Hustlers (2019)

Film: Hustlers (2019)
Stars: Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart
Director: Lorene Scafaria
Oscar History: Lopez scored a Globe nomination, but ended up being the shock snub at the Oscars.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's always weird to see a film that is slightly post-peak in the immediate pop culture zeitgeist, particularly when that film has become an unlikely critical darling.  Thus was the reality of me, who has been getting over a cold for the past two weeks, this past weekend finally catching the movie that pretty much everyone on Twitter had already seen.  Hustlers, based on the trailer, was not a movie that I would have normally invested my time in.  Revenge fantasy films aren't really my cup of tea, and while the cast list was impressive from a "very 2019" attitude (in addition to the above women, they also found roles for singers Lizzo & Cardi B), it didn't really jump-off-the-page for me in the trailer.  However, the reviews were too good to pass up (and considering how late we are in the year, I don't turn down any film with Oscar buzz), so I headed out to the cinema and watched Hustlers.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Dorothy (Wu), who goes by the stripper name of Destiny.  Dorothy is a woman who is down-on-her-luck, trying to make a living to provide for her grandmother who raised her, and is doing so as a struggling stripper at a local New York City hotspot.  She can't seem to find the right groove at the club, and so she reaches out to Ramona (Lopez), a veteran at the club who seems to be able to command respect and mountains of cash from the patrons.  Soon they're cleaning up, but the stock market crash (and Dorothy's unexpected pregnancy) separates them for a while, and when they inevitably reunite it's under different circumstances.  Now they are trying to scam the men they are dating, drugging them to charge thousands of dollars on their credit cards, doing so with the assistance of other dancers like Mercedes (Palmer) & Annabelle (Reinhart).  As the film progresses, the relationship between Dorothy & Ramona feels more strained, as Dorothy becomes convinced that Ramona is taking their enterprise too far, and indeed she is-eventually they are found out by the police when one mark catches them confessing on a phone call, and they have a final break that seems like it will mend over the film's final moments.

All of this is told to Elizabeth (Stiles), a journalist who is interviewing Dorothy, and we soon learn Ramona, for an article about the incidents.  This is perhaps the film's biggest flaw, as while Stiles is good in an underwritten role (essentially playing the audience), it's also a pretty convenient writing crutch.  When you feel like the women are taking things too far, Elizabeth is there to voice "some people may think you took it too far, but I don't," trying to hide some of the bigger flaws in the film's structure.  After all, while the guys that these women are scamming are largely scum (they profit off of the misery of other people for their own greed), frequently the women are doing the same thing by the end of the film, with almost no actual retribution.  We see shopping sequences where Dorothy & Ramona drown themselves in designer purses and boots, but it's just another cog in the hyper-consumerist culture that we're supposed to hate about the Wall Street guys but dismiss in our heroines.  I personally left feeling not bad for the Wall Street guys, who treat these women like objects they can play with for the night, but I also left not feeling particularly strongly for the women in the film either, who use a criminal life not to necessarily better their own circumstances, but to indulge in a similarly-decadent lifestyle.

A lack of sympathy for the women might have something to do with Constance Wu in the center of the film.  Her Dorothy is a mystery, someone who is guarded for most of the film (there's a lot of late-in-the-film reveals about her past that might make a repeat viewing more interesting), but she really shouldn't be in order to gain a perspective into her.  Wu is not great with underwritten characters (see also Crazy Rich Asians), where she's forced to find things that aren't on-the-page, and gets washed out by more intriguing side performers and better actresses like Palmer or Reinhart or Handmaid's Tale's Madeline Brewer as other women involved in the scheme.  Since she's the main protagonist, not being invested at all in her work, where she swings wildly from one scene to another in terms of her motivations, is a struggle, and kind of stopped my interest in the film.  Considering the box office of both Hustlers and Crazy Rich, Wu seems to be establishing herself as a leading woman presence in films for at least the next few years, so I hope she grows on me since she's likely around for a while, but her performance here left me feeling nothing for a lead, and nearly ruined the movie.

Luckily, you have Jennifer Lopez firing on all cylinders here.  Lopez is an intriguing star that we don't discuss much because she doesn't make a lot of the "type of films" she did early in her career, when Selena and Out of Sight put her in a place where she might become a different kind of actress/performer.  However, she transitioned into a pop star and celebrity-diva persona in the tabloids, frequently more famous for her ageless beauty and romances/feuds than she was for the product she was producing.  Here she reminds us why we became intrigued in the first place, giving her best film work in twenty years.  Ramona is a firework, always magnetic, someone you're instantly drawn toward.  Lopez is tasked with playing a character everyone is obsessed with (for various reasons), even when they know it's probably not for the best, and she nails that role.  There are moments toward the end where the script's sloppiness & framing device with Stiles's Elizabeth nearly throw her Ramona aside, giving too many character traits (particularly the on-again/off-again motherly attitude between Ramona & Dorothy) for her to be able to work into her performance, but she's dynamic in this part.  If the Oscar nomination happens (it could-it's a weak year and Lopez will surely push hard for this because she's been around long enough to know what an Oscar nomination would be worth and how rare a chance to nab one is), it'll be understandable and hardly unearned.  This might not be Meryl Streep-style acting, but it's definitely a star performance from an actress who has always had the potential, but rarely the parts, to make such a creation happen.