Category: Film

In her new movie, 50-year-old Jennifer Lopez plays a stripper.

I knew before I even saw any reviews or previews that Jennifer Lopez is not going to strip in this movie.  Like Natalie Wood and Demi Moore and Jennifer Aniston, who have all played strippers in movies, she will embrace the peculiarly feminine trope of screaming “look at me!  I’m SO naughty!” without actually doing anything all that naughty.   She will somehow convey that she didn’t really want to play the role but just had to.  That somehow, this film about persuading men to give you money to take off your clothes, is really about female empowerment.

She will not do this film unless the director ensures that when she does her pole dance, the “audience” simply goes wild.  We don’t– it’s a rather pedestrian pole dance, and, fit as she is, Lopez is still 50– but the audience in the film are actually paid extras directed to “go wild” and shower the stage with money.  And we are supposed to believe that this is a kind of gutsy performance, the result of dedication and discipline and months of training.

She will fully expect, and the entertainment press will fully deliver, reviews that rave about her astonishing beauty.  Who would even think she was 50 years old?  And some reviewers will give her extra points for playing a character they think the audience thinks is dark or conflicted or interesting on some level that eludes me.

And a certain type of reviewer will fall in line by proclaiming that the 50-year-old will stun 20-year-olds into awed silence at her overwhelming deliciousness, while simultaneously shutting men up with her liberated, empowering, feistiness and bravado and blah blah blah.

Speaking for the entranced multitudes:

Nowhere is this truer than with the 50-year-old Lopez, who makes a magnificent entrance in “Hustlers” with an athletic, graceful and erotic dance number, and never lets go from there. Once again, she proves what an instinctive, spontaneous actress she is, infusing Ramona with her own Bronx-born street smarts, and carrying herself with the feline regality she’s acquired over a nearly 30-year career as one of the entertainment industry’s most gifted triple threats. In this raunchy, gloriously liberated revenge fantasy, Lopez rules with seductive, triumphant authority. Not only do we climb into her fur, we’ll happily follow her anywhere.   Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post

Let’s make this absolutely clear: Ann Hornaday is writing about her own projected self.  She is absolutely writing about herself.

Have you seen any other Jennifer Lopez films?  She may or may not have “feline regality” but she is far too busy being a star to be convincing in any of her roles.  And what is “feline regality” anyway, if not a code word for celebrity privilege and entitlement?   But we are given a clue about the reviewer’s perspective: she infuses “Ramona with her own Bronx-born street smarts”.  Is that code for the idea that she doesn’t really create a character– she just plays herself?

We understand why Hollywood religiously adheres to the titillation code: Wood, and Moore, and Aniston, and Lopez can play strippers and deceive you into thinking they are almost naked on screen (they never are) so you can enjoy the perversity of watching a “naked” woman, while reassuring yourself that you are a decent, morally upright human being because they are never actually naked.  You get to live in an envelope of widely accepted hypocrisy.

It is of a piece with Seth Rogan comedies: you get to talk dirty and make stupid jokes about bodily functions and then tack on some kind of sentimental moral lesson so that audiences can feel good about enjoying the smut.

In interviews, Lopez plays it for what it’s worth:

This is the first time you see my character. It’s sexy, it’s dangerous,” Lopez explained of her character’s introduction during the video diary.  From 

Source.

I am just stunning!  And empowering!  And stunning!  I display my empowerment by stripping for men (and then robbing them).  And stunning!

The distasteful part of it is that the film will show other characters in the film reacting as if they have waited their entire lives to watch a 50-year-old rich celebrity strip.  This is the arrangement: Lopez will draw a guaranteed constituency to pay to see the film (who revel in her celebrity status) and therefore has to power to essentially give herself a role more suited to a 25-year-old.  As I noted, the celebrity press will play along with this, even suggesting she should get an Oscar.

She continued: “There’s something liberating and empowering about it, but you’re really out there, physically, emotionally and psychologically.”  From Here.

That makes me morally superior to Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.

In some way or another.

 

 

“Klute” is a devilish movie.

If you asked any man to candidly express his biggest frustration with women, you are likely to get an answer like this: “I don’t know what they really want.”

