MIstress of the muppet hustle: why we all
go gladly to the girls' room with amy adams
by daniel yezbick
1. The Prime of Miss Amy Adams
She is Nancy Drew on birth control, American Girl™ electrified, Betty and Veronica gone drag racing with Thelma and Louise (or, if cinephiles prefer, speedboating with Celine and Julie). She has lent humor and hubris to Superman’s Smallville, Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin, and Hank Hill’s Arlen TX, not to mention the cosmic carnival of Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse.
Yet, Amy Adams has not only become the most volcanically redhot Hollybody in the current webosphere, she might also be one of the shrewdest actresses of her generation. In effect, she toys with artifice, acting, stardom, and celebrity so confidently and capably that the previous pantheon of cinematic sirens and sultry sexpots may offer up their collective corsets in appreciation and envy. As an “A List” actress of commanding presence, she exudes fiery feminine agency with the pouty potency of Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, or Joan Crawford. As a classic fashion plate, she matches the regal poise of Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, Anna Karina, or Jane Birkin. Still, her real import—the source and scion of her fascinating, compulsive appeal—is that she rivals the finest acting talents ever framed in silver nitrate, Technicolor, Cinemascope, or 3D Imax. As charismatic a cover girl as she appears, Adams is driven, even cunning, as a performer. She devours each part like Plath’s Lady Lazarus munches on her men, and she trades on her pouty “Girl Next Door” Playmate persona to dismantle and disarm the co-stars, critics, and crowds that follow her from each film to another.
Earlier this year, Adams reincarnated as a lackluster 21st Century rendition of the comic strips’ Lois Lane for Zack Snyder’s turgid, lumbering Man of Steel. It was a thanklessly underdeveloped role that reduced the intrepid proto-feminist “Girl Reporter” to yet another fanboy Super-fetish. In fact, her first meeting with Super-thug, Henry Cavill, culminates in (literally) gut-wrenching abdominal x-ray surgery that might just stand as the most blatantly coded rape fantasy in super-movie history.
Soon after the Stupidman debacle, Adams rebounded with her greatest role to date. Shunning franchise capes and CGI kryptonite, David O. Russell’s American Hustle takes us back to the 1980 ABSCAM sting, serving up Adams’ landmark performance as the inscrutable accomplice, Sydney Prosser, who masquerades as slinky sophisticate “Lady” Edith Greensley. Wafting through languid montages with counterfeit class, Prosser/Greensley helps Christian Bale’s hirsute huckster, Irving Rosenfeld, con gullible investors out of $5,000 signing fees on bogus insider deals. This role, more than any other, has brought us all together in burning adoration of Amy Adams’ piquant powers of persuasion, transformation, and attraction. Super-brutes like Snyder and Cavill may have nailed her with a few nasty lasers in the nether regions, but in American Hustle, Adams beats the house by proving that subterfuge and slight-of-hand make for a far more motivated and magnetic Actress of Steel.
Of course, the scope and variety of Adams’ previous roles display impressive range and surprising precision as well. She gleefully hosts the charming “Me Party” in Disney-fried Hensonland for James Bobin’s The Muppets (2011) and her deconstructed fairy princess in Kevin Lima’s metropolitan myth Enchanted has garnered considerable cult status with the soccer mom set (2007). Adams’ perky work gives way to other nervy, and at times, harrowing performances. As the inimitably effervescent Ashley in Phil Morrison’s June Bug (2005), Adams overwhelms every obstacle and irritation with her pearly white positivity. She sparkles with insouciance in the face of miscarriage, dysfunction, and antebellum atavism. Perhaps she impersonates the friendly homemakers of God-fearing, “Red State” hospitality in perverse homage to the emphatic propriety of her Mormon upbringing? Whatever the reason, the rare zeal of her star-making turn in June Bug is a revelation of cultural catharsis galvanizing a film more or less designed as an autopsy of the national ethos. It was a vivid preview of the captivating, controlled burn that powers her finest homage to the film actor’s dangerous dance of deception and disguise.
