![]() ![]() Burt returns to awful Beatrice in New York, the mutually smitten Harold and Valerie go their separate ways, Amsterdam becomes a distant memory and “Amsterdam” itself comes crashing to earth. ![]() Burt becomes a medic with a unit modeled on the famous 369th Infantry Regiment, tending mostly to Black soldiers, like Harold, shunned by their white fellow servicemen.īut that feeling can’t last. ![]() (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers pop up as charming amateur ornithologists, though as with almost everyone here, there’s a bit more to their identities than meets the eye.) Along the way, Russell slides in that crucial 1918 flashback: We see Burt, who’s part Jewish, being shipped off to war by his status-conscious wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), and her relatives, whose antisemitism is as plain as their Park Avenue address. Unsurprisingly, Russell crams in as many odd jolts and detours as possible, among them an impromptu autopsy (made bearable by Zoe Saldaña as a nurse who’s stolen Burt’s heart), a few violent ambushes and one or two relaxing conversations on the subject of birdwatching. #David l steward movie#So begins a shaggily plotted whodunit that the movie approaches with a sometimes charming, sometimes tiresome and faintly Raymond Chandler-esque reluctance to solve. Taylor Swift pops up for a suitably swift cameo as Meekins’ daughter, Liz, hanging around just long enough to voice her teary-eyed suspicions of foul play before leaving the dogged Burt and Harold to figure out what’s going on. Joining forces not for the first time, Burt, a doctor, and Harold, an attorney, are quietly brought in to investigate the sudden demise of an Army general, Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who commanded their regiment during World War I. That action kicks off in New York in 1933 the interwar years are slowly rumbling to a close, and whispers of unrest can be heard beneath the bustling city noise and the notes of Daniel Pemberton’s airily charming score. (Merie Weismiller Wallace / 20th Century Studios) ![]() (It also shares with that movie a few gifted Russell regulars, including production designer Judy Becker and editor Jay Cassidy.) Like Russell’s splendid ’70s caper, “American Hustle” (2013), the movie is a roving piece of period whimsy and a madcap history lesson, a parade of concealed motives and cunning switcheroos loosely inspired - and just barely held together - by real-world events. While it features its own lovingly detailed glimpses of torn flesh and lingering scars, “Amsterdam” seems rather less inclined to get too deep inside its characters, physically or otherwise. Russell himself pushed the carnage of war to aesthetic extremes in 1999’s “Three Kings,” when he turned his camera into an X-ray and showed us - in squirm-inducing, viscera-rupturing detail - what a bullet can do to the human body. For a few tender, spirited moments you might be reminded of “Jules and Jim” or perhaps Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” even when Burt’s shot-up face is wrapped in bandages or when Valerie, an aspiring Dadaist, is molding sculptures from the bloody bullets and shrapnel she’s extracted from her patients’ wounds. The French New Wave may still be decades away, but there’s an invigorating dash of Truffaut (but really, true-friend) energy to these proceedings. For two wounded American servicemen, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and a nurse, Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), overseeing their recovery, the city of Amsterdam becomes a temporary refuge and playground. Russell, refers to the events of a memorable Dutch idyll in 1918, toward the end of the First World War. The title of “Amsterdam,” the typically busy and discombulating new movie written and directed by David O. ![]()
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