Directors: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Adam Rodriguez, Alex Pettyfer, Channing Tatum, Cody Horn, James Martin Kelly, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer, Matthew McConaughey, Olivia Munn, Reid Carolin
Cast: Adam Rodriguez, Alex Pettyfer, Channing Tatum, Cody Horn, James Martin Kelly, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer, Matthew McConaughey, Olivia Munn, Reid Carolin
We can be relaxed when Jane Fonda plays a confident, unrepentant prostitute in Klute, Dolly Parton a proud madam in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas or Natalie Wood a celebrated striptease artist in Gypsy. But we feel more than a little uneasy when leading actors appear in male versions of these roles, and an essential part of Billy Wilder's Irma la Douce, Paul Schrader's American Gigolo and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is to make us warm to and understand Jack Lemmon, Richard Gere and Mark Wahlberg as respectively a pimp, a gigolo and a porn star.
This is the task that Steven Soderbergh has taken on in Magic Mike. His debut film, the provocatively titled but essentially chaste sex, lies and videotape, set in prosperous, middle-class Louisiana, won the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes festival. Now, more than 20 films later, he's moved across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa on the west coast of Florida with what might have been called "stripping, self-deception and G-strings", a raunchy but still essentially chaste tale set in the louche Xquisite Club, a "Male Dance Revue" venue.
Magic Mike is inspired by the teenage experiences of its principal star, Channing Tatum, and scripted by his producing partner, Reid Carolin. The toned and tanned Tatum plays Mike, a handsome, 30-ish blue-collar construction worker employed as a roofer by day and a star striptease artist by night. He lives quite well in a beach house overlooking the Gulf and is served by good-looking prostitutes, one of them a psychology student working her way through college. Apart from the fact that both of Mike's bosses are ready to pay him as little as possible, there is little suggestion of the economic necessity that drove the unemployed Sheffield steel-workers into the clothes-shedding business in The Full Monty. There is little pride and no obvious shame in his work. His aim is to save enough money to realise his true ambition – to own a firm producing superior custom-built furniture, though not, presumably, imitation Chippendale.
On a building site he meets the well-built teenage Adam (British actor Alex Pettyfer), a college dropout who's given up an athletic scholarship after a row with a coach. He inducts, or seduces, this naive youngster into the stripping business, although at the age of 19 Adam is legally too young to be working at such a place as the Xquisite. Mike's motives are interestingly mixed and unclear. He presumably needs a young follower, someone to mentor and perhaps to vindicate and validate his own dubious life.
atum plays Mike as a mumbling, ambling, charismatic sub-Brando type, and Adam has a sister, Brooke, employed as a nurse (Cody Horn), who has a certain resemblance to Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront. Mike is drawn to Brooke, and her ambivalent attitude to him resembles the relationship Saint has to Brando's similarly shambling, dubiously employed and charming Terry Molloy.
Adam proves an adept pupil and immediately fits into the club's all-male team, whose backstage dressing room behaviour is indistinguishable from football players or chorus girls. They only truly come alive in performance, dressing as cops, firemen, trench-coated private eyes, hoodies and other parodic macho males, before stripping down to their thongs for their laughing and shouting all-female audience, a youngish, well-heeled middle-class crowd. The stage show's thrust is pelvic but not penetrating, something it shares with the film itself. As recalled by Tatum, it's all oddly innocent and good tempered. Soderbergh, as director and cinematographer (under his customary pseudonym of Peter Andrews), gives it a golden glow. Gregory Jacobs, one of the film's producers, has said that he and Soderbergh "both felt it was something we hadn't seen in a movie before, and Channing's approach was fearless".
In fact the film isn't especially original and takes few real risks. When the stripping has to stop there is always an opaque veil in the form of a posing pouch or leather jock strap to bring an acceptable pudeur to unacceptable pudenda. One wonders what Michael Winterbottom, an equally versatile and prolific director who really does go out on a limb, would have brought to this milieu. Moreover, the film never touches on such matters as the performers engaging intimately with the customers, and only briefly raises the question of ageing and of the role of the mafia muscling in on the business. This latter arises when some mob enforcers pursue Adam for drug money that he can't repay, and Mike is forced to draw on his precious savings.
