Film review: Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers
“This whole country’s a strip club. You’ve got people tossing the money and people doing the dance,” Lopez’s Regina tells Julia Stiles , who plays a version of nonjudgmental journalist Jessica Pressler, investigating the case. Practically everyone in “Hustlers” is playing some version of a real person, although Stiles is just about the only one whose casting doesn’t amount to a million-dollar makeover.
By incorporating Pressler’s reporting into her big-screen treatment, Scafaria raises questions about representation right off the top: What kind of biases do outsiders bring when they think about strippers? “Hustlers” humanizes the women at its center, giving them boyfriends, backstories and, most importantly, agency.
Destiny’s new-girl status excuses Wu’s relatively clumsy moves while giving Scafaria reason to walk audiences through the profession. Unless you’ve given or gotten a lap dance yourself, the rules of the game are not at all obvious — and frankly, remain a bit too mysterious in their impartial explanation here. At a club like Moves , the women earn nothing for dancing but work for tips, giving a hefty cut to the club, which provides the rooms where the patrons start to get really generous.
Things are safer when the women work together — as Destiny starts to do with Ramona — which also makes it easier to coax more cash out of their human ATMs. “It’s a business, and it’s more honest than any transaction they did that day,” Destiny explains, buying Gucci bags with a stack of sweat-soaked singles while a prim-and-proper saleswoman looks on in mild disapproval.
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