2. Doing Russell’s Hustle
So David O. Russell’s American Hustle is among the films of the moment, and rightly so. Currently bedecked with Globules of Gold and a bevy of promising invites to Uncle Oscar’s party, the movie tops Russell’s triptych of quirky actor-centered dramas including Silver Linings Playbook (which linked current Hustlers Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in 2012), and The Fighter (2010), another 1980s retro-vision which first launched Adams and Bale into each other’s orbits. American Hustle, however, fuses the prodigious talents of all four players into a gorgeously adorned disco ball of late Seventies “Smarm” und Drang. Based loosely around the topsy-turvy ABSCAM affair, Russell’s newest exercise in deliciously knotted performances provides an ideal context for the film’s real purposes: the testing, refining, and detonation of a performative smart bomb so stealthy and seamless in its delivery that very few viewers —professional or otherwise—have noticed just how damn devious the entire enterprise actually is. American Hustle is the perfect cinematic shell game, capriciously conning us all with every practiced move.
To begin, Hustle plays deftly on a ridiculous trend in media marketing. Its didactic, semi-pompous title promises the kind of political relevance and cultural signposting that drives the assumptions of reflective satires like American Beauty, American Pie, American Psycho (oddly also starring Christian Bale—a Welshman), American Horror Story, and the ultimate allegory of our adoration of dubious talent, false prestige, and manufactured fame, American Idol. Yet, these texts—worthy entries though they are in their own genres—don’t dare to tread water in the deep end of the national psyche like Russell’s wry, little hustle. Only here do we find Bale and Adams falling for each other through a mutual admiration of Duke Ellington’s jazzy innovations, which Bale’s Rosenfeld interprets as their own type of ballsy, aesthetic swindle. “Who does that?,” squawks Bale’s protagonist in his exuberant tip off about the filmmakers’ own motivations in turning a tale of nostalgic sleaze into a celebration of resilience, loyalty, and love. Thus, a tender tryst between soulmates is conjured out of the shiny, ephemeral waltz of automated dry-cleaners’ bags. A series of running “Buddy Cop” gags involving a dead sibling never gets resolved. A domestic quarrel over the new-fangled “science oven” ends in a stalemate that foreshadows the lingering doom to come. A touching love story builds itself around a b-girl in a woolen one-piece (with a Duke Ellington charm bracelet!) who finds a match for her own passion for the put-over in a paunchy, toupeed scam artist? Who does that?
It’s like the Actors Studio invaded Studio 54 with Lee Strasberg and John Cassavetes leading the charge. Despite so many other lesser nuggets of sumptuous retro-simulation, the pool parties, drab offices, posh restaurants, and cramped restrooms of American Hustle may appear even more seedy and salacious than the late 1970s themselves. Russell’s camera languishes in oceans of chest hair, man curlers, spaghetti straps, and free-flying cleavage. His street scenes reek of inner city garbage and industrial decay. Meanwhile, diffuse hotel rooms, living rooms, bedrooms, and “high-tech” kitchens read like the Brady Bunch sets redone in the palette of Edgar Allan Poe.
Yet, style is always a gamble, and in this case, the stakes are all about the arts of acting. As we succumb to so much macramé and mascara, the film breaks into a series of interdependent conversations about putting something over on somebody somehow for the sheer, unbridled chutzpah of the take down. Thus, the hilarious opening sequence describing Christian Bale’s gravity-defying hairpiece emphasizes just how essentially linked deception and drama really are. Throughout legions of discussions concerning swindles, cons, stings, busts, and collars, whether it’s the FBI, the small-time con artists, the mafia, the politicians, or the “desperate housewives,” all the drama constantly comes back to the art of make believe, the science of convincing impersonation, and the transformative magic of acting. Every element of the film seems to have a double, dupe, or doppelganger. There are two anxious male leads, two powerful women with questionable agendas, two raucous restaurant scenes, two supposed flirtations with organized crime, and two incredible trips to the ladies room with American Hustle’s supreme seductress, Amy Adams.
