The Looming Great Depression Makes the Terrific, Economic Downturn-based 2019 Dark Comedy Hustlers Almost Too Real and Relatable
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m not sure why I did not see 2019’s Hustlers during its theatrical run or in the six years since its release, except that I only started writing about new movies in theaters in the last couple of years for my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
I’m glad a generous patron chose the film because it is timely to an uncanny degree. It is downright spooky how closely the film’s drama and dark comedy mirror the current awful, uncomfortable cultural moment.
We are seemingly on the verge of a global recession caused by the ignorance and bull-headedness of an exemplar of toxic masculinity who thinks that he understands the world, and the world of business, better than anyone else, including people who have won the Nobel Prize for economics.
Hustlers is about financial desperation, the long, lingering effects of recessions, the battle of the sexes, and the savage iniquities engendered by late-stage capitalism. It’s a deeply empathetic look at hustlers who use MDMA and Ketamine to drug rich businessman into a state of unconsciousness so that they can rob them blind.
In this terrible timeline, the wealthiest businessman in the world drugs himself into a stupor with Ketamine, then robs the American people blind to finance massive tax cuts for billionaires.
Hustlers was a critical and commercial hit even if Jennifer Lopez did not receive an Academy Award, or even an Academy Award nomination, for her career-best performance as Ramona Vega, the maternal ring-leader of a gang of sex workers who drug and rob rich Wall Street assholes.
She was robbed.
Lopez’s performance favorably recalls Demi Moore’s similarly gutsy comeback turn in The Substance. It’d be impossible to imagine Lopez in this role twenty years earlier, just as Moore wouldn’t make any sense in The Substance if she were in her forties.
The singer-actress had to age into the role. There’s an emotional depth that comes with age, experience, and failure. Lopez had to live and suffer for the character’s frustration to feel real.
Constance Wu stars as Dorothy/Destiny, a stripper working at Moves, a sketchy club, to help her grandmother. She’s struggling to get by before she becomes infatued with Ramona, a sex worker who seemingly has all the answers.
The younger sex worker has an intense, instant bond that seems more than platonic, if not quite sexual. She embraces the older sex worker as a mentor who exposes her to a world of money and power.
Hustlers is a unique exploration of strip clubs in that it is a movie about sex work that seems more interested in work than sex.
We see the strip club’s patrons the way Destiny and Ramona do, as ATMs with hard-ons. The strip club’s clientele may be masters of the universe in their high-powered jobs on Wall Street, but at Moves, they’re sentient wallets begging to be fleeced.
It certainly does not hurt that our anti-heroines are so insanely attractive that many heterosexual men would consider it an honor to be robbed by such sexy women.
For Ramona, the hustle is as psychological as it is physical. She knows how to manipulate men into a state of horniness so extreme and intense that they’re seemingly willing to do anything to get off.
I read that Martin Scorsese passed on directing Hustlers. That makes sense because he only makes super-macho gangster movies about how the mafia is awesome and that you should definitely commit crimes.
Hustlers explores the decadent world of Wall Street super-bros from a markedly different angle than The Wolf of Wall Street. The coke-snorting, champagne-swilling hedonists of Scorsese’s controversial 2013 hit don’t see the sex workers they employ as fully human. They’re sex objects who exist entirely for their pleasure rather than human beings with aspirations and agency.
The women of Hustlers similarly do not see their victims as entirely or even mostly human. It isn't until deep into the third act that Hustlers acknowledges that stealing from the rich may, in fact, be morally wrong. Otherwise, the film sees its protagonists as Robin Hoods in thongs and pasties who steal from the rich to avoid being poor.
With Ramona’s guidance and help, Destiny finds herself in an exciting, glamorous world of sex, money, and power. They’re fast friends who make the most of every opportunity until the financial crisis of 2008 delivers a bracing reality check.
Ramona, the money-making queen of Moves, finds herself folding modestly priced clothing at the Gap. Desperation hits Moves as well. The girls begin to perform sex acts just to survive.
Destiny has a child and tries to leave sex work behind for a straight job, but her work history makes that tough.
A few years later Destiny reunites with Ramona, and, with the help of eager newcomers like Keke Palmer’s Mercedes, sets about relieving Wall Street douche bags of their money and self-respect.
Hustlers is almost too entertaining. It’s so much fun, funny, and energetic that you find yourself glibly cheering on immoral, illegal, and destructive behavior. It pains me to admit this, but wealthy Wall Street bros are, in a very real way, also human—at least some of the time.
The film’s framing device has Elisabeth, a journalist played by Julia Stiles, interview Destiny about her relationship with Ramona and descent into crime. Elisabeth speaks for the audience when she says that she doesn’t feel sorry for the men the strippers fleeced.
We aren’t encouraged to feel for the larcenous lovelies’ victims until late in the film, when we meet an earnest man with an autistic son and a difficult life whose only crime seems to have been bad judgment rooted in excessive horniness.
As the autistic father of two autistic boys, I was a soft touch for this plot point. I feel a sense of solidarity with parents of the autistic, even if it’s in a movie or television show.
Hustlers has some of the same coked-up rhythms as Boogie Nights and Goodfellas, as well as an arc where drug-fueled high times (in multiple senses) give way to paranoia, drug abuse, and jail sentences.
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s dark comedy of amorality deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics.
Time is a circle. Hustlers time has come again. It’s once again painfully relatable, even if you’d never even consider drugging and robbing someone. It’s an unfortunately relevant look at criminal innovation as a response to economic downturns that’s ripped from today’s headlines as well as yesterday’s
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