates murder in the vocabulary of a magazine and the gap is the horror, because the film knows the gap is there. Here the narration and the film are in the same bemused tone, so there’s no gap to feel.
Bale Is Very Good
Burt Berendsen has a glass eye, a back full of shrapnel, a self-administered drug habit, a wife who won’t live with him, and a practice treating veterans nobody else will treat.
Bale plays him as a decent man operating at about sixty percent capacity at all times, which is an unusual thing to attempt, and every physical detail is consistent. The eye is the best of it. It comes out, it goes in wrong, it’s a running joke, and it’s also a permanent injury from a war, and Bale keeps both of those true at once in a way the rest of the film can’t manage.
Bale is the reason I didn’t rate this lower. The glass eye is the smartest idea in the whole production, and he’s the one performer who keeps the joke and the wound true at once. Margot Robbie and John David Washington are both good and both are playing considerably thinner parts. Valerie has an illness, a brother and a secret, and the film treats all three as reveals instead of as conditions she lives in. Washington has the hardest position of the three. Harold is a Black lawyer in 1933 who’s being framed for murder, and the film gives him a courtroom, a wife nobody can know about, and no scene where any of that is his problem instead of the plot’s.
A physical impairment maintained consistently does an enormous amount of characterization for free. The reader tracks it, and every scene where the character compensates for it is a scene about who they are. The failure mode is remembering it only when the plot needs it.
Let one element be both funny and serious at the same time. The eye works because the film never chooses. That’s the exact thing the rest of the picture fails to do with its tone.
A character defined by reveals isn’t a character. A secret is something a person carries, and carrying it should be visible before it’s disclosed.
The Cast Is the Problem
Around fifteen recognizable performers appear, most for a handful of scenes, and each arrival stops the film while the audience tones who has just walked in.
That’s a structural cost and it’s rarely discussed. A famous face in a small part is a distraction with a running time attached, because the audience assumes significance and waits for a payoff that doesn’t come. Robert De Niro’s general is the exception and he’s real weight, largely because the part is the real story and he’s playing it seriously in a film that mostly isn’t. His speech to a room is the best scene and it arrives two hours in. Everybody else is decoration. Chris Rock has a monologue, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon have a running joke about ornithology, Anya Taylor-Joy and Rami Malek have a house, and Taylor Swift is in it for about six minutes.
The Myers and Shannon pairing is the clearest symptom. Two intelligence officers operating under cover as bird enthusiasts is a good joke, they’re both funny in it, and the film returns to them repeatedly during a stretch where a coup is being uncovered.
That choice is plain dumb. A coup is being uncovered and the film keeps cutting back to two spies talking about birds. I laughed at the joke the first time, and by the third return I’d have cut it myself.
What Went Wrong
Made for around eighty million dollars, the film took about thirty-one. That’s a major failure and was widely reported as one.
The reception was also complicated by an entirely separate matter: Russell’s conduct on previous productions has been publicly documented and several performers have spoken about it. That’s context the film can’t escape and it’s not the reason the picture doesn’t work.
The reason it doesn’t work is structural. A significant true story about an attempted coup is present in the material and the film treats it as a twist, and everything before the twist is a different and considerably lighter picture. There’s a version of this that opens with the testimony and works backward. There’s another that’s simply the mystery with no politics in it. The film attempts to be both and arrives at neither.
The frustrating part is that Russell can do this. Three Kings holds a comic tone and a serious one at the same time, across a real war, and never loses track of which is governing a given scene. The capability is demonstrably there and it’s not in use here.
When a work fails commercially and creatively at once, separate the causes before drawing conclusions. External factors affect reception and structural problems affect the work, and only one of those is a lesson. Here the structure would have failed with any director’s name on it.
Two good films inside one bad one is the most common shape of an overreaching failure. Identify which one you’re writing before the halfway point. An extraordinary true event deserves to be the subject instead of the reveal. Placing real history in the position of a twist tells the reader the history was a device.
Should you watch Amsterdam?
Only for Bale and for the last twenty minutes. It gets a 4 because it takes a real attempt to overthrow an American government in 1933 and buries it under two hours of whimsy, with fifteen famous people arriving in turn and a glass eye giving the best performance in the picture. De Niro’s speech is the film I wanted, and it shows up two hours late.
