Amsterdam Review

The Business Plot is a real episode, genuinely strange, and a film that simply told it would have been worth watching. David O. Russell instead builds a shaggy comedy of mannerisms in which every actor is performing eccentricity at a different frequency and none of them are in the same picture. Christian Bale does a glass eye, a stoop and a mumble; Margot Robbie plays whimsy; John David Washington plays earnestness; Robert De Niro arrives late and, briefly, gives the film a spine by underplaying everything around him.

Emmanuel Lubezki lights it beautifully, which only sharpens how little is happening inside the frame. The plot is delivered almost entirely in exposition, characters explaining to each other what has occurred offscreen, and the mystery resolves in a speech at a gala rather than through anything anyone did. Scenes run long past their point and the tone lurches from slapstick to atrocity without transition. Somewhere under the quirk is an angry film about American fascism that never gets to speak.