What I’m Watching: the new film ‘Hustlers’Date: 9/18/2019 \What I’m watching: the new film “Hustlers.”
In theaters: Hustlers
If your impression of “Hustlers” is that it is a film that expresses a moral judgment about strippers, or is a crime movie, or is designed to excite audiences with the idea of seeing a major movie star naked or partially naked, you would be wrong.
“Hustlers” is a far more complicated film than what you might think. It is a film about a particular era in American finance and history. It is about a close relationship formed between two women through adversity. It is about the relationships between men with money and power and with women who have neither and how the tables are turned. It is about the rawest form of capitalism and greed. It is about the lines that blur between real human interaction and fantasy.
Director and writer Lorene Scafaria has adopted a 2015 New Yorker article titled “Hustlers at Scores” that detailed how two strippers in New York’s financial district devised a plan to continue their incomes that had been decimated by the 2008 financial crash. They would target still wealthy businessmen, drug them, bring them to the VIP room of their strip club, take their credit card information and max out the card. The drugs they gave the men would obscure the memories of the encounters.
In her screenplay, Scafaria tempers the real life story quite a bit – apparently the two leaders of the scam were not as close as depicted in the film and have little interest in having a friendship now – humanizing the story and giving greater emotional depth.
Constance Wu, who is known for her TV role as the co-star of “Off the Boat” and her role in “Crazy Rich Asians,” plays Dorothy/Destiny, a woman who strips not just to support herself but also her grandmother. Her income changes for the better when she is befriended by Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), a veteran performer who teaches her a bit of pole dancing and a lot of psychology.
While Destiny enjoys her increasing financial success, she also questions what she and Ramona are doing – how far they should go in harvesting money from the credit cards and how they are treating some of the men. Ramona does not share very much of her concerns.
Eventually one of their victims contacts the police and the scam is stopped.
The film is well paced and the two leads deliver nuanced performances. Wu’s character is more sympathetic, but Lopez’s Ramona is not quite a villain. Her character is someone who has been trained by her interactions to take a situation and exploit it for all that it’s worth – just as the Wall Street types who have been her customers would do.
The difference is that she and Destiny were caught when they went too far.
I think this film fits in nicely with Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” and Martin Scorseses’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as examinations of the dark side of American capitalism.
As I’ve done in the past, I asked someone who actually has experience in a field of endeavor depicted in a film if they thought the film captured something genuine. So, I asked a friend who has worked as an exotic dancer what she thought of “Hustlers.”
She said, “I agree with most of your review, except I do not agree that Ramona’s friendship was genuine nor do I agree she had a respect for human interaction for she used it at its highest and its lowest points. She wasn’t a vigilante for the many families who lost their money in the crash. She preyed on the inebriated, which is worse because it’s entrapment.
“Since the movie was to showcase an “Oceans 11” type scam, I would have liked if they were speaking from behind bars rather than just to some journalist. The punishment didn’t fit the crime, especially since we don’t know what ever happened to that guy who overdosed.”
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