It all starts with a murder. Or possibly two murders. One is unequivocal: a young woman is shoved into the path of oncoming traffic on a busy street in 1930s New York, just as she reveals a crucial piece of this deliberately confounding, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle of a movie. The second murder is the suspected poisoning of the woman’s father, a military hero and formerly the commanding officer of Burt, a doctor (Christian Bale, overacting wildly), and Harold (John David Washington, practically inert), a lawyer. Burt and Harold find themselves in the crosshairs of the law, accused of the woman’s death.
But just as you start to get to grips with David O Russell’s elastic approach to a real-life conspiracy in the US in the 1930s, the story rewinds. We find ourselves in 1918, in the aftermath of the first world war; wounded brothers at arms Burt and Harold bond with Valerie (Margot Robbie), a nurse in a Belgian field hospital who collects their bloody shrapnel to incorporate into her mixed-media conceptual art pieces. Magnetic, well-connected and bohemian, she’s the reason that they all end up living in postwar Amsterdam for a spell, the closest of friends and, in the case of Valerie and Harold, lovers. If you’re still following the story, congratulations: you’re doing better than most audience members.
The latest picture from Russell has the ambitious structural intricacy of his 2013 hit American Hustle, but lacks that film’s effortless rhythms and coherence. Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.