3. In the Stalls
First of all, the very idea of a “restroom” leaks with American provincial euphemism. We just can’t do the European “toilet” or “W.C.” Bidets and washroom attendants make us edgy and the actual appearance of a flushing toilet in Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 shocked most audiences more viscerally than the shower slaughter that followed moments later. Thus, our “restrooms” are places of intense, unavoidable necessity, spaces of privacy and relief and honesty. That is, until Amy Adams invites you into her stall of confusion. Thank goodness, we get to see her do it twice! These bookends of shocking frankness, wicked manipulation, and transcendent performance may not be the most important scenes in Russell’s film, but they are certainly among the most accomplished.
Rather than spoil the fun with specifics, we’ll suffice it to say that the first scene occurs during Adams’ elaborate seduction of would-be FBI crime-smasher, Richie DiMaso, portrayed with exhilarating pathos by Bradley Cooper. In previous scenes, for various reasons, she has baited him like a Bassmaster. Slowly shifting thighs, pursed lips, eager eyes, and half promises have tempted him out of his personal and professional safe zones. He has defied his boss, belittled his fiancé, and thrown a whopper of a tantrum before his own mother all out of longing for whatever Adams’ pheromone warrior has insinuated between them. Now, he finds himself coked up at the disco, ensnared in a ladies room stall, trading tongues with the very woman he has kept in a detaining cell for days. Adams plays him dangerously, while a raucous chorus of cross-legged disco mamas eggs her on. The scene is thrilling, frightening, and ultimately empowering. Embodying all of her mark’s fantasies of control and manipulation, she lets him manhandle her with clumsy brutality, before straddling the commode in a dangerously defenseless statement of vulnerability. There is so much agonizing cruelty, sadness, and immaturity in what happens next, we teeter on the sharpest edge of worry and concern. Again, no spoilers here. In the end, however, Amy Adams conquers her one time captor. She exposes his imbecility so fiercely and completely, that once they leave the security of their stall, he has been twice wrecked and thoroughly castrated. Even more enamored, enslaved, and unfulfilled than before, he leaves the first restroom sequence without any satisfaction, respite, or relief. He has been “translated,” in Shakespearean terms, from an ambitious, streetwise “tough guy” to a hapless Petrarchan eunuch and, though Prosser’s body has been bruised and belittled in the melee, she still dominates their erotic war of wills.
Copper and Adams exit the most deceptive “restroom” in cinema history to the ballyhoos and cat-calls of the assembled spectators, who, like Cooper themselves, are completely confident in their assumptions about what has just occurred. In effect, Adams’ body language – prone, passive, and provoking in the extreme, effects a kind of gang rape in reverse, a deconstruction of objectifying pornographic power fantasies involving the claiming and humiliating of women’s bodies under painful conditions in abject spaces to fulfill the frenzy of ravenous crowds. Instead, after Adams is through with Cooper’s copper, there has been no conquest, no release or relief from his horny agony, and it is the male who is ridiculed and humiliated by the jeering throng. From now on, Adams pulls the strings on her man-muppet, and the tensions between all four leads will continue to rise until the film’s colossal crescendo.
If Adams’ first powder room provocation is all rear ends, screaming spectators, and clumsy spread-eagled violence, its companion piece is all about faces and face-offs. Adams’ Prosser conquers her male mark “from behind,” but her tete-a-tete with her lover’s codependent wife, played by the indomitable Jennifer Lawrence, leads to one of American Hustle’s most exhilarating commentaries about gender, romance, and, of course, acting. Here, lust and seduction are replaced with close conflict and furious jealousy. There is no “freshening up” of any kind. Fearing that Lawrence’s kooky behavior may somehow compromise their ultimate scam, Adams has pulled rather than lured her rival to the ladies room, and this time, the homosocial conflict between both women dictates a very different type of play. Again, we’ll leave you to savor the specifics on your own, but one can almost see the nominations and accolades piling up between both actresses as they spar and spit through a series of close angles and frantic reaction shots. It’s a cat fight between two radioactive sabertooth tigers, but this time the assault is full frontal and that puts the shrewdly manipulating Prosser at a disadvantage. Throughout the film, Lawrence’s wickedly slippery Rosalyn Rosenfeld has always preferred to hustle her marks directly and immediately, in close conversation with intimidating split-second precision. This time, the shock comes not from the physicality of Adams’ performance, but in how quickly she finds her hands full of scorn-driven sabotage. If Cooper’s castrated cop walks away more dazed and abused than ever, Lawrence’s Rosalyn response to Prosser concludes the scene with a furious testament to the resilience of their mutual struggle to ultimately claim and keep Christian Bale’s inimitable Irving. When the powder room standoff ends, it’s still anybody’s game and Prosser has failed to manage Rosalyn’s volatile role in the heady shenanigans to come. The sequence’s final close-up of Prosser’s devastated face is a marvel of fragility and frustration.
4. The Adams Family
From wicked restroom trysts to colossal cat fights, Amy Adams’ impeccably orchestrated performance of dignified dishonesty ranks her at the head of a veritable bumper crop of savvy new starlets whose glamour and gusto are as potent and popular as their performative talents. She seems to guide a burgeoning tribe of demanding actresses nurtured by the same severe muse who once ignited the thespian flames of Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, Sissy Spacek, Sally Field, and Jessica Lange. From part to part, Adams and her ilk have carved out fun new modes of performance that signal a rising tide of provocative women’s drama for the 21st century. Alongside Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlet Johansson, Anne Hathaway, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sarah Polley, Lena Dunham, Lupita Nyong’O, Amanda Seyfried, Gabourey Sidibe, and Greta Gerwig, Adams pushes forward from the vanguard of what will hopefully become a new school of powerful female performance. With the subtle seductions of Sydney Prosser, however, the art of Amy Adams has become even more iconic. Her therapeutic smiles have cut through the lingering haze of burning crosses, x-ray misogyny, federal malfeasance, even the Hollywood sleaze machine’s factory farming of celebrity frogs, pigs, and gonzos. Whether cuddling muppets or conning Feds, Adams knows how to play in our private places. Her rare and poignant bridge between innocence and experience teases, taunts, and overturns our general assumptions about stardom. What’s more, the diversity and depth of her screen personae put her well on pace to become the single most important American movie actress of the early 21st Century. Whatever formulas of gutsy grace Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor once bestowed upon Classical Hollywood, those secrets are now firmly invested in Ms. Adams. She’s conned them out of us all, fairly and beautifully, and I, for one, am very, very glad.
She is Nancy Drew on birth control, American Girl™ electrified, Betty and Veronica gone drag racing with Thelma and Louise (or, if cinephiles prefer, speedboating with Celine and Julie). She has lent humor and hubris to Superman’s Smallville, Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin, and Hank Hill’s Arlen TX, not to mention the cosmic carnival of Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse.
Yet, Amy Adams has not only become the most volcanically redhot Hollybody in the current webosphere, she might also be one of the shrewdest actresses of her generation. In effect, she toys with artifice, acting, stardom, and celebrity so confidently and capably that the previous pantheon of cinematic sirens and sultry sexpots may offer up their collective corsets in appreciation and envy. As an “A List” actress of commanding presence, she exudes fiery feminine agency with the pouty potency of Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, or Joan Crawford. As a classic fashion plate, she matches the regal poise of Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, Anna Karina, or Jane Birkin. Still, her real import—the source and scion of her fascinating, compulsive appeal—is that she rivals the finest acting talents ever framed in silver nitrate, Technicolor, Cinemascope, or 3D Imax. As charismatic a cover girl as she appears, Adams is driven, even cunning, as a performer. She devours each part like Plath’s Lady Lazarus munches on her men, and she trades on her pouty “Girl Next Door” Playmate persona to dismantle and disarm the co-stars, critics, and crowds that follow her from each film to another.
Earlier this year, Adams reincarnated as a lackluster 21st Century rendition of the comic strips’ Lois Lane for Zack Snyder’s turgid, lumbering Man of Steel. It was a thanklessly underdeveloped role that reduced the intrepid proto-feminist “Girl Reporter” to yet another fanboy Super-fetish. In fact, her first meeting with Super-thug, Henry Cavill, culminates in (literally) gut-wrenching abdominal x-ray surgery that might just stand as the most blatantly coded rape fantasy in super-movie history.
