In the Flesh: Hustlers

“This whole country is one big strip club,” says dancer and con artist Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez) to the officers interrogating her. In the words of my great uncle, she’s blowing smoke, but the smoke ain’t wrong. Set in the economic and social wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, Hustlers depicts a world in which work, even skilled and rigorous work, is no longer enough. The American economy as we knew it at the turn of the millennium is effectively over, and a new economy of gig labor, fraud, banditry, and constant hustling struggles to be born. The film’s quick pace and nimble camera do an excellent job conveying the speed with which the world is changing around its characters, anchored by Lopez and an excellent Constance Wu. We dart and whirl through crowded changing rooms, glide around the edges of private dances, tremble expectantly as difficult women converse. For a mostly visually unimpressive film, plagued by CBS procedural lighting, it has real flair in terms of movement.

It’s a canny move on the part of writer/director Lorene Scafaria not to shy away from her characters’ greed, shortsightedness, and casual cruelty. They play very much like the cast of The Wolf of Wall Street, a cabal of gleefully venal thieves with a few half-decent brains between them. There’s no Robin Hood ethos at play here, no coherent goal to all this excess, just glamorous, beautiful sex workers drugging and defrauding finance assholes so they can buy themselves expensive things. Lopez in particular sells this aspect of her character beautifully. You believe Ramona can’t stop, that she might not even understand why she should stop. She’s relentless in her pursuit of more because she’s a bottomless pit, because the nothingness inside her demands constant feeding. Lopez uses her mask-like beauty and carefully studied poise to good effect, giving her performance a sense of intricately layered artificiality shot through with streaks of cold, vacuous dysfunction and apparently genuine warmth. 

The rest of the cast keeps up gamely, from Constance Wu’s alternately put upon and breathtakingly naive Destiny/Dorothy to the nightmarishly squirrelly cokehead Dawn. The sense of easy intimacy between these women the performers and Scafaria manage to conjure is really something. There are no male characters of note to break up their screen time together, just a series of largely interchangeable schmucks and the brief charisma explosion that is Usher and his entourage walking into a strip club. The film’s focus on its core cast is admirable, and if its energy begins to falter as the narrative conceit of Destiny’s interview with reporter Elizabeth (Julia Stiles) catches up with the story, the relationship between Destiny and Ramona is still more than strong enough to keep things moving until the satisfyingly bittersweet conclusion.