“Klute” is too specific and particular to answer that question cleanly.  All it does is raise the possibility that men are generally being hosed when they think they have been given an answer.  It also indirectly raises the question of whether women are being hosed when they think they have been given the question.  All in that dark brain of that self-possessed, insidiously clever woman, Bree Daniels.  (She is variously called “Bree Daniel” and “Bree Daniels” in the film– check it out.)

Here’s a summary:  Tom Gruneman, a businessman in Tuscarora, PA, disappears one day.  After six months of frustration, his boss, Peter Cable, and family, hire a private detective and family friend, John Klute (Donald Sutherland, who is wonderful in the role), to undertake an investigation to try to determine what happened to him.  Their only real clue is an violently obscene letter found in Gruneman’s desk, addressed to an escort named Bree Daniels in New York.  In this well-made film, the family does not appear to be totally shocked– they’re more concerned about the disappearance, than they are shocked by the indiscretion,  at the moment.  But that colorful little detail adds a murky, dark texture to the quest.  What was he up to?

Klute goes to New York and contacts Bree Daniels.  She refuses to see him at first.  So Klute takes an apartment in her building, below hers, and succeeds in tapping her phone and recording her calls.  He uses the recordings as leverage to get her to agree to meet with him.  When she does, she tries to entice him in the most predictable way imaginable, but he is clearly unmoved by her exotic allure, and her sexuality.  Instead, he persuades her to lead him on a dark exploration of the world of drug addicts and prostitutes in New York, to gather information from anyone who may have had contact with Gruneman, including the  prostitute who gave him Bree’s name.

At one point, she asks him what he thinks about her glamorous life in the city and her friends: he tells her they are pathetic, and she is wounded.  She liked to think she was somehow shocking and roguish (oddly, like the Sally Bowles character in “Cabaret”, who also seemed to take a special pleasure in the illusion that she was somehow shockingly outrageous).

This narrative is periodically interrupted with Bree’s therapy sessions with a female  psychiatrist.  Bree tells her how she feels about her job, how it gives her control and power over men, how they are easily manipulated, and how she needs to know that they desire her.  These are some of the most corrosive passages in the movie.  They are among the most corrosive passages in any movie (the only serious competition probably comes from “Carnal Knowledge”).  Do you think you know your wife?  Even worse is the “You Don’t Own Me” aspect of it: Bree is consummately independent, self-contained, needless.  She wants life on her own terms.  She doesn’t need or expect anyone to enter her life to protect or manage her.

She thinks she might become a model or an actress: in another caustic scene, she goes to a cattle call for actresses, and we witness how the women are lined up, examined, and judged clinically, and rejected.  And we learn how Bree sees the way society judges women.

Here’s brilliant artistry: we aren’t give the “Shawshank Redemption” treatment here, and asked to be shocked and outraged at Bree”s treatment at these auditions.  Instead, we become aware of how deeply embedded this kind of objectification is– it is casual and routine, and Bree herself isn’t shocked.  It is a far more powerful statement than the more usual Hollywood treatment, in which Bree would demand attention, receive it, and glow with triumph while earning the grudging respect of the cruel casting directors.

There’s nothing caricatured or mean about this scene, other than the subject: the casting directors act in a way that is a caricature of how we judge beauty and worthiness.  It’s just the way we do business.  Bree understands that and plays along with it when necessary, but you can see how her options are really limited.  How different, really, is the industry that also dehumanizes the subjects of our gaze, manipulates them like objects, punishes them for not matching our illusions about beauty and privilege.

It raises the question though– why doesn’t Bree just get an education and look for a regular job?  She’s smart and attractive.  “Klute”  answers that question: because it would only result in her being used in different ways, being pressed into conformity, and forced to sacrifice her independence.  It would be part of the package that Gruneman and John Klute himself represent, and they illustrate to her that even the powerful members of that society are drawn to the outliers, the rebels, the divergent.

It challenges the most fundamental assumptions about sex and sexual relationships and power and privilege and desire.

Spoiler Alert

In the end, perhaps as a concession to the audience, Bree does decide to take a chance on a more conventional lifestyle.  It doesn’t feel totally plausible to me, but it doesn’t hurt the story very much, artistically, because it doesn’t anesthetize the viewer with drippy music or a pastel sunset.  They both know it won’t be easy.

And the astute viewer knows that it probably won’t work.

[updated 2019-09-23]