Do we care what happens to cheating men? All right, lemme clarify … do we care what happens to powerful, slimy, ultra-rich men cheating on their wives with strippers and prostitutes? Go ahead and picture Donald Trump. I sure did. He’s the epitome of a man who believes that self-worth equals one’s bank account while morality is an impediment. If the call girls he solicits take advantage of him (or men like him) don’t you just smirk a bit and pretend it never happened?
It is 2007 and Wall Street executives are behaving as if Gordon Gekko is an amateur. Despite the frequency of coke-snorting playboys at the local strip club, Destiny (Constance Wu) just can’t find her destiny. It’s hard to know what to feel here … I want you to succeed to help your grandma pay her debts, Destiny, but –and I mean this especially since you seem to be lousy at the strippin’ game- have you thought about another profession?
And then JLo shows up. Well, that was fast. Like Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike, veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) appears to guide Destiny in the libido game and remind older viewers not to get rid of those decades-old posters just yet. And like a sexy Yoda, Ramona tutors Destiny in the ways of forcing horny men part with money. Times are good. Everybody gets a happy ending. This salad-days stuff is all prologue. The movie happens after the market falls apart and now single mom “Dorothy” has to go back to stripping to make ends meet.
What do you do when the potential Sugar Daddies all get religion? Hustlers says it was time to sell, and by selling they meant mobilizing a team of vixens to scope bars for married villains, drug them, kidnap them, and run up their expense accounts. If the Johns [read: Marks] ever complained, the girl story was “you had a great night; why fight it?” Yes, this is kinda abhorrent. Two things however: 1) The film demonstrated how isolated and vulnerable the women were. While Destiny was capable of paying the bills, Dorothy was not. The solidarity in her relationship with Ramona added several levels of security. 2) Almost to man, these guys are slimeballs. Do you really feel sorry for the kind of guy who throws money at a stripper? Yeesh.
Hustlers is based on a true story and is told as a memoir, which doesn’t work. Julia Stiles (remember her?) plays a reporter who gets the whole story straight from Dorothy partly as a fond memory and partly as a police blotter. About an hour before Dorothy finally gets there, we the audience wonder why she’s admitting a criminal past to an investigative reporter.
The most striking feature of Hustlers is not the selling of sex while being anti-John. That’s just a façade and a film perk. What Hustlers is truly about is adopting a defensive and justifiable tone for the crimes being committed: “Sure, we were drugging the dudes and ripping them off, but didn’t they have it coming?” And part of you, a LARGE part of you says, “yes, they did have it coming.” Yet if the roles were reversed, you’d want the guy put away for a long time, no? Is there a dollar bill mountain of hypocrisy there? I’m honestly not sure.
This is something of a dream role for JLo. What other film role is she ever going to have where she gets to show off her sex appeal, her smarts, her femininity, her feminist outlook, and her parental instincts all while looking like a supermodel? So it’s a shame that I’m on the down side of the fence here; while I was troubled by the fairly a-moral and callous message of the film combined with the unnecessary presence of Julia Stiles, I have no doubt that Hustlers will appeal, and justifiably so, to a number of women -especially sex workers- who have been bullied. I imagine that describes almost every sex worker, quite frankly. For this group of vulnerables, I hope this is your Holy Grail; enjoy it for all your might. God bless you, JLo.
♪JLo, is it fans you’re looking for?
Cuz I wonder how you pick
The roles that you do
Did they shrink when you turned five-oh?
Have you considered blue?
Tell me how’d you choose this art
Have you felt that ceiling glass?
Or do you just like shaking all that ass?♫
Rated R, 110 Minutes
Director: Lorene Scafaria
Writer: Lorene Scafaria
Genre: The sliding scale of morality
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Anybody who has been abused by a Wall Street douchebag
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People uncomfortable with ambiguity
♪ Parody Inspired by “Hello”
