Hustlers (Review)
Hustlers is a Good Film Filled with Reprehensible Characters.
To be honest, I’m a bit torn when it comes to Hustlers. On the one hand, it’s an incredible story, exquisitely told by writer/ director Lorene Scafaria. It features a jaw-dropping cast of beautiful women giving powerful performances as empowering characters. On the other hand, I have some pretty big moral qualms with some aspects of the story. Of course, I’m not talking about the fact that the heroines of the story are exotic dancers. I’m talking about the fact that they drug and rob from unsuspecting men. Still, part of the complexity of Hustlers is that even though I despised the characters for how far they took things because of their greed, I still couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them.
Based on one of those true stories that prove that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, Hustlers follows a gaggle of strippers struggling through the 2008 financial crisis. At the center of the story is Destiny (Constance Wu) who finds herself enamored with veteran exotic dancer Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). The pair become fast friends, but when stripping no longer pays the bills they decide to take things a bit further by becoming con artists. It doesn’t just stop there though, because soon greed overtakes them and they decide to make their lives a bit easier by simply drugging and essentially robbing rich businessmen.
Constance Wu might be the primary protagonist of Hustlers, but the real star is easily Jennifer Lopez. Don’t get me wrong, all the women in the film do a great job with their performance both on and off the stage, but this is easily the best I’ve ever seen Lopez on the big screen. There have been rumors about her deserving an Oscar as the ruthless Ramona, and I certainly hope they turn out to be true. In the film, she plays the ringleader of the group who, sick of seeing undeserving Wall Street scumbags being willfully blind to the consequences of their actions, takes a page from their own cutthroat playbook and starts preying on them. What makes her character so interesting is even though there’s no way to legitimately justify her actions, she manages to convince herself and others that there’s nothing wrong with their scheme. In her eyes, if they didn’t do it, someone else would. It’s a frightening mentality that puts her on a par with some of the more callous psychopaths I’ve seen on the big screen and Lopez sells it like she truly believes every word coming out of her mouth. Oh, and the target audience of Hustlers, will also probably love that the movie includes cameos from famous singers such as Cardi B (who is no stranger to the lifestyle or the reprehensible crimes in this film) and Lizzo.
I don’t believe that Hustlers would have been possible without a female director. There’s no escaping the aspect of the male gaze given the nature of the movie since these women do work in strip clubs, where they monetize exactly that for a living. However, it never lingers more than it has to on that aspect of their lives, and therefore those moments with nudity never lose their impact. Sure, it’s an element of who they are, but it’s never what defines them. Instead, the film dives into how hurt they are and how that suffering leads to them inflicting suffering of their own on others. It’s an examination of the cycle that continues to plague society. People are put in bad situations with no way out and then society is shocked when they have to do bad things to survive. That being said, by the height of the plot’s second arch, these women are not just doing this for survival, but to live lives of excess.
While I enjoyed Hustlers quite a bit, I still hate everything it embodies. Sure, there’s a fun, empowering aspect to it as women turn the tables on the men who treated them like slabs of meat there to gyrate on stage for their pleasure. However, the movie isn’t about these women outwitting these men and taking them for all they’ve got with the perfect con. They’re slipping them drugs and then running up their credit cards for everything their worth. While I agree that most of the men they prey upon are assholes that are probably facing divine justice embodied by these women, they soon take things too far as they stop hunting the men they know to be scumbags and start targeting strangers. I’m glad that at one point Hustlers acknowledges that they do actually ruin a few lives all for the sake of some Louboutin shoes. In that regard, Hustlers is the ultimate American dream movie, because in order for these women to get the lives they feel they deserve, they have to step on and crush a number of people to get there.
When all is said and done, Hustlers is a good movie. My biggest problem with it is simply a moral one and I found myself annoyed that the film seemed to celebrate the despicable actions taken by these women. While I had nothing but sympathy for them, even when they were simply conning men into going to a strip club and having one too many drinks as they racked up an insane bill, the moment they started to drug people I found myself seeing them as no better than the men they were after. To a certain degree, it tries to justify their actions as an extension of the toxic capitalist patriarchy that almost ruined this country in those times, and I find that troubling. Still, it’s incredibly entertaining to watch and even with my issues, I easily recommended it to a few friends that I knew would enjoy it for its “hustle” mentality.
