![]() This isn’t to say that Amsterdam loses all semblance of its curious otherworldliness: New York, where Berendsen and Woodman work together, appears to be more evidently shot on a backlot than any period film in recent memory, and the slightly magical and artificial nature speaks well to the film’s strange qualities, especially as lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki in rich, bright tones. As such, when Amsterdam inevitably leaves this almost otherworldly realm, never to return to it, it’s a wrenching loss for the characters, one which propels the rest of the film. Woodman’s Blackness and his interracial relationship with Voze are also far more accepted in this cosmopolitan setting. For Berendsen, life in Amsterdam offers respite from his wife and her rich family of doctors, who openly disparage the half-Jewish man attempting to practice on Park Avenue. For one, Voze is an artist who, among works in many other media, creates small sculptures out of bullets and shrapnel salvaged from the bodies of soldiers-including those of the heavily scarred Berendsen and Woodman-which serves as a perfect metaphor for the kind of earnest subversion that Russell is working toward here.Īll three characters revel in their time away from the States. This section, which takes up close to half an hour of the film, is in many ways the justification for Amsterdam, observing the simple pleasures of bohemian life in the Dutch capital, full as it is with dancing, excitement, and creativity. It’s a detail-rich telling of how the two men became friends in the army and met Voze, a nurse and bon vivant who draws them into her orbit. ![]() The central narrative doesn’t take place outside of New England, but an extended flashback, which occurs while Berendsen and Woodman are fleeing from unknown assailants, transports the viewer to Europe at the tail end of the war. Indeed, Amsterdam’s title is both a feint and the key to unlocking the film. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and the mysterious Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie). However, Amsterdam is first and foremost a surprisingly indelible portrait of an almost utopic friendship between three World War I participants: Dr. The film takes this conspiracy as its spine: Butler’s fictionalized counterpart is General Gilbert Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro in one of his most considered and forceful recent performances), and the protagonists, in the process of trying to clear their names, stumble upon a group (whose moniker nods to the real-life Committee of Five). Butler instead testified to Congress, though none of the wealthy businessmen who allegedly financed the coup were ever arrested. Nominally, the plot of the film, like that of American Hustle, is based on a true story, in this case the Business Plot of 1933, which sought to instigate a veteran-led coup against the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install retired General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in the mold of Mussolini and Hitler. Russell’s Amsterdam strikes a different chord than the series of popular films that he made throughout the early 2010s, though it wouldn’t appear to be the case at first glance.
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