The film's most interesting and memorable character is Dallas, the club's flamboyant owner, whose aim is to move to Miami and get into the big time. As played by Matthew McConaughey in a Stetson, black waistcoat, leather chaps and little else, he's a warm-up artist who can bring the seated customers from zero to near orgasm in 10 seconds without leaving the stage. One of the rare occasions he's seen in broad daylight outside the club is when he escorts his boys to a sunny "sand-bar party" in the Gulf, an outing that resembles the episode in Max Ophüls's Le Plaisir when the Victorian madam takes her girls on an outing into the Normandy countryside. McConaughey's performance reminds one of two other great movie MCs, Gig Young's increasingly hysterical superintendent of the dance marathon in Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Joel Grey's sinister host of the Kit-Kat club in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, both winning Oscars for best supporting actor.
This is the task that Steven Soderbergh has taken on in Magic Mike. His debut film, the provocatively titled but essentially chaste sex, lies and videotape, set in prosperous, middle-class Louisiana, won the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes festival. Now, more than 20 films later, he's moved across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa on the west coast of Florida with what might have been called "stripping, self-deception and G-strings", a raunchy but still essentially chaste tale set in the louche Xquisite Club, a "Male Dance Revue" venue.
Magic Mike is inspired by the teenage experiences of its principal star, Channing Tatum, and scripted by his producing partner, Reid Carolin. The toned and tanned Tatum plays Mike, a handsome, 30-ish blue-collar construction worker employed as a roofer by day and a star striptease artist by night. He lives quite well in a beach house overlooking the Gulf and is served by good-looking prostitutes, one of them a psychology student working her way through college. Apart from the fact that both of Mike's bosses are ready to pay him as little as possible, there is little suggestion of the economic necessity that drove the unemployed Sheffield steel-workers into the clothes-shedding business in The Full Monty. There is little pride and no obvious shame in his work. His aim is to save enough money to realise his true ambition – to own a firm producing superior custom-built furniture, though not, presumably, imitation Chippendale.
On a building site he meets the well-built teenage Adam (British actor Alex Pettyfer), a college dropout who's given up an athletic scholarship after a row with a coach. He inducts, or seduces, this naive youngster into the stripping business, although at the age of 19 Adam is legally too young to be working at such a place as the Xquisite. Mike's motives are interestingly mixed and unclear. He presumably needs a young follower, someone to mentor and perhaps to vindicate and validate his own dubious life.
atum plays Mike as a mumbling, ambling, charismatic sub-Brando type, and Adam has a sister, Brooke, employed as a nurse (Cody Horn), who has a certain resemblance to Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront. Mike is drawn to Brooke, and her ambivalent attitude to him resembles the relationship Saint has to Brando's similarly shambling, dubiously employed and charming Terry Molloy.
Adam proves an adept pupil and immediately fits into the club's all-male team, whose backstage dressing room behaviour is indistinguishable from football players or chorus girls. They only truly come alive in performance, dressing as cops, firemen, trench-coated private eyes, hoodies and other parodic macho males, before stripping down to their thongs for their laughing and shouting all-female audience, a youngish, well-heeled middle-class crowd. The stage show's thrust is pelvic but not penetrating, something it shares with the film itself. As recalled by Tatum, it's all oddly innocent and good tempered. Soderbergh, as director and cinematographer (under his customary pseudonym of Peter Andrews), gives it a golden glow. Gregory Jacobs, one of the film's producers, has said that he and Soderbergh "both felt it was something we hadn't seen in a movie before, and Channing's approach was fearless".
In fact the film isn't especially original and takes few real risks. When the stripping has to stop there is always an opaque veil in the form of a posing pouch or leather jock strap to bring an acceptable pudeur to unacceptable pudenda. One wonders what Michael Winterbottom, an equally versatile and prolific director who really does go out on a limb, would have brought to this milieu. Moreover, the film never touches on such matters as the performers engaging intimately with the customers, and only briefly raises the question of ageing and of the role of the mafia muscling in on the business. This latter arises when some mob enforcers pursue Adam for drug money that he can't repay, and Mike is forced to draw on his precious savings.
The film's most interesting and memorable character is Dallas, the club's flamboyant owner, whose aim is to move to Miami and get into the big time. As played by Matthew McConaughey in a Stetson, black waistcoat, leather chaps and little else, he's a warm-up artist who can bring the seated customers from zero to near orgasm in 10 seconds without leaving the stage. One of the rare occasions he's seen in broad daylight outside the club is when he escorts his boys to a sunny "sand-bar party" in the Gulf, an outing that resembles the episode in Max Ophüls's Le Plaisir when the Victorian madam takes her girls on an outing into the Normandy countryside. McConaughey's performance reminds one of two other great movie MCs, Gig Young's increasingly hysterical superintendent of the dance marathon in Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Joel Grey's sinister host of the Kit-Kat club in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, both winning Oscars for best supporting actor.
