By There comes a point during the scam movie in which, directly or not, the question is put to the audience: would you try to get away with this if you could? The art of a great hustle movie is in convincing you that something we know is wrong is somehow right; in getting you to go along for the ride with an act that at first sounds outlandish, but by the end feels inevitable somehow.
We have perhaps never been more inured to scams, nor more sympathetic to those who manage to outsmart a rigged system. Behemoth companies get away with tax avoidance while treating their workers like human robots; banks go under due to their own recklessness yet are bailed out; traders make money off dying companies but won't let ordinary folk play them at their own game; and a reality TV host can make it to the White House with no experience and a trunk full of lies. Ever tried cancelling a free trial?
In an essay from from her 2019 book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes the story of a generation in seven scams, covering everything from student debt to the stuff that comes out your tap being marketed and sold as 'raw water'. "It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these days has the availability or the time?" she writes. "There are fewer and fewer options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly defensible way."
Indefensible ways of surviving have been surfacing in entertainment in recent years, chronicling real life scams as in The Big Short, Hustlers, and even a high profile case of literary forgery in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. There's also been fictitious scams on display in cinema, from the multiple Oscar-winner Parasite, to more recent films Kajillionaire and I Care A Lot. The fake German heiress Anna Delvey, whose story is dramatised in a Netflix series due next month, and founder of the doomed Fyre Festival Billy McFarland, have become figures of intrigue. Their commitment to the hustle, even as their worlds burn around them, is testament to the delusion which the scammer immerses themselves in.
Scamming is a shortcut to where you would have ended up anyway, right? A way of trying to level the playing field in a match which has been fixed against you. The problem, as we see in these stories of when things go wrong, is where we end up in this endless bending of the rules, this endless desperate asking of: would you do this if you could?
Parasite
At the heart of Bong Joon-Ho's dark class satire is the swindle that a poor family carries out on their rich counterparts. We are introduced to the Kim family and their cramped basement, where they vie for the best wifi spot and fold pizza boxes to make money, then, by contrast, the wealthy Park family who live in a gleaming glass box of a home filled with endless food, works of art and activities for their young children. The hustle, whereby each member of the Kim family poses as a tutor, housekeeper, driver and art teacher, to infiltrate the Park's palatial home, is a scam which has you cheering along gleefully, until it all goes horribly wrong.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Few people epitomise the era of the scammer quite like Jordan Belfort, the stockbroker who ran a penny-stock scam in which he conned hundreds of millions of dollars from people who he sweet-talked into buying stocks that he'd inflated the price of. DiCaprio is on fine form as Belfort in Martin Scorsese's suitably garish take on this scammer story, a uniquely pre-crash slice of America, and a fable of greed and capitalism. An early adopter of the hustler mentality, part of what makes his story part of the scam movie canon is his continual refusal to feel genuine contrition, as the self-proclaimed "Wolf" is still embarking on public speaking tours and publishing books, as well as now getting into the NFT grift.
The Big Short
Another financial fraud fable comes in this adaptation of Michael Lewis's book of the same name by director Adam McKay. The con we watch unfolding is the impending subprime-mortgage crisis, in which greedy banks got carried away agreeing mortgages with people with a poor credit rating and a little chance of being able to repay them. The teetering tower of these mortgages then burst, as we see chronicled in this star vehicle which uses sped-up explainers – Margot Robbie in the bath, for example – to explain complex financial jargon. What makes The Big Short so interesting is that its vantage point is those who saw it coming, and bet big accordingly. The 'short', then, is a kind of con on top of a con, whereby millions were made by someone betting on a rigged system
I Care A Lot
A drama that licks its lips at the prospect of cruelty, here Rosamund Pike plays a crooked legal guardian who dupes courts into appointing her as a custodian for the elderly before taking their riches. The enterprise comes unstuck when she targets a victim who has ties to a gangster, played by the wry Peter Dinklage. With wealth and hustling at the grubby heart of the film, here Pike's Marla Grayson satirises our obsession with wealth by showing the villainous hustles she's willing to pull in order to get what she wants. As with Promising Young Woman, the recent Emerald Fennel-directed film, here we see the image of the sweet white blonde woman used as bait to lure in unsuspecting victims, making a point about who we consider dangerous in society. Landing at a time of heightened interest in Britney Spears's conservatorship and the movement to #FreeBritney heating up, I Care A Lot is also an interesting exploration of autonomy and ownership.
Promising Young Woman
The scam at the heart of this story is both controversial and unremarkable, an act which does nothing but hold up a mirror to the supposed victim, and yet feels shocking in doing so. The film watches Cassie (a brilliant Carey Mulligan) drunk and alone, slumped in the corner of a club until a nice guy comes to rescue her night after night. The sleight of hand becomes clear as Cassie snaps to complete sobriety just as the man of the hour has nudged her onto his sofa, or pushed her flat as he starts to go down on her. His reaction to realising she has been watching him all along is so filled with guilt, anger and shame that it tells you everything about what he thought he was getting away with. Fennel's film is a rape revenge thriller dressed up as a slick blockbuster which keeps you guessing until the brilliantly twisted ending.
Kajillionaire
"Most people want to be be kajillionaires," says the father of the family of con artists in Kajillionaire. "That's the dream, that's how they get you hooked." This guiding principal of eschewing the rat race in favour of getting by on what you can is what pushes the trio to graduate from their small time hustle of raiding lost and found items to a bigger operation. After the group win a free holiday they pull a lost luggage scam, inviting in a stranger they meet to their misfit family, with things predictably going downhill from there. The story comes from the mad mind of Miranda July, the writer who takes a deliciously loose view on reality, and the film cleverly combines her eccentricities with the thrill of the scam, resulting in a story which is both amusing and very moving about the weirdness of life.
Hustlers
Jennifer Lopez may have never got her Academy Award nomination for Lorene Scafaria's excellent 2019 film Hustlers, but this strobe-lit dive into the strip clubs and shopping mall excesses of pre-crash New York City shines without a gold statue. Based on a New York Magazine article about strippers who drugged and robbed their clients when they stopped spending in the wake of the Great Recession, Hustlers recounts how these women wreaked vengeance on the slimy men who had abused and ridiculed them when they were on top, then dropped them when they hit rock bottom. As Pressler's original article managed to, Scafaria's adaptation is compelling about bending the rules when the system is broken, getting us on side with the women as they sink lower and lower, until you realise how far things have slipped.
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
The true story of writer and literary forger Lee Israel, who imitated the riotous letters of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when she was down on her luck, is turned into a brilliantly grotty tale of hustling in this film from Marielle Heller. In a rare sombre role, Melissa McCarthy is impressive as Israel, but it is Richard E Grant who steals the show as her partner in crime, with the actor's craftily executed awards season campaign even, in a meta twist, accused of being a hustle in itself. A story which is perfect for our twisted times, this victimless, highbrow scam satirises the stuffy of the literary world so well you never want Lee to get caught.
FYRE - The Greatest Party That Never Happened
The scammer who embodies the arrogant spirit of the modern hustle better than any other, Billy McFarland's catastrophic fall turned him into a global villain that many couldn't help admire the relentless self-belief of. The Netflix documentary pieces together the story without McFarland's input – for his take you'll want the Hulu version – but instead speaks to all the people who McFarland assembled for his festival paradise turned Lord of the Flies for influencers in Barbados. As one of the talking heads summarises poetically during the film: "A couple of powerful models posting an orange tile is what essentially built this entire festival. And then one kid with probably 400 followers posted a picture of cheese on toast that trended and essentially ripped it all down."
