'Hustler's' Movie Review
BY CHARLIE HOBBS
For nearly as long as I have been familiar with her, I have posited that Jennifer Lopez should focus all of her lasers on acting. I am not trying to be rude in this advocacy; my position is based more in her strength on the screen than in her weakness in song (although her vocals should be examined at a later date). Until this point, however, I could only bolster my claim by pointing to performances as old as myself, namely Selena and Out of Sight. With the release of Hustlers this weekend, I can safely return to my plea for Lopez to retire from music.
It is true that this film takes liberal notes from Goodfellas, but I would actually place it more in the vein of I, Tonya in its study of women who commit crime. There is no point where the hustlers are exalted for their drugging of men, but this hard-lined look is doused with a healthy dose of compassion. These women have children, and they do bad things, thing that they feel they have no choice but to do given the world in which they live, in order to attain what their customers gained in more or less the same way. Hustlers is the most fun you will have at a movie, until suddenly it isn’t.
Lopez, who infamously received second tier billing for this film, is nonetheless its star. There is her dancing, where her Ramona makes her first impression, but her skill on the pole Trojan horses her into the room, at once distracting from and betraying her skill in manipulation. Every word that she utters is the truth, even when the audience knows that it absolutely is not. She hates the game, as we see when she is tipped to leave the room by men who “just aren’t feeling her” (one of the few unbelievable moments) but someone who is so good at playing it has no choice but to partake.
Very much holding her own is Constance Wu as Dorothy, who becomes Destiny when she walks the floor at Scores, the strip club where she and Ramona meet and work. She is actually at her best in her scenes with Julia Stiles, set years after the titular hustling as Stiles’ journalist interviews her for a piece about the scam. Here, a framing device that I normally loath (largely for ruining Atomic Blonde, which could and should have been iconic), allows Wu to at once retrospectively deny and subtly grieve how her actions affected Ramona, her daughter, and, most importantly to herself, herself.
As for that friendship, one must wonder what Hustlers could have been had it remained faithful to the account of the woman on whom Ramona is based, Samantha Barbash. Instead of warmth, a general indifference could have leveled the stakes beyond sisterhood. If each time one of them ran into trouble the rest ran scattershot away á la Keke Palmer (truly the MVP) in the scene most suited to my tastes in a movie whose entire runtime is already made entirely to my tastes.
Also so perfect that I audibly gasped on three occasions was the film’s ability to use music to violently whip you back in time to each time jump, setting the scene on a level beyond set dressing and costume. Director Lorene Scafaria moves so smoothly between disparate periods of time that there is no ache for explanation, whether a week has passed or three years. A perfect encapsulation of the recession and what followed told at last not by the people who caused it or could have stopped it.