Critical thinking
Economics
Paper details:
Assn#9 Essay Movie: America Hustle; How Far Should Government go to protect its Citizens from harm?
Your economic analysis, discussion & your opinion of a of the 2013 movie: “AmericanHustle.”Watch Movie and write a 500 word essay reviewing the movie:
http://freedownloadfullmovieonline.blogspot.com/2013/12/american-hustle-2013.html
A robust economics based analytical discussion of this issue is Prof Gary Becker’s Crime and Punishment, An Economic Approach, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c3625.pdf
• What are Becker’s economic principles discussed in this movie “American Hustle”? What are underlying assumptions of rational behavior? Describe his model in a paragraph or two with graphical illustration.
• If you were to use marginal analysis what points on the graph would suggest the amount government should invest in this activity?
• Try to assess quantitatively, in a model, the economic implications to the US citizenry? At what sacrifice? At what risk? What is the cost to US protective measures? What are the social welfare tradeoffs for a free society.
• Think boldly to discuss the economic principles of this issue:
Read this review article from New Yorker; Grand Scam“American Hustle” by David Denby December 16, 2013 The Current Cinema
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/12/16/131216crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=all
Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner in David O. Russell’s new movie, based on the Abscam scandal of the nineteen-seventies. Illustration by Michael Gillette.
David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” an intentionally overripe comedy about corruption, duplicity, loyalty, and love, is a series of astonishments. Russell, rewriting a script developed by Eric Singer, takes off from the Abscam affair—the bizarre criminal investigation of the nineteen-seventies in which the F.B.I. called on a swindler named Mel Weinberg to help ensnare public officials. (Six congressmen and a senator were among those ultimately convicted.) The bureau’s elaborate sting involved two “Arab sheikhs” (both F.B.I. employees) eager to invest in Atlantic City’s nascent casino industry and willing to bribe officials in order to procure operating licenses. (“Abscam” was short for “Abdul scam.”) Russell has both simplified and juiced a tale that is already close to preposterous; he has created a fantasia told from the point of view of two con artists, a man and a woman (based loosely on Weinberg’s mistress). Not just the crooks but virtually everyone in the movie seems slightly crazed by ambition. The one person who’s ordinary in temperament, an F.B.I. supervisor played by Louis C.K., could be a member of a different species. We seem to have stepped into the magical sphere—Shakespeare rules over it and Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges are denizens—where profound human foolishness becomes a form of grace.
Christian Bale, bearded and forty pounds heavier, with a complex and unreliable hairpiece (parts of it come loose at unsuitable moments), is Irving Rosenfeld, who owns a chain of dry cleaners in New York and sells forged and stolen art on the side. Like all successful con men, Irving has a serene understanding of deception: most people, he’s sure, will believe what they want to believe. He’s deeply dishonest but not, in most ways, a terrible man. Irving wants things to work out for people; his half-goodness is part of the expanding joke of the movie. During a winter indoor-pool party at a friend’s house on Long Island, he meets an ambitious young woman, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a former stripper, who is alarmingly intelligent and determined to make something of herself. She and Irving bond over a mutual love of Duke Ellington and begin an affair. Sydney also joins Irving’s scams, posing as a British aristocrat with banking connections; she wears dresses cleaved to the waist and boldly stares everyone down while quaking in her high heels. When the pair are caught by a high-strung F.B.I. agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), they wind up working for the bureau, carrying out Richie’s big-time sting. Racing around New York, Irving occasionally goes home to his luscious nutbrain wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who has a habit of blundering into his arrangements at exactly the wrong time. The movie evokes such classics as “Married to the Mob,” “Goodfellas,” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” but it has a fizziness all its own and a pell-mell but lucid storytelling strategy that is one of the most impressive achievements in recent filmmaking.
Like “Goodfellas,” this movie uses voice-over to swing us into the action, offering first Irving’s view of the world, then Sydney’s, then the two in alternation, as the characters expound on their up-from-the-bottom ethos of survival. They are matched in avidity by Richie, who lives at home with his mother and sets his straight hair with curlers so that he can look sexy-Italian. His desire for Sydney is aroused so quickly that he tries to pry her loose from Irving even as he’s arresting her. She flirts with him and maybe falls for him, but, in any case, she’s determined to use him. Currents of love and jealousy electrify the convoluted, many-faceted operation that the three pull off. In Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” Cooper’s patented anxiety—the burning blue eyes and the motormouth feverishness—nagged and clogged the early scenes. But here his rapid-fire attack is comically just right. Richie isn’t as bright as he thinks he is; his mind works erratically, and Russell leaves some air around Cooper’s lines, many of which take startlingly odd turns. Sprucing up like John Travolta getting ready for the disco in “Saturday Night Fever” (which came out in the same period in which this movie is set), Cooper wears a medallion on his exposed chest. His night on the disco floor with Amy Adams is the dreamiest of consummations—they’re both great dancers.