Soon after the Stupidman debacle, Adams rebounded with her greatest role to date. Shunning franchise capes and CGI kryptonite, David O. Russell’s American Hustle takes us back to the 1980 ABSCAM sting, serving up Adams’ landmark performance as the inscrutable accomplice, Sydney Prosser, who masquerades as slinky sophisticate “Lady” Edith Greensley. Wafting through languid montages with counterfeit class, Prosser/Greensley helps Christian Bale’s hirsute huckster, Irving Rosenfeld, con gullible investors out of $5,000 signing fees on bogus insider deals. This role, more than any other, has brought us all together in burning adoration of Amy Adams’ piquant powers of persuasion, transformation, and attraction. Super-brutes like Snyder and Cavill may have nailed her with a few nasty lasers in the nether regions, but in American Hustle, Adams beats the house by proving that subterfuge and slight-of-hand make for a far more motivated and magnetic Actress of Steel.
Of course, the scope and variety of Adams’ previous roles display impressive range and surprising precision as well. She gleefully hosts the charming “Me Party” in Disney-fried Hensonland for James Bobin’s The Muppets (2011) and her deconstructed fairy princess in Kevin Lima’s metropolitan myth Enchanted has garnered considerable cult status with the soccer mom set (2007). Adams’ perky work gives way to other nervy, and at times, harrowing performances. As the inimitably effervescent Ashley in Phil Morrison’s June Bug (2005), Adams overwhelms every obstacle and irritation with her pearly white positivity. She sparkles with insouciance in the face of miscarriage, dysfunction, and antebellum atavism. Perhaps she impersonates the friendly homemakers of God-fearing, “Red State” hospitality in perverse homage to the emphatic propriety of her Mormon upbringing? Whatever the reason, the rare zeal of her star-making turn in June Bug is a revelation of cultural catharsis galvanizing a film more or less designed as an autopsy of the national ethos. It was a vivid preview of the captivating, controlled burn that powers her finest homage to the film actor’s dangerous dance of deception and disguise.
2. Doing Russell’s Hustle
So David O. Russell’s American Hustle is among the films of the moment, and rightly so. Currently bedecked with Globules of Gold and a bevy of promising invites to Uncle Oscar’s party, the movie tops Russell’s triptych of quirky actor-centered dramas including Silver Linings Playbook (which linked current Hustlers Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in 2012), and The Fighter (2010), another 1980s retro-vision which first launched Adams and Bale into each other’s orbits. American Hustle, however, fuses the prodigious talents of all four players into a gorgeously adorned disco ball of late Seventies “Smarm” und Drang. Based loosely around the topsy-turvy ABSCAM affair, Russell’s newest exercise in deliciously knotted performances provides an ideal context for the film’s real purposes: the testing, refining, and detonation of a performative smart bomb so stealthy and seamless in its delivery that very few viewers —professional or otherwise—have noticed just how damn devious the entire enterprise actually is. American Hustle is the perfect cinematic shell game, capriciously conning us all with every practiced move.
To begin, Hustle plays deftly on a ridiculous trend in media marketing. Its didactic, semi-pompous title promises the kind of political relevance and cultural signposting that drives the assumptions of reflective satires like American Beauty, American Pie, American Psycho (oddly also starring Christian Bale—a Welshman), American Horror Story, and the ultimate allegory of our adoration of dubious talent, false prestige, and manufactured fame, American Idol. Yet, these texts—worthy entries though they are in their own genres—don’t dare to tread water in the deep end of the national psyche like Russell’s wry, little hustle. Only here do we find Bale and Adams falling for each other through a mutual admiration of Duke Ellington’s jazzy innovations, which Bale’s Rosenfeld interprets as their own type of ballsy, aesthetic swindle. “Who does that?,” squawks Bale’s protagonist in his exuberant tip off about the filmmakers’ own motivations in turning a tale of nostalgic sleaze into a celebration of resilience, loyalty, and love. Thus, a tender tryst between soulmates is conjured out of the shiny, ephemeral waltz of automated dry-cleaners’ bags. A series of running “Buddy Cop” gags involving a dead sibling never gets resolved. A domestic quarrel over the new-fangled “science oven” ends in a stalemate that foreshadows the lingering doom to come. A touching love story builds itself around a b-girl in a woolen one-piece (with a Duke Ellington charm bracelet!) who finds a match for her own passion for the put-over in a paunchy, toupeed scam artist? Who does that?
