A Fairytale in Modern Dress

Rating: 7/10 (23 October 2006)

"Pretty Woman" came at the end of the decade that gave us the "greed is good" mentality and the concept of the yuppie, so it is perhaps fitting that the male lead, Edward Lewis, is a ruthless millionaire businessman. Lewis specialises in taking over companies, splitting them up and selling off the profitable parts. While in Los Angeles to conclude a deal, he gets lost while driving in his car and stops to ask directions from an young woman named Vivian, who just happens to be a prostitute. Edward's work involves a good deal of socialising, but being divorced and having recently split up with his girlfriend, he has no female partner to accompany him. Much taken with the attractive Vivian, he offers her $3000 to be his escort for the week. Of course, this being a romantic comedy, they end up falling in love with one another.
As has often been pointed out, that is not a realistic story line. Indeed, this film has been criticised for its lack of realism, but romantic comedies, especially that sub-category of the genre dealing with love between people of different social backgrounds, are not generally supposed to be exercises in kitchen-sink realism. Contrary to what we might have been led to believe by "Maid in Manhattan", for example, most Republican senators (or Democrat ones for that matter) are not married to Latina chambermaids. Nor (pace Richard Curtis in "Notting Hill") do female Hollywood superstars generally find the love of their life working in small bookshops in West London. It is a historical fact that no British Prime Minister has ever married his tea-lady (not even Palmerston, whose appetite for working-class girls was legendary), so it seems that Mr Curtis got it wrong in "Love, Actually" as well. Like "Maid in Manhattan" and "Love, Actually", "Pretty Woman" is a modern dress version of all those old fairy tales about the poor girl who falls in love with a prince.
The film has also been criticised by certain moralists for giving an excessively romantic and glamorised picture of prostitution. Certainly, it is not exactly realistic to suggest that every prostitute is a beautiful, healthy, carefree Julia Roberts lookalike who ends up marrying a handsome millionaire. On the other hand, the moralists' preferred position on prostitution- that every prostitute is a drug-addicted disease-ridden crack whore living in squalid poverty who ends up either dying of AIDS or being murdered by a modern Jack the Ripper- is equally unrealistic. Vivian is an example of the "tart with a heart", a stock character who has been part of the literary tradition going back at least as far as "La Dame aux Camellias" (when Vivian and Edward go to the opera together, it is to see "La Traviata", based upon Dumas's story) and part of the cinematic tradition since at least the sixties, when film censorship began to be relaxed. (Think, for example, of Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's").
Julia Roberts's performance in this film was reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn in another way. Hepburn had the ability to seize hold of any film and, through the force of her personality, make it entirely her own so that one just cannot imagine any other actress in the leading role. That is just what Roberts does here. Vivian may be a tart, but Roberts makes her so lovable, playful and full of life that the audience instantly fall in love with her. (The use of the Christian name "Vivian" may have been deliberately significant on the part of the scriptwriters- it is derived from the same Latin root, meaning "living", that gives us the word "vivacious"- the word that best sums up Roberts's character). There are thematic links with two other Hepburn films, "Sabrina" and "My Fair Lady", which also feature poor girls who fall in love with wealthy men. (Vivian is seen watching a fourth Hepburn film, "Charade", on television). The relationship between Vivian, who gradually learns social graces under Edward's tutelage, parallels that between Eliza and Higgins in "My Fair Lady".
In this film, made when she was a promising starlet, Roberts plays a woman in love with a high-status man. By the time she made "Notting Hill" nine years later, she had become an established star, and the roles were reversed; her character, Anna, is the high-status woman in love with a man from a humbler background. In both films, however, it is the lower-status character who is mentally stronger. Anna is beautiful and successful but insecure. Similarly, Richard Gere's Edward has been immensely successful in business and outwardly appears confident and self-possessed. Underneath, however, he is also insecure, going through a crisis of conscience about his dubious business ethics and worried by the fact that he makes his money through financial sleight of hand, without ever producing anything tangible. He admits that his main psychological motivation has been anger against his father, from whom he was estranged. There is a sub-plot involving Edward's attempts to take over a family-owned shipbuilding firm; he gradually comes to respect the elderly patriarch who has built that company up, and there is a suggestion that he has come to see the old man as a substitute father.
"Pretty Woman" may be an unrealistic, cliché-ridden story, a fairy-story in modern dress, but, like "Notting Hill", it does have some psychological depth. Moreover, it was so well done, and Roberts and Gere both play their parts so well, that I couldn't help enjoying it. 7/10