In the immortal words of patron saint Beyoncé, a "diva is a female version of a hustla." The new movie Hustlers — about a group of strippers who steal from wealthy men — embodies that concept fully, not just due to its cast of unparalleled iconic diva-hustlers, but by making you feel like one of them.
Guaranteed to be one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year, this is the Girl's Trip of 2019, and it's best experienced in a theater. Go with the friends you know are ready to wild the fuck out. It took all of 20 minutes for my crowd, a small group of media and industry professionals, to drop all pretenses of professionalism and erupt in celebratory screams of unadulterated joy.
But the true power of Hustlers lies in the juxtaposition of visceral highs against harshly relatable realities.
Based on a famed investigative piece in New York Magazine, the movie centers around an industrious team of strippers who decide to turn the tables on their wealthy Wall Street patrons. After the 2008 recession threatens their way of life, they venture down more illegal (and increasingly morally questionable) avenues to secure their financial independence by taking advantage of the men that used to exploit them.
It's a hot, savvy, steamy, sobering, fun, poignant distillation of American's abusive relationship to capitalism. More specifically, it captures the impossibility of finding your power as a woman in a social system that insists on placing more value in you as property than as a person.
While clearly sympathetic to the women behind the operation, Hustlers is also perceptive enough to show how we all get fucked over by the zero-sum game of capitalism to varying degrees. Whether a Wall Street bro or the stripper drugging them, everyone's doing soul-sucking works that blurs the lines of legality and ethics.
But only one of them suffers actual consequences for that criminality.
The balance between Hustler's extremes -- comedy and glorification versus tragedy and realism -- isn't always flawless. Pacing is its biggest weakness; like most movies nowadays, it could benefit from a much tighter runtime.
But it's hard to get too hung up on any flaws when most of the cast, particularly the inimitable Jennifer Lopez, delivers a performance as unapologetically glamorous as it is achingly human. Lopez is the gravitational pull of this movie, with everything else (including an astounding parade of A-list cameos) orbiting around the blinding heat of her glory. If you think equating Lopez to the sun is an exaggeration, then you haven't seen this movie.
There are so many traps Hustlers could've easily fallen into but didn't, thanks to the deft hands of writer/director Lorene Scafaria known for Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.
The "sex worker with a heart of gold" trope is as tired as it is patronizing. Stories about female friendship are too often reduced to warm fuzzies, glossing over the many struggles of building sisterhood in a patriarchal society designed to keep us in competition rather than in solidarity. It luxuriates in the sexuality of its protagonists without ever exploiting it. In a cultural moment when stories about women using sex to deceive men for money could easily do more harm than good, it navigates those dangerous waters flawlessly with care and confidence.
Due to its subject matter and premise, Hustlers will probably get comparisons to Magic Mike, The Big Short, Wolf of Wall Street -- which only goes to show women can't do anything without being defined in comparison to men. While Hustlers addresses similar topics, its approach is grounded in the perspectives that almost always get left out or misrepresented in conversations about America's rigged capitalist system.
Because it's not just the economic system that's rigged. The social values entrenched in our moral codes are so sexist, classist, and racist in themselves that it's easy to lose sight of when breaking them is or isn't justified.
Hustlers doesn't offer easy answers about whether it's "right" or "wrong" for people born without privilege to take from those who were. It's an honest portrayal of the circumstances that lead these particular women to do it, ultimately indicting the society that forces us to treat one another like transactions.
It sounds cliché, but what makes Hustlers a truly Empowering Female Narrative is the depiction of womanhood in all its shades of humanity: beautiful and ugly, powerful and vulnerable, good and corruptible, victims and victimizers.
Beyond that, everyone can identify with the struggle to do what you need to do to thrive in a world that doesn't even really care if you survive it.
