Amsterdam

My nephew Sean really wanted to see Amsterdam and, since he is a busy high school senior with a job, I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time with him.  We saw it last night and, even though it is a bit convoluted with some messy tonal shifts, we both liked it (apparently far more than most people).  During the Great War, Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) is assigned to a Black regiment where he meets Harold Woodsman (John David Washington).  They are both severely wounded and are cared for by Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), an unconventional but wealthy and well-connected nurse.  After the war, the three of them bond as life-long friends during an idyll in Amsterdam but eventually they go their separate ways and return to the U.S.  It is now 1933 and Burt is a doctor who specializes in caring for veterans, Harold is a lawyer, and Valerie is an over-medicated invalid.  When Senator Bill Meekins (Ed. Begley, Jr.) dies under mysterious circumstances, his daughter Elizabeth (Taylor Swift) asks Burt and Harold to investigate because he was their commanding officer.  However, they become the prime suspects when she is also murdered just as they are about to reveal their findings.  They recruit Valerie to help clear their names and encounter Burt's estranged wife Beatrice Vandenheuvel (Andrea Riseborough) and her disapproving parents Augustus (Casey Biggs) and Alvelia (Dey Young), Valerie's brother Tom (Rami Malek) and his social climbing wife Libby (Anya Taylor-Joy), General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), a sympathetic policeman (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his suspicious partner (Alessandro Nivola), an MI5 agent (Mike Myers) and his counterpart at Naval Intelligence (Michael Shannon) who pose as bird watchers, and representatives from an organization dedicated to replicating the beliefs espoused by a rising dictator in Europe, before discovering the truth at a reunion of their former regiment.  This cast is absolutely amazing and I loved all of the performances, especially Malek and Myers who made me laugh out loud every time they were on screen, but I will say that I enjoyed individual scenes more than the whole.  There is definitely a lot going on with commentary on just about everything from racism to PTSD to the rise of fascism but I was particularly struck by the theme of friendship and the importance of choosing who you love.  The mad-cap humor is often at odds with these heavy themes but, ultimately, I thought it was very entertaining and definitely not as bad as the critics are suggesting.