It’s like the Actors Studio invaded Studio 54 with Lee Strasberg and John Cassavetes leading the charge. Despite so many other lesser nuggets of sumptuous retro-simulation, the pool parties, drab offices, posh restaurants, and cramped restrooms of American Hustle may appear even more seedy and salacious than the late 1970s themselves. Russell’s camera languishes in oceans of chest hair, man curlers, spaghetti straps, and free-flying cleavage. His street scenes reek of inner city garbage and industrial decay. Meanwhile, diffuse hotel rooms, living rooms, bedrooms, and “high-tech” kitchens read like the Brady Bunch sets redone in the palette of Edgar Allan Poe.
Yet, style is always a gamble, and in this case, the stakes are all about the arts of acting. As we succumb to so much macramé and mascara, the film breaks into a series of interdependent conversations about putting something over on somebody somehow for the sheer, unbridled chutzpah of the take down. Thus, the hilarious opening sequence describing Christian Bale’s gravity-defying hairpiece emphasizes just how essentially linked deception and drama really are. Throughout legions of discussions concerning swindles, cons, stings, busts, and collars, whether it’s the FBI, the small-time con artists, the mafia, the politicians, or the “desperate housewives,” all the drama constantly comes back to the art of make believe, the science of convincing impersonation, and the transformative magic of acting. Every element of the film seems to have a double, dupe, or doppelganger. There are two anxious male leads, two powerful women with questionable agendas, two raucous restaurant scenes, two supposed flirtations with organized crime, and two incredible trips to the ladies room with American Hustle’s supreme seductress, Amy Adams.
3. In the Stalls
First of all, the very idea of a “restroom” leaks with American provincial euphemism. We just can’t do the European “toilet” or “W.C.” Bidets and washroom attendants make us edgy and the actual appearance of a flushing toilet in Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 shocked most audiences more viscerally than the shower slaughter that followed moments later. Thus, our “restrooms” are places of intense, unavoidable necessity, spaces of privacy and relief and honesty. That is, until Amy Adams invites you into her stall of confusion. Thank goodness, we get to see her do it twice! These bookends of shocking frankness, wicked manipulation, and transcendent performance may not be the most important scenes in Russell’s film, but they are certainly among the most accomplished.
Rather than spoil the fun with specifics, we’ll suffice it to say that the first scene occurs during Adams’ elaborate seduction of would-be FBI crime-smasher, Richie DiMaso, portrayed with exhilarating pathos by Bradley Cooper. In previous scenes, for various reasons, she has baited him like a Bassmaster. Slowly shifting thighs, pursed lips, eager eyes, and half promises have tempted him out of his personal and professional safe zones. He has defied his boss, belittled his fiancé, and thrown a whopper of a tantrum before his own mother all out of longing for whatever Adams’ pheromone warrior has insinuated between them. Now, he finds himself coked up at the disco, ensnared in a ladies room stall, trading tongues with the very woman he has kept in a detaining cell for days. Adams plays him dangerously, while a raucous chorus of cross-legged disco mamas eggs her on. The scene is thrilling, frightening, and ultimately empowering. Embodying all of her mark’s fantasies of control and manipulation, she lets him manhandle her with clumsy brutality, before straddling the commode in a dangerously defenseless statement of vulnerability. There is so much agonizing cruelty, sadness, and immaturity in what happens next, we teeter on the sharpest edge of worry and concern. Again, no spoilers here. In the end, however, Amy Adams conquers her one time captor. She exposes his imbecility so fiercely and completely, that once they leave the security of their stall, he has been twice wrecked and thoroughly castrated. Even more enamored, enslaved, and unfulfilled than before, he leaves the first restroom sequence without any satisfaction, respite, or relief. He has been “translated,” in Shakespearean terms, from an ambitious, streetwise “tough guy” to a hapless Petrarchan eunuch and, though Prosser’s body has been bruised and belittled in the melee, she still dominates their erotic war of wills.
