Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale in American Hustle
Is Being Con Men The Best We Can Do?
by Donald Robert Clasen
Dec. 17, 2013
At a time when our world keeps coming apart at the seams, Hollywood manages to keep cranking out one incredible production after another. I have seen practically all the major releases this year including some very good ones, but at this point at least, American Hustle is probably my favorite so far and a certain shooin for a Best Picture nomination for the 2014 Oscars. Its director David O. Russell certainly snuck up on everyone at this time last year with his Silver Linings Playbook and this offering may garner even more awards and attention. While Russell gained a reputation in earlier years for being something of a tyrant, some say his penchant for on-the-spot dialogue adjustments while filming a scene is very appealing to actors and gives his movies a greater sense of spontaneity. Certainly the chance to watch such talented actors turned loose on the audience is a delight indeed.
While the story and characters of American Hustle are seedy—Amy Adam’s very revealing attire is especially distracting—they are close enough to segments of real life in 1970s America to provide a genuine topic of discussion. As for the movie, the ensemble acting is brilliant, the story involving and immensely entertaining, the characters colorful, richly drawn and developed, the dialogue memorable and real-life.
But it’s the comedy that shines through the most. Biting, incisive, iconoclastic and irreverent, it is classic Hollywood humor, subversive in the best sense of the word, perfectly capturing a society so enamored of its own self-importance and encrusted with the sacredness of its national myths. Hustle illustrates in its best moments a theory I‘ve had for a while now that some of the best comedy is the kind that unveils God’s view of human behavior, seen from His elevated perch. It must be to Him an immense source of both sadness yet amusement given His omniscience and awareness of our thinking, feelings and motives at any given moment. The folly of people’s endless scheming is conveyed loud and clear in this movie and the futility and self-defeating nature of it all.
I nevertheless sat there at the end overwhelmed by memories of a time when I wrestled with a question that ultimately led me to Jesus Christ—are we all fated to be nothing more than con men throughout life, lying to one another and even ourselves, taking advantage of and exploiting one another? Or is it possible to actually live a life of true altruism according to one of the most fundamental spiritual principles Jesus Christ taught which was, “Love your neighbor as yourself”? Obviously I now believe the second, but there was a day when I spent a lot of time pondering the first.
This was ironically the same time period and the very end of my BC days, when I was deeply involved in the extremely popular EST organization, even a staff member for a time. EST was a real phenom back in the early 1970s, a two-weekend seminar that incorporated a large number of mostly New Age and Eastern philosophies and techniques giving the participants the opportunity to work through their personal issues. Its founder and benevolent dictator was Werner Erhard who left his wife and four children, migrated with another woman to the West Coast, and eventually started this training once he came to understand how the universe “really works.”
How it “really works” essentially was the idea that there’s nothing to believe in; all there is is experience. This was summed up in his oft-repeated axioms such as, “You people want to believe in me, but I am to be experienced.” And, “I’m just a con man; what you don’t get is, so are you.” At the time I was naïve enough and gullible enough to swallow such cynicism hook, line and sinker, since I like so many of my age and generation at the time in groovy San Francisco, had an instinctual revulsion toward western religion (read that, Christianity).
But things changed for me when Werner hosted “An Evening With The Clergy” at a time when he and EST were on a real growth curve. All these ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and the like showed up and Werner began his usual spiel about the delusion of believing in anything. I was quite stunned to watch the man get quite nervous before these people, as if he intuitively understood how arrogant and—if you will, preachy—his words must have sounded to them. It was all very out of character for someone normally so charming and smooth but looking back, not surprising at all. For me it was an experience that confirmed to me that all this thinking was so wrong-headed.
Werner’s acceptance that he was a con man and the casual acquiescence to it by multitudes shows us how far gone from the Christian paradigm of life America had already come. His life story parallels similar things in Christian Bale’s character Irving Rosenfeld who comes to avoid his wife to take up with another woman while pursuing the life of a professional though much less respectable con man. The real life character Irving is modeled on was Mel Feinberg whom the FBI forcibly recruited to “catch bigger fish.”