One of Irving and Sydney’s swindles involves loans that are promised but never paid. It’s the only serious plot mistake that Russell makes—as portrayed, it’s flatly unconvincing—but you pass over it, because the momentum of the story is irresistible. Working with the cinematographer Linus Sandgren, Russell takes the camera smoothly and rapidly through offices, restaurants, and parties, feeding one episode into the next, and linking them with movement or narration, like sustained musical phrases. In a few scenes, a character silently mouths the words of the song playing on the soundtrack, as if propelled by the beat in his head. The movie has a ceaseless flow; the music of greed never stops.
Richie summons a New Jersey politician, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner, with a serious pompadour), to the Plaza Hotel and offers him a suitcase full of money to help clear the way for the casinos. Carmine refuses and leaves, but Irving chases him down in front of the hotel, and makes a personal connection with him. A true artist must keep things moving toward the instant of seduction, and Irving and Carmine, partying with their wives, become friends. The suborning of public officials requires drink, music, and long nights in restaurants, and “American Hustle” is rich in jubilant sociability. “Always take the favor over money,” Irving advises Carmine, which is an outrageous thing to say, since he has just successfully bribed him. At another level, though, Irving means it, as he guiltily begins to do favors for the man he has trapped. Carmine wants to get the casinos going so that his constituents can find jobs, and Irving’s attempt to protect him becomes a complicating and moving strain in the movie. “American Hustle” is built around many acts of cynical manipulation, but it is generous, even kindly, in spirit. Corruption and con artistry, in this telling, are mutually dependent, and not always evil. The single truly malevolent figure is a Mafia boss from Miami (played by Robert De Niro), whose sinister jokes make Irving and Richie panic at the thought of what they have got into.
Some of the behavior onscreen is so outlandish that you wonder, at times, if the entire movie isn’t a put-on, but then a surge of feeling, or an idiosyncratic moment, brings you back to the common ground of devotion and to the mysteries of human character. Russell has finally reached the kind of sustained heightened excitement that he has been working toward ever since he directed the satirical “Flirting with Disaster,” in 1996. (He reached it in parts of “The Fighter.”) What he puts on the screen here is faster than life and more volatile than common realism, but it’s definitely not farce. His characters act stupidly because they want something desperately, and his actors, all of them taking enormous risks, form an ensemble that is the equal of anything from Hollywood’s golden age.
Jennifer Lawrence’s needy stay-at-home wife has buttery golden looks and piled-up blond hair—she’s a vulgar beauty with a bedroom voice. Lawrence doesn’t project; she pours, passing without hesitation from teasing sensuality to strident bitchiness and abject anger. Amy Adams has played nice (“Junebug,” “Doubt”), and she has played hard (“The Master”); this movie allows her to pull the two together, and she’s remarkably vivid in scene after scene. Sydney vamps Irving in one of his dry-cleaning establishments wearing his customers’ fancy clothes. (In a dizzying touch, suits hanging on a garment conveyor whirl past them as they kiss.) She grabs at a chance for the good life, even in borrowed dresses, and Adams, throwing back her head in triumph, captures the spirit of American drive. When Adams and Lawrence, playing rivals for Irving’s affection, meet at last, it’s literally a face-off, strength against strength at a distance of a few inches, and the screen explodes. The object of this war is an unlikely prize, but Bale makes shrewdness sexy. A Welsh actor playing Bronx Jewish in a sludgy voice, Bale is funny from the first scene, but he doesn’t try for laughs—a man with a hairpiece needs to stay in control. The real Mel Weinberg is still alive, somewhere in Florida, and Bale persuades you that his character is tough enough to live forever.
“Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. “American Hustle” offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. In the world that Russell has created, if you don’t come to play you’re not fully alive. An art devoted to appetite has as much right to screen immortality as the most austere formal invention.