“Amsterdam” Is an Exemplary Work of Resistance Cinema

It’s tempting to say that I found David O. Russell’s new film, “Amsterdam,” a hoot and a half, and be done with it. But there’s much more to this exuberant movie, in substance and in style. It’s a historical fantasy that is written and acted like a comedic tall tale, but it’s all the more remarkable for its solid (albeit slender) basis in reality. It also takes its place in a recent, odd but significant subgenre of movies that has cropped up in response to the authoritarian and hate-filled deeds and rhetoric of the Trump era: resistance cinema. It would be easy to mock the very notion as a form of highly selective crowd-pleasing, were many of these movies, including “Amsterdam,” not among the most emotionally committed and aesthetically distinctive films of the times.

The international cinema of resistance has a venerable history, and is ongoing (as in Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears”); in recent years, prominent American filmmakers, whether or not their work has often had a political dimension, have responded to the rise of the far right and related tenets and syndromes. I’m thinking of such films as Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter,” Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” Frederick Wiseman’s “Monrovia, Indiana,” Shatara Michelle Ford’s “Test Pattern,” Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Good Time,” Ricky D’Ambrose’s “Notes on an Appearance,” Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” (really), Matt Porterfield’s “Sollers Point,” the late Lynn Shelton’s “Sword of Trust,” and James Gray’s forthcoming “Armageddon Time.” I consider Charlie Chaplin to be the primordial figure of resistance cinema—most prominently, with “The Great Dictator”—and that film is the prime cinematic spirit inhabiting “Amsterdam.”

In “Amsterdam,” Russell confronts the real-life so-called Business Plot. In the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s first Administration, a group of executives sought to leverage the anger of veterans who hadn’t received due benefits under his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, in order to install, as an adviser-cum-dictator, General Smedley Butler—who, they assumed, would do their bidding. (Instead, Butler exposed the plot, testifying to Congress about it.) In “Amsterdam,” Russell (who wrote and directed the film) rosencrantzes and guildensterns that conspiracy, to high purpose: he focusses on a fictional trio who stumble on that plot and then attempt to thwart it. Russell gives these characters a magnificent backstory in order to unfold the character traits and the strange circumstances (both ludicrous and logical) that crystallize their spirit of resistance into determination and action—that transform three insulted and injured obscurities into protagonists of history.

The deliciously intricate story begins in Manhattan, in 1933, in the form of a whirligig whodunnit. A plastic surgeon, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), who is also a grievously wounded Great War veteran, practices in Harlem with the self-appointed mission to aid similarly scarred veterans. He shares space with an attorney, Harold Woodman (John David Washington), who is his best friend and also a seriously wounded veteran, and who served under him in the Great War. Burt, an Army medic, was appointed by the fair-minded, honorable General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley, Jr.) to take over from a cruel racist as the commander of the all-Black 369th Regiment, then fighting in France. When Meekins, newly home from Europe, suddenly dies, his daughter Liz (Taylor Swift) recruits Harold to arrange for the autopsy. Working with a medical examiner named Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldaña), Burt concludes that Meekins was murdered; then another body turns up, Burt and Harold are falsely accused of that killing, and, in order to clear their names, they need someone from high society to vouch for them. That quest carries them through the upper-crust Voze family—notably, Tom (Rami Malek), an ineffectual bird-watcher with a Kennedy accent—to another general, Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), Meekins’s best friend and the only person who was privy to Meekins’s activities in Europe before his voyage home.

The character who—as seen in a series of flashbacks—joins Burt and Harold to round out the trio during wartime is Valerie (Margot Robbie), a military nurse and an artist who, in a military hospital in France, saves the two men, forges a deep friendship with both and a romance with Harold, and keeps the shrapnel from both men’s bodies to use in her art work. She brings the men to Amsterdam; there, she connects Burt, who lost an eye, to a master glass-eye craftsman named Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers), who’s also a British spy in partnership with Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon), an American one. Harold and Valerie (whose background is vague and whose identity is elusive) vow to stay in Amsterdam, since their interracial romance has no hope in the United States. In 1919, Burt returns home to New York and to his wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), the daughter of Park Avenue snobs, the Vandenheuvels, who had ordered the half-Jewish, half-Catholic Burt to war to bring home medals and thereby win the acceptance of their set. But, when Burt, upon returning to medical practice with his father-in-law, insists on treating Black veterans, the Vandenheuvels—Beatrice with them—kick him out. Then, in the early nineteen-twenties, Harold leaves Valerie in Amsterdam and returns to the U.S., graduating from Columbia Law School, setting up shop with Burt in Harlem, and fulfilling his dream of helping veterans in need. In 1933, when Harold and Burt get caught up in the Meekins case together, Valerie turns up again and joins forces with them to try to solve the murders. In the process, they discover a conspiracy of American plutocrats to install Dillenbeck as dictator, and they turn to Paul and Henry for help, to grandly dramatic effect.

Even a detailed description of the Rube Goldberg-esque plot can’t do justice to the zinging action and the manifest delight that Russell takes in bringing it to life. Leaping around in time, tipping in a trio of voice-overs, truffling the soundtrack with hyperbolic aphorisms, adding fantasy sequences, Russell realizes the tale in performances as delicately nuanced as they are fiercely expressive, and, together with the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, conjures images that whirl and gyrate; the camera presses under the characters’ chins and watches them cock their heads insolently, glides with sly glints of discovery, and fills the screen with brusque action and finely emphasized subtleties. The movie is full of felicities that manage to be, at the same time, poignantly earnest and giddily inventive, as when Burt, heading off to perform the autopsy while bearing a bouquet for the estranged Beatrice, witnesses another killing, flees the killers and the police, and reaches a safe hiding place while still grasping the flowers; or when Burt, resetting Irma’s broken wrist, gives rise to the film’s most breathtakingly rapturous moment. The literary archness of the dialogue yields an incantatory set of street-smart poetic refrains, whether in the studied diction of Burt, the pensive manner of Harold, the incisive tone used by Valerie, or the hectic yet fiercely serious manner of Harold’s assistant and fellow-veteran, Milton (Chris Rock), whether challenging someone who “followed the wrong god home” or asserting the dangers posed to two Black men by “a dead white man in a box.”

Russell does more than fill the film with its high-wattage parade of stars, who energize the proceedings from beginning to end. He creates vivid and forceful characters—slightly heightened caricatures whose unnaturally emphatic presences befit the air of serendipity that gives history the oddball heroes it needs, and that gives them the happy ending they deserve. Shannon does comedy worthily alongside Myers, who lends his whimsy an apt gravity; Rock combines intense self-awareness in substance with unhinged impulsiveness in bearing. Matthias Schoenaerts brings tense dignity to the role of a detective whose war wounds match Burt’s but whose job brings the two men into conflict. Alessandro Nivola channels James Caan as a policeman who compensates cruelly for the drubbing that his self-image takes as a noncombatant owing to flat feet. Anya Taylor-Joy brings curdled chipperness to the role of Libby Voze, Tom’s blithely arrogant wife, and Riseborough flutteringly fluctuates almost to the vanishing point as a young woman caught between parents and husband.