Striptease (1996)

I firmly believe that it’s futile and foolish to try to review a movie unless you approach it with an open mind. Even if it has a poor reputation, even if it got savaged by the critics, even if it’s regarded as a so-bad-it’s-good movie or a camp classic, even if it attracts lots sneers from online reviewers, it should still be approached with an open mind. Which is what I’m going to try to do with the somewhat notorious 1996 Striptease starring Demi Moore.

Striptease suffered a similar fate to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, made the previous year. Both were movies about strippers (Nomi in Showgirls ends up a showgirl but starts out as a stripper). In both cases the critics were gunning for these movies before even seeing them. Once a few bad reviews appeared the rest of the critics, as always, fell into line and were ready with the snark.

Demi Moore plays Erin Grant. She’s working as a stripper (in the Eager Beaver Club) to accumulate enough money to fight a custody battle with her ex-husband.

Erin works in a strip club but this is Hollywood so it’s a strip club where the girls don’t take all their clothes off.

There’s some trouble at the club and the trouble involves Congressman David Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds). Then a dead body shows up miles away. The victim seems to be linked in some way to Congressman Dilbeck and to the the Eager Beaver Club. That brings Homicide Lieutenant Al Garcia (Armand Assante) to the club and he’s anxious to talk to Erin. He thinks she saw something important.

Erin’s life turns into a nightmare as the custody battle with her husband gets nastier and she gets drawn into the shady world of Congressman Dilbeck. The congressman has become infatuated with her and when Dilbeck wants to sleep with a woman he expects to get what he wants.

This is several different movies at the same time. It’s obvious that Burt Reynolds and Demi Moore were not making the same movie.

There’s a political satire which is occasionally amusing although Reynolds perhaps pushes his performance just a bit too far. There’s also an erotic thriller movie. Which was probably intended to be semi-comedic lighthearted fun.

The problem with Striptease as an erotic thriller is that it’s one of the least erotic movies ever made. It’s certainly the most un-erotic move ever made about a stripper. And this was the unrated version I saw. If the unrated version is this tame and this sexless how tame must the U.S. theatrical release have been? The mind boggles.

It does seem clear that either Bergman or someone else involved in the production side had decided that this was going to be a totally sexless movie. None of the striptease routines are sexy. Erin’s routine would scarcely have raised eyebrows at a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the local Baptist Church. We do got plenty of bare breasts but this movie manages the extraordinarily difficult trick of making boobs totally unexciting. We get a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Demi Moore’s bottom. That’s it.

It’s possible that Bergman waned Erin to be a sympathetic character and had decided that sexy women are Bad Women so she had to be unsexy.

But that is out of sync with the oddest thing about this movie, which is that it takes an amazingly sympathetic view of strippers. All of the strippers are really nice girls and they’re all cheerful and well-adjusted. The manager of the Eager Beaver treats them with affectionate indulgence. This positive view of stripping is refreshing (and incredibly surprising in a Hollywood movie). So why does the movie make stripping so un-erotic? Perhaps Andrew Bergman is just a director with no idea how to handle erotic subject matter. This movie did pretty much end his career as a director, which doesn’t surprise me.

The strip routines would hardly raise an eyebrow at a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the local Baptist Church. And this is the unrated version I’m watching. If the unrated version is this tame how tame was the theatrical release? The mind boggles.

Striptease is also a movie that tries too hard to be tasteful. It’s trying too hard to be wholesome. Verhoeven in Showgirls wasn’t afraid to be vulgar. Bergman seems to be terrified of showing even a hint of vulgarity.

Another weakness is the lack of any romance angle. Lieutenant Garcia and Erin become quite friendly but he makes it clear that he’s happily married and that he isn’t going to make a pass at her and she obviously has no romantic interest in him. The trouble is that the movie needed a romance angle to make Erin more interesting and to give us some reason to feel sympathetic towards her. It was needed in order to make her a living breathing human being with human emotions. But it isn’t there and it’s part of the reason Erin is such an uninteresting character. Maybe Bergman thought that mothers shouldn’t have emotional lives. Weird.

The movie does have a few strengths. Ving Rhames is fun as the Eager Beaver’s bouncer, Shad. He’s the most interesting and colourful character in the movie. Shad isn’t very honest but he is fiercely protective of the girls at the Eager Beaver and Rhames gets this across without making him too much of a Boy Scout.

Striptease’s biggest problem is Demi Moore. She was horribly and disastrously miscast. She isn’t funny and she isn’t sexy. She plays things absolutely straight which is really jarring when she’s playing scenes with actors (like Reynolds). And she delivers the least sexy performance in the history of motion pictures. Maybe writer-director Andrew Bergman told her to give the least sexy performance she could or maybe Demi Moore just doesn’t know how to convey eroticism. Judging by this movie she doesn’t know how to convey any human emotions either. With the right actress Striptease might have worked. Erin is the centre of the movie. She has to grab our attention. We have to relate to her and we have to care about her and we have to be interested in her. The movie needed an actress with energy and charisma and with an engaging personality, an actress who wasn’t afraid to be sexy. It needed an actress who could make Erin believable and interesting and fun. Demi Moore gives the impression she just turned up to collect her $12 million dollar pay cheque.

Striptease did have potential. The idea was by no means terrible. But Demi Moore’s performance sinks it.