New spin on an old theme

Rating: 7/10 (25 October 2000)

Pretty Woman is a popular and very familiar movie meant for a popular audience, the main attraction being the charisma of its two box-office buffos, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.
I always feel a certain sense of interest when anticipating a Richard Gere film. I know that in some way he will be slick and sleazy (e.g., Breathless (1983), Internal Affairs (1990), etc.) and I can get involved in his contrary nature. In other words, he won't bore me with a one-dimensional persona. Here however he is thoughtful, kind, considerate, intelligent--a non-sleazy, gray-suited business man with a wise and fatherly manner. Perhaps this is Gere's persona for his middle years...
In the case of Julia Roberts, not only is she nice to look at, she is interesting to look at. It is no accident that her face is one of the silver screen's dominate images from the nineties. She has a powerfully expression nature and can assume a role as easily as one puts on a coat. She is striking physically, the huge mouth, the delicate nose, the long limbs... She is also the quintessence of a woman who can appear ordinary or beautiful according to circumstances. I have seen her in two PBS productions of Nature. (Yes, she is a Hollywood star with compassion, or at least one who loves animals.) In one she is in Borneo with orangutans, and in the other in Mongolia with the descendants of Genghis Khan and the wild horses. In both cases she throws herself into the dirt and discomfort like a trooper without a hint of the glamour she left thousands of miles behind. She charms both the children of the nomads and the orangutans. In fact, one randy orangutan becomes so smitten with her that he starts to put the moves on, and has to be restrained! In other words she has an equalitarian, democratic, down-to-earth nature which sits well with a popular audience. She has made so many movies lately (hurriedly as her youth is expiring: she is now over thirty, the age of death for most Hollywood actresses) that I cannot keep up with them, so many that her ranking among the great stars of the screen is still up for grabs as we evaluate her many performances.
Will her role in Pretty Woman help? Although I found it difficult to swallow her fake bad grammar, the phony lack of sophistication, and the predictability of her golden heart, I thought it marginally plausible that such a striking woman COULD in some strange parallel universe be reduced to hooking in Hollywood. And I thought she did a creditable job by bringing some originality to a well-worn role. Certainly I believed in Julia Roberts, the whore, as much as I did in Elisabeth Shue, the whore (from Leaving Las Vegas (1995)). Had Roberts been portrayed as a drug addict--which of course Hollywood made a stringent point of NOT doing, since they needed Middle America to identify with her in order to sell tickets--I might have bought it. Most American prostitutes are drug addicts. That's how most of them they got enslaved into the business in the first place.
So what we have here is a variation on an old Hollywood fantasy: poor, underclass girl, through her natural beauty, lovable nature and good common sense wins the heart of a man of considerable means, thus upgrading her social and economic status, etc. In others words, this is a woman's fantasy-fulfillment movie all the way. The real question to be asked, though, is how did the chemistry between the two stars work? Do Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have anything to be jealous about? I think not, but judging from the box office success and the fact that they were paired again in Runaway Bride (1999), I am probably wrong. But see it and judge for yourself. Despite the cliché situation, this is more than a confectioner's diversion because of what it implies, and what we can learn, about the American psyche, circa 1990.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)