Mystery! Intrigue! A star studded cast!
BQB here with a review of Amsterdam.
I saw this movie last night and was shocked to read the reviews today. The critics hate it, calling it the worst movie of the year thus far, a hot, meandering, chaotic mess. Strange, because I walked out of it thinking it was the first Oscar contender of the year. I found it charming, part-mystery and part-comedy that gave me some of the first legitimate laughs in a movie theater in…I can’t even remember.
How could I, your humble blog host and the professional movie watchers be so divergent in our view? Hold that thought. I’ll speculate on it later.
In 1910’s France, toward the end of World War I, misfits Dr. Burt Berendson (Christian Bale), Harold Woodman (John David Washington) and Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), meet and become fast friends. Valerie is an art-loving nurse who treats Burt and Harold for their war wounds, while they defend her from local French folk disgusted by her penchant for digging shrapnel (metal scraps) from soldiers and forging it into art.
After peace breaks out in Europe, the trio take a detour on their way home to America, finding peace and acceptance in Amsterdam, a sweet sense of bliss they never found in their homeland of the United States. Each has their own personal war waiting for them at home. Burt is half-Jewish, half-Catholic and (SPOILER ALERT) as he laments in a line that had me slapping my knee, openly guffawing, “I think my in-laws sent me to war to get rid of me.” He is estranged from his wife, who defers to her high society parents and their open hatred of her husband, who they consider to be of a low pedigree.
Valerie is a free spirit who lives for creating masterpieces through the brush and photography. In other words, she’s at risk for being stamped “crazy” with a crazy stamp on her forehead and treated that way, free-spirited women being considered bonkers at the time.
Harold is the most level-headed of the trio, but he’s black, and well, we all know the history of how black people were treated in the early 1900s.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. The trio eventually closes their Amsterdam vacation and return to the states, where they go their separate ways, yet they forever see their time in Amsterdam as a state of mind, a yearning to just be themselves without guilt, remorse, or trying to please all the unpleasable people in their lives.
Flash forward to the 1930s. Harold is now a lawyer, fighting for the civil rights of African Americans, poor veterans, and downtrodden folk at large. Burt does this in his own way, starting a practice where he treats the less fortunate who are scoffed at elsewhere and charging little. The dynamic duo come together at the behest of Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift) to investigate the untimely demise of their old Army general, who his daughter theorizes was the victim of foul play.
And so, down the rabbit hole of mystery the friends go, searching for clues and unraveling a far flung, worldwide conspiracy involving fascism, dictators, ornithology scandals, a wacko hitman, and well, if I tick off the other boxes, I’d give the rest of the story away.
Christian Bale, who rivals Daniel Day Lewis in his ability to transform into someone else, does it again here. His character, Burt, is a doctor of the people with a heavy Brooklyn accent. He laments his lot in life, feeling like he can do no right in the eyes of his family, yet soldiers on anyway, caring his injured fellow veterans. He is partly the comic relief and partly the heart of the movie, inventing new drugs, which he argues, the world needs but the medical community is unwilling to develop. He may be right, but he constantly falls flat on his face mid-sentence, the result of being his own test subject. The glass eye he received to replace the one lost in the war is forever popping out only to be found again. I almost want to say the character is reminiscent of Seinfeld’s Kramer, if Kramer had a medical license.
John David Washington excels as the straight man, the brains of the bunch who keeps the trio focused on the case and away from devolving into too much tomfoolery. It’s clear his character would have gone further in life had he not been born in such an openly racist time, yet he refuses to be defined or denigrated by those who dislike him simply because of the color of his skin.
Robbie is a delight, her smile can really warm up a movie theater. She’s not crazy, but suffers the false allegations of craziness with a stiff upper lip.
Who are the stars? Literally everyone. Anya Taylor Joy. Mike Myers. Michael Shannon. Timothy Olyphant. Rami Malek. Chris Rock. Robert DeNiro. That’s all I could think of in one sitting. There are more. It’s as if everyone in Hollywood stopped by the set to get their five minutes in this flick.
Which brings me back to the start of this review. Everyone in Tinsel Town apparently believed in this flick enough to be in it, so why did the critics give it ye olde raspberry?
Admittedly, the plot is convoluted and meandering. As often happens in so many mysteries, the characters pull a thread that leads to another thread, that sometimes leads to four or five separate threads. At some point, you the audience member are left to decide whether you want to whip out a pen and jot notes, maybe even a flow chart on the back of your popcorn bag, or if you just want to shrug your shoulders and assume the writers know what they’re doing and you can look up any questions you were stumped on online later.
It has a lot of heart. The friendship between the three main characters is very sweet. Three people who were not accepted at home find acceptance abroad. I wonder if early 1900s Amsterdam really was that much of an accepting place, or if it was just a matter of the trio going to a new place where no one knew their past and this allowed them to reinvent themselves. There is a romance between Harold and Valerie, but it’s genuine, not tawdry. There’s no titillating sex scene, rather you can tell they legitimately enjoy each other’s company, and by extension, the company of their BFF Burt. Relationships built on sex, money, social standing etc., never last. In life, you’re lucky if you find maybe a handful of friends who accept you as you are, warts and all, and love you all the more for it.
Strangely, unconditional love is the message of the movie. Love the veterans who fought for their country only to be disposed of like garbage when the time came for the country they fought for to pay for their medical bills. Love the African Americans who are just looking for their piece of the pie. Love the women who want to be free-spirited and don’t drug them up under false allegations of being a crazy dame. Love the schmucks who don’t seem to fit in anywhere but who keep showing up anyway, even when their glass eyes fall out.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. The critics are wrong here. This film is a throwback to Oscar winners of the past, large, ambitious, far-flung historic pieces. Comedy ensues, though most of the jokes shine a light on the mistreatment the downtrodden faced during a terrible time in history where if you weren’t a rich white man then society just treated you as being in the way. Admittedly, you could take away the mystery as it basically just serves as a framework for so many actors to meet and riff of one another, but then again, aren’t most films about the search for the elusive MacGuffin? I would like to see Hollywood make more movies like this, though I fear the critics have grown so accustomed to the streaming bologna sandwich schlock served up by streaming services that they have no idea what to do when a steak of a film like this is set before them.
Answer: Devour it, then burp in satisfied glory.
Bookshelf Battle 