Amsterdam (2022) Review

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 genuine 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.

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 have three scenes each.

The Real Story Is Better

In 1933 a retired Marine Corps general testified before a congressional committee that he had been approached by a group of wealthy men 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 is the material. A soldier with enormous credibility among veterans, approached to betray a government, who goes to Congress instead and is then quietly disbelieved into obscurity. It is 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 precisely 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.

The Tone Never Settles

The film is 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 scene is played for laughs. A body is dissected on screen and the pathologist is a comic figure. An attempted coup is discovered and the discovery is delivered in a bit about a hat.

That approach can work. Some of the best films alternate registers 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 compounds it. Bale’s voiceover runs through the film in a bemused register 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 register, so there is 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 will not live with him, and a practice treating veterans nobody else will treat.

Bale plays him as a fundamentally decent man operating at about sixty percent capacity at all times, which is a specific and 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 is a running joke, and it is also a permanent injury from a war, and Bale keeps both of those true at once in a way the rest of the film cannot manage.

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 is 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.

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 registers who has just walked in.

That is a specific structural cost and it is 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 does not come.

Robert De Niro’s general is the exception and he has genuine weight, largely because the part is the real story and he is playing it seriously in a film that mostly is not. His speech to a room is the best scene and it arrives two hours in.

Everybody else is texture. 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 are both funny in it, and the film returns to them repeatedly during a stretch where a coup is being uncovered.

What Went Wrong

The film cost around eighty million dollars and took about thirty-one, which is a substantial failure and was widely reported as one.

The reception was also complicated by an entirely separate matter, which is that Russell’s conduct on previous productions has been publicly documented and several performers have spoken about it. That is context the film cannot escape and it is not the reason the picture does not work.

The reason it does not 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 is a version of this that opens with the testimony and works backward. There is another that is 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 register 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 is not in use here.

Should you watch Amsterdam?

Only for Bale and for the last twenty minutes. A real attempt to overthrow an American government in 1933, buried under two hours of whimsy, with fifteen famous people arriving in turn and a glass eye giving the best performance in the picture.

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