Based On A True Story (Well Kind Of…)
At the opening of American Hustle, we see a glib statement on the screen to the effect that, “Some things in this story actually happened,” giving us a hint of what is to follow. The real life part of this story is based on the ABSCAM scandal of the late 1970s which originally stood for “Arab Scam” but which was quickly changed to “Abdul Scam” after the Arab-American lobby cried foul. It was basically an FBI operation that put about a half dozen members of Congress in jail on bribery charges. If the movie is to be believed, what actually happened was that the bureau failed in its attempt to nab some major organized crime figures but made lemonade by tempting some politicians to accept briefcases of cash in exchange for facilitating a wealthy sheik’s application for citizenship.
“Sheik Abdul” as it turns out was a fake, an impersonator played by an FBI agent, yet the Congressmen were enticed and entrapped into what seems like minor infractions compared to today’s legal looting of the U.S. Treasury by lobbyists for banking and all sorts of other industries, the flooding of Congress with huge amounts of money and the like. Back in those days, elements of the government entrapping other branches as well as the whole subject of entrapment itself, were still quite controversial. But this was the post-Watergate era after all, and the bringing down of Congress members was gratifying to a still-jaded public. To our continual hurt, such tactics have now metastasized into just one of many police state weapons used to terrorize the public at large.
In the movie version, we are immediately introduced to Irving Rosenfeld who in voiceover tells the audience he developed into a con man “from the feet up.” It started when he claims his father, who had a plate glass window business, was constantly being taken advantage of by other people. Irving decided as a boy to apply some false flag business tactics to this situation by throwing rocks into people’s windows, thereby insuring lots of business for his father. By the time he was an adult, he had learned to be a multi-faceted though small-time con artist specializing in loan sharking and peddling fake art.
At a party in Long Island he meets Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and the two immediately hit it off. Sydney from Albuquerque sees herself as “dedicated to survival,” “desperate to be anyone but myself,” and thus easily slips into an alter ego she creates known as Lady Edith Greensleeve, complete with cultured British accent. In this way, Irving and Sydney/Edith team up to perfect their ability to con money out of people desperate for a loan, pretending she is connected to British royal family money.
Before long though as you would expect, the FBI breaks down their door led by ambitious agent Richie DiMaso played by Bradley Cooper. DiMaso wants the two of them to cooperate their way out of a prison term by conning at least four bigger criminals than themselves. When they get out of jail, Sydney figures out that their best option is to leave the country but Irving doesn’t want to leave his adopted son Danny behind, who he shares with his wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). He also loves Rosalyn but knows she is, as he puts it, “the Picasso of passive/aggressive karate” who always outwits him, the consummate conman, thus frustrating and scaring him and addicting him all at the same time. Thus he makes the fatal decision to go along with DiMaso’s unconventional (for the day) scheme with consequences off the chart.
As their plan evolves—everyone in this movie especially Irving, always has a hare-brained, spontaneous “plan” for every twist and turn in this cascade of complications—it involves a fake sheik (Michael Pena) looking to throw around some money in return for American citizenship. DiMaso figures the best “mark” for this kind of an idea would be the glad-handing, popular mayor of Camden, New Jersey, Carmine Polito, played by Jeremy Renner. Based on the real life Mayor Angelo Errichetti (who was much more corrupt than this character), Polito is actually quite commendable as far as New Jersey politics go. His only motive is to find a way to bring jobs to the growing ranks of the unemployed in his city at a time when the de-industrialization of America was just starting to get into high gear. Carmine understands the reality of mob money on the one side and economic policy trends on the other, and just wants to find a way to make casino gambling in Atlantic City work. It is fitting perhaps, considering the sleazy ambitions and style of DiMaso and U.S. Attorney Amado (based supposedly on Rudy Giuliani who filled that position at the time) to pick on a mayor trying to do what he could.
