American Hustle

David O. Russell opens without dialogue on a man gluing his hair into place, and that sequence is the argument of the picture, since everything after concerns the upkeep of an appearance. Takes run long, actors talk over one another, and scenes carry on past the point where the information has landed, so anyone tracking how the sting is built assembles it from fragments dropped between arguments. The voice over switches narrator partway through, the film saying that nobody recounting this is reliable. The operation is often the least interesting thing in frame, because the camera keeps leaving the investigation for the marriages. The script started as Eric Warren Singer’s spec titled “American Bullshit” before Russell rewrote it and turned the real figures into caricatures. Christian Bale had altered so far that Robert De Niro failed to recognise him on set, asking who the fat guy was. Science writer Paul Brodeur sued over the microwave line, and a California appeal court threw it out on the ground that no audience would take anything that character says as fact. A good fit if you want scenes to keep running after the plot point lands, with performances overlapping. Not a fit if you want the sting laid out step by step; the deal that rescues the mayor was invented for the film.