Copper and Adams exit the most deceptive “restroom” in cinema history to the ballyhoos and cat-calls of the assembled spectators, who, like Cooper themselves, are completely confident in their assumptions about what has just occurred. In effect, Adams’ body language – prone, passive, and provoking in the extreme, effects a kind of gang rape in reverse, a deconstruction of objectifying pornographic power fantasies involving the claiming and humiliating of women’s bodies under painful conditions in abject spaces to fulfill the frenzy of ravenous crowds. Instead, after Adams is through with Cooper’s copper, there has been no conquest, no release or relief from his horny agony, and it is the male who is ridiculed and humiliated by the jeering throng. From now on, Adams pulls the strings on her man-muppet, and the tensions between all four leads will continue to rise until the film’s colossal crescendo.
If Adams’ first powder room provocation is all rear ends, screaming spectators, and clumsy spread-eagled violence, its companion piece is all about faces and face-offs. Adams’ Prosser conquers her male mark “from behind,” but her tete-a-tete with her lover’s codependent wife, played by the indomitable Jennifer Lawrence, leads to one of American Hustle’s most exhilarating commentaries about gender, romance, and, of course, acting. Here, lust and seduction are replaced with close conflict and furious jealousy. There is no “freshening up” of any kind. Fearing that Lawrence’s kooky behavior may somehow compromise their ultimate scam, Adams has pulled rather than lured her rival to the ladies room, and this time, the homosocial conflict between both women dictates a very different type of play. Again, we’ll leave you to savor the specifics on your own, but one can almost see the nominations and accolades piling up between both actresses as they spar and spit through a series of close angles and frantic reaction shots. It’s a cat fight between two radioactive sabertooth tigers, but this time the assault is full frontal and that puts the shrewdly manipulating Prosser at a disadvantage. Throughout the film, Lawrence’s wickedly slippery Rosalyn Rosenfeld has always preferred to hustle her marks directly and immediately, in close conversation with intimidating split-second precision. This time, the shock comes not from the physicality of Adams’ performance, but in how quickly she finds her hands full of scorn-driven sabotage. If Cooper’s castrated cop walks away more dazed and abused than ever, Lawrence’s Rosalyn response to Prosser concludes the scene with a furious testament to the resilience of their mutual struggle to ultimately claim and keep Christian Bale’s inimitable Irving. When the powder room standoff ends, it’s still anybody’s game and Prosser has failed to manage Rosalyn’s volatile role in the heady shenanigans to come. The sequence’s final close-up of Prosser’s devastated face is a marvel of fragility and frustration.
4. The Adams Family
From wicked restroom trysts to colossal cat fights, Amy Adams’ impeccably orchestrated performance of dignified dishonesty ranks her at the head of a veritable bumper crop of savvy new starlets whose glamour and gusto are as potent and popular as their performative talents. She seems to guide a burgeoning tribe of demanding actresses nurtured by the same severe muse who once ignited the thespian flames of Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, Sissy Spacek, Sally Field, and Jessica Lange. From part to part, Adams and her ilk have carved out fun new modes of performance that signal a rising tide of provocative women’s drama for the 21st century. Alongside Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlet Johansson, Anne Hathaway, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sarah Polley, Lena Dunham, Lupita Nyong’O, Amanda Seyfried, Gabourey Sidibe, and Greta Gerwig, Adams pushes forward from the vanguard of what will hopefully become a new school of powerful female performance. With the subtle seductions of Sydney Prosser, however, the art of Amy Adams has become even more iconic. Her therapeutic smiles have cut through the lingering haze of burning crosses, x-ray misogyny, federal malfeasance, even the Hollywood sleaze machine’s factory farming of celebrity frogs, pigs, and gonzos. Whether cuddling muppets or conning Feds, Adams knows how to play in our private places. Her rare and poignant bridge between innocence and experience teases, taunts, and overturns our general assumptions about stardom. What’s more, the diversity and depth of her screen personae put her well on pace to become the single most important American movie actress of the early 21st Century. Whatever formulas of gutsy grace Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor once bestowed upon Classical Hollywood, those secrets are now firmly invested in Ms. Adams. She’s conned them out of us all, fairly and beautifully, and I, for one, am very, very glad.