In the process of conning Polito, Irving and Rosalyn become overnight BFFs of Carmine and his wife Dolly. Yet a big twist comes at a critical moment during a hotel gala arranged to sting the mayor. Victor Tellegio (Robert DeNiro), the right hand man of Meyer Lansky no less, is in the back room representing the Mafia and their long-held dream of opening up casinos on the East Coast. The sting team barely survive this unexpected development, but DiMaso’s mind is now reeling at the possibility of snagging the legendary hit man Tellegio.
Irving on the other hand, who has been ritually holding his head in his hands for some time now as the plot thickens and gets more risky, is less than enthused. He is told what he instinctively knows, that if this whole thing is discovered to be a set up, the very Mob will be gunning for him, his wife and his son. His wife he doesn’t care about a whole lot at this point—she’s been carrying on with Pete, one of the Mob’s foot soldiers and has hinted to him that all her husband is doing is part of a big federal sting—but Irving “has a plan” nonetheless. He sets up a fake arrangement with a friend impersonating the Mob kingpin’s lawyer, intending to frame DiMaso. In the end, the feds have nothing but half a dozen Congressmen and a Senator to nail on bribery charges, but this is more than enough for the ambitious U.S. Attorney Amado to step in and take credit for it all.
In the end, Irving and Sydney manage to escape relatively unscathed. But his now-dear friend Carmine ends up getting a year and a half in prison for being little more than a victim of the ambitions of individuals in the federal government who can get away with what they do merely because they have the power to do so. A guilt-ridden Irving laments in a voice-over at the end something to the effect that, “I lost my friendship with Carmine, and I will always regret that.”
Do Ya Think?
Well, of course he did. Poor Carmine, trying to do what he could in a very difficult environment. And no, that environment was not the presence of a “too big” federal government as mindless right wing ideologues love to peddle, but a federal government with particular employees here and there too ambitious for their own good or anyone else’s. At least in this story.
And poor Irving. Like so many others in this sordid/tragic/amusing tale of folly, they all ended up conning others, each other and even themselves. He even ends up something of a sympathetic character, though the real life Mel Feinberg was a far more outrageous criminal. And as ingenious as the movie is, as entertaining as it is, as “cool” as it is (and I wouldn’t want to take away any of that), it would be a huge mistake to ignore the glaring object lesson at the heart of this production.
Sir Walter Scott once famously said, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” Scott lived during that old, corny era of Christian paradigm that dominated the West until about the end of the 19th Century. Then came the 20th, the “Jewish Century” according to professor Yuri Slezkine, when the cynicism so perfected in Talmudic philosophy got applied to so many nightmares that emerged. It was kicked off with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was adopted by the Nazis with their “Big Lie” philosophy, and is now at the heart of the dirty tricks of the CIA, KGB, Mossad and MI6. Now the modern Orwellian state is thoroughly entrenched corrupting the public itself high and low, collectively and individually.
Which brings me back to my original thoughts about the con man. The term “con man,” so street wise, is a contraction of “confidence man.” A confidence man is someone who seeks to get your trust so that he might set you up for a sting. It refers to deliberate deception, something the Bible in general (Lev 19:13; I Sam 12:3) and the New Testament specifically (I Cor 6:8, etc.), condemn in no uncertain terms. We are instead to speak truth every man to his neighbor (Eph 4:25), and are warned of a broad, generalized condition of deceit in the last days (II Thess 2:11).
The Talmud in contrast justifies the use of deceit, especially if it’s for the purposes of getting advantage over the Gentiles. At the very least, it has a very casual attitude toward the practice. While it is true that people in their urgency to “survive” as Sydney put it, deceive others and even themselves, it is not true that people cannot ever be truthful. Even she and Irving under pressure of their own self-made calamities were forced to confess they were “being real” at times. To lower that standard in the name of human weakness or as a clever weapon to use against others is not a standard God accepts. That Irving Rosenberg/ Mel Weinberg embraced con man-ism so easily may be a result of the philosophical environment they were raised and steeped in. My question is, why can’t the Church see this and respond to it with Biblical truth?
