Starring: Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, and Adam Rodriguez
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2012
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This is a movie about male strippers who work at the Xquisite Dance Club, an all-male revue club in Tampa, Florida, US. The film is based loosely on the real-life experiences of Channing Tatum, who worked as a male stripper for eight months when he was younger, and it is his life that partially motivated Soderbergh to make the movie.
Catholic viewers should be warned. The main professional aim in life of males in this movie is to perform so as to make the women watching them scream with delight. It is a world full of immorality. There is drug use, easy access to sex, and scenes of confronting nudity intended to titillate.
Adam (Alex Pettyfer) has trouble holding a job down, and works along-side Mike (Channing Tatum) on a construction site. Mike helps him out by offering him the dance world of male stripping. Cody Horn, who plays Adam’s sister, Brooke (and Mike’s love interest) is a woman who disapproves of men stripping for entertainment, but she comes to accept it only because it is what Adam has chosen to do. Mike manages to keep his personal and stage life separate, but Adam, dancing as “The Kid”, submits to the adulation of his audience, and is seduced by the glamour of it all.
The film has elaborate dance routines, and they are intended to entice. One of them, “It’s Raining Men”, has a group of half-naked males wielding umbrellas as obvious phallic symbols during their performance on stage, and all of the dances are choreographed, and photographed, to look raunchy. In addition to Mike and Adam, who take to the stage, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez and Kevin Nash play Big Dick Ritchie, Ken, Tito, and Tarzan, and are all routinely buffed and oiled for the part. Matthew McConaughey plays Dallas, the manager of the strip group, and owner of the club.
It would be tempting to write off the movie as a misguided excursion by Soderbergh into soft-core male pornography, but that doesn’t entirely do justice to the film. There are other aspects to it. Sodenbergh has directed quality movies like “Erin Brochovich” (2000), “Traffic” (2000), “Oceans 11” (2001), “Solaris” (2002), and most recently, “Contagion” (2011), and he brings a very distinctive style reliably to his movies. In all of them, he injects thoughtful themes. Characteristic of his direction, this film is about the American dream going sour, and is much darker than it looks on the surface.
In this film, the personal and professional lives of the male strippers are in collision, the men struggle with who they really are, and most are painfully aware of what their life is missing. They each perform as an object of desire, but everyone of them knows that the human condition is asking something more of them, that they haven’t yet delivered, or can’t do so.
All the males are made to look as if behaving badly is great fun, but that is not the case. Adam has enormous difficulty surviving, despite the odds, and Mike, edging 30, is getting old and is in financial trouble. The movie also reverses interestingly the usual world of cinema voyeurism. Here, it is males, not females, who are projected collectively as the objects of desire, and for Hollywood that is a little unusual.
The film concludes by Mike giving up his dancing for Brooke’s sake, and to find his real identity. However, most of the moral issues it raises remain unresolved. It has shown the abandonment on- (and off-) stage of people, who have much to lose, and to end by suggesting that issues can be solved by Brooke and Mike coming together is too convenient a solution.
This is a movie, which offers spectacle-entertainment, with meaning attached. Provocation lies beneath the glitz. Soderbergh has chosen to direct the film by trying to go beneath the seedy surface of life, and he is asking us to look more thoughtfully at the world around.
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