Magic Mike

Magic Mike – Steven Soderbergh’s final picture as a Hollywood director, Magic Mike exemplifies the notion of having your cake and eating it too.  Perhaps, the irrevocable contradictions implicit in this big-budget picture, celebrating something that the film’s shows us to be morally deplorable, were part of Soderbergh’s motivation for renouncing Hollywood, at least, for the present.  A 19-year old man, sleeping on his sister’s couch and supporting himself as a roofer, encounters the titular character, a male stripper.  Mike treats the young protagonist as his protégée and, soon, the hero is making lots of money performing lewd dances on stage for shrieking young women.  Mike dreams of using the cash that he makes on stage to start a legitimate business, an enterprise producing custom-made furniture.  But the Recession is in full swing and he can’t secure financing.  Ultimately, the young man gets into big trouble – the wages of sin are always death, even in 2012 – and Mike has to help him out, thereby winning the heart of the kid’s sweet, and straight, sister.  Told baldly in these terms, Magic Mike seems pretty conventional, even archaic in its ethical stance – displaying one’s body for money is bad and leads to worse things; the love of a good woman is redemptive; greed and lust are evil; and so on.  The film’s quasi-Victorian ethos, however, is undercut by lavish sequences of nude and semi-nude dancing, apparently intended to titillate the female (and gay) members of the audience.  About a third of this rather staid, and predictable, morality play is dominated by spectacular images of almost naked men, decked out in leather S & M gear, thrusting their pelvises at half-swooning girls.  The film is cynically calculated to denounce the very thing that it celebrates for a substantial portion of its running time.  Soderbergh is never less than an interesting director and he keeps things moving swiftly and the little ensemble of male strippers is closely observed, and, I suppose, realistically presented.  (The 800-pound gorilla in the room – that is, the question of whether some of these men are gay and whether the film, and their dancing, is principally, or, at least, to some degree targeted to gay audiences is evaded throughout the picture.).  The movie has a unique appearance – Soderbergh’s Tampa-St. Pete milieu, all lagoons and luxury condominiulms, is filmed through a filter that strains out all blue and green colors and imparts a tropical, burnished sepia-yellow tint to the images.  By contrast, the scenes in the night-club involving the striptease show are shot in vivid blue-tinted color and the dance numbers are extraordinarily ornate – this aspect of the film feels dreamlike and unrealistic:  I doubt that male strippers are so precisely choreographed, wonderfully athletic, and dramatically lit in their performances – Soderbergh wants to present the striptease milieu as sordid and tawdry, but the spectacle overwhelms these intentions and the dancing is pure, old-time Hollywood.   Furthermore, Soderbergh resists the temptation implicit in this material of objectifying in a humiliating way the crowds of girls groping the young men.   The audiences at the strip shows are portrayed as uniformly young, fit, and beautiful women, well-groomed, well-dressed, and not so drunk as to be obnoxious.  (Of course, one expects that a real-life crowd of women gathered to watch such a spectacle would contain its contingent of the obese, the ugly, the plain and unhandsome, and that there would be plenty of inebriates in evidence.)  Curiously, Soderbergh presents the male burlesque show as good clean fun for good clean kids.  This strategy, again devised to comfort the female members of the audience who have come to see Matthew McConnaughy mostly naked, works against his theme that participation in this enterprise is dangerous, corrupting, and iniquitous.  This aspect of the film’s content is portrayed in lurid, emblematic terms that would not be out of place in a silent film.  One of Mike’s girlfriends owns a little pig and, at one point, we actually see the movie’s youthful hero passed out in a puddle of his own vomit with the small porker grazing on the puke-spill.  The deathly yellowish tint to the landscapes gives them a quasi-apocalyptic aspect and one orgy is staged in a room with a huge flat-screen TV portraying the spiral eye of a hurricane on a radar screen as the wind and rain whips at the windows of the home.  Everyone lives in large, spacious houses, decorated with grim-looking abstract paintings that seem to have been done by Anselm Kiefer – again, this is an example of style trumping realism.  Kin to such films as American Gigolo and Boogie Nights, Magic Mike is not as thought-provoking, or scathing, but still a satisfying, if morally, incoherent picture.  Virtue triumphs and true love wins out in the end.