STRIPTEASE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Demi Moore, Burt Reynolds, Ving Rhames, Armand Assante, Robert Patrick. Screenplay: Andrew Bergman. Director: Andrew Bergman. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
"It's not SHOWGIRLS" one trailer for STRIPTEASE bluntly announces, capping off a marketing campaign which may be the first in recent memory to attempt to convince the movie-going public that a new film is _nothing_ like a previous film. Sure, it works the other way all the time, thanks to pre-fabricated critical blurbs like "This year's FORREST GUMP" or reminders of the director's previous successes, but the stink of SHOWGIRLS is such that it threatens to contaminate anything featuring a pelvis and a pole. Of course, if you remembered that writer-director Andrew Bergman is behind such comedic gems as THE IN-LAWS, THE FRESHMAN and HONEYMOON IN VEGAS, you'd know not to expect SHOWGIRLS. The real question is whether you'd expect STRIPTEASE, a film as inconsistent in its tone as it is occasionally hilarious.
Demi Moore stars as Erin Grant, a Miami woman forced to extreme measures when her pill-popping, police-informant ex-husband Darrell (Robert Patrick) is granted custody of their 7-year-old daughter Angie (Rumer Willis, Moore's real-life daughter). To earn the necessary money for the appeal, Erin takes a job dancing at the Eager Beaver, a topless bar which counts Congressman Davey Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds) among its regulars. One night, Dilbeck is caught on film assaulting another patron at the bar, a fact which deeply concerns Dilbeck's staff and corporate supporters. When the photographer and another man turn up dead, homicide detective Lt. Garcia (Armand Assante) begins an investigation which draws Erin and her daughter into a nasty mess of sleazy politics.
Moore received the surprising sum of $12.5 million to bump-and-grind her way through STRIPTEASE, and at the very least the producers should take solace in the fact that she picked up dancing a heck of a lot faster than she has picked up this whole acting thing. There is something both smug and overly earnest about Moore's standard screen pose, as though she never wanted there to be any doubt that she felt deeply about whatever her predicament might be, but also that nothing could stop her if she set her mind to it. In STRIPTEASE, that is a major problem. This is supposed to be a frisky comedy, but Moore's deadly serious performance acts like ankle weights on a swimmer. There are scenes between her and Armand Assante which seem to come from a second-rate TV-movie -- "Baring Her Soul: The Erin Grant Story."
That's a real shame, because there are plenty of moments in STRIPTEASE where Bergman's wonderfully weird sense of humor gets to shine through. Ving Rhames has a great role as the Eager Beaver's put-upon bouncer Shad, a man looking for the get-rich-quick scheme which will allow him to get out of the bouncer business; he gets one of STRIPTEASE's best moments as he impresses a couple of thugs with tales of his responsibilities "auditioning" topless dancers. Burt Reynolds is completely over the top as Dilbeck, a pathetic, fetishistic drunkard who coats himself in Vaseline and sniffs Erin's dryer lint before addressing a Young Christians' conference, and there is something improbably enjoyable about the way Reynolds doesn't even pretend to modulate his performance. Bergman makes fine use of oddball supporting characters, and seasons STRIPTEASE liberally with his trademark unpredictability, like a priceless scene during the film's climax involving Erin's daughter, two well-endowed dancers and a jump-rope.
There are plenty of laughs in STRIPTEASE, enough to make it moderately entertaining, but the reason STRIPTEASE isn't a better movie is that they're the wrong _kind_ of laughs for the material. Based on Carl Hiaasen's novel, the story demands a darker edge in its political satire, a sense of irony that the topless dancer is one of the few characters in the film with any morals. That simply isn't Andrew Bergman's style; his comedy may be wild, but it's always good-natured. When Burt Reynolds' Congressman is as absurd a character as the general played by Richard Libertini in THE IN-LAWS, it's tough to extract any biting commentary. The result is a film which is moving in several different directions at once: the source material is trying to make it dark, Bergman is trying to make it silly, and Moore is trying to make it serious. When it's silly, STRIPTEASE is super, but a lot of the time it's not clear _what_ STRIPTEASE is. Except, of course, that it's _not_ SHOWGIRLS.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Demi-clad women: 6.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews