jason alexander

Bratty Woman

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This year’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars was about a sex worker who foolishly allows herself to be swept off her feet by a fantasy romance proposal from a wealthy fuckboy client, clashing classic “Cinderella story” & “hooker with a heart of gold” tropes with the harsh, transactional realities of the modern world. There’s obviously a lot of Pretty Woman (1990) DNA running through Anora‘s veins, even if the older, schmaltzier film is distanced from its offspring by several decades and the entire length of the United States. As opposing coastal stories, both movies are appropriately anchored, with Anora playing the scrappy Brooklynite brat who throws stray punches at Pretty Woman‘s dream-factory Hollywood romance. They have too much in common to be purely read as polar opposites, though. Pretty Woman strut the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard so that Anora could clack its Lucite heels on NYC pavement. The former was rewarded with great box office returns & terrible reviews, while the latter is a niche art-circuit crowdpleaser that sneakily nabbed Cinema’s Top Prize despite a relatively meager scale & budget.

Julia Roberts sealed her status as a Hollywood A-lister by playing a fresh-faced streetwalker. She hooks a once-in-a-lifetime trick in the form of a sleepwalking Richard Gere, playing a slutty businessman who’s feeling numb & lonely after the recent loss of his father. Their single-night luxury hotel room tryst quickly escalates into a weeklong engagement for the lifechanging sum of $3,000 (a figure that provided the working title of the original screenplay) and then, eventually, a genuine proposal of marriage. In Anora, the modern fairy-tale romance of that premise unravels quickly & violently, leaving its titular sex worker scrambling to hold onto some compensation after blowing up her life for a dishonorable john. In Pretty Woman, the big-kiss acceptance of the proposal is the end-goal, a consummation of Roberts declaring she “wants the fairy tale” instead of being kept as an on-staff sex worker. The deal-sealing kiss is then punctuated by an unnamed observer on the street pontificating, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep dreamin’. This is Hollywood.”

The original scripted ending of Pretty Woman had a distinctly Sean Baker touch, mirroring the end of The Florida Project with Roberts taking her fairy-tale romance to Disneyland. I doubt the toothless Gary Marshall’s version of that trip would’ve had the same dramatic or satirical impact as Baker’s, but they’re both consciously dealing in the same tropes & cliches. If anything, I don’t see Anora upending Pretty Woman‘s naive view of sex-worker-and-client romance; I just see it starting where Pretty Woman ends, logically teasing the story out past the rush of the first Big Kiss. Julia Roberts’s Vivian has plenty in common with Mikey Madison’s Ani throughout the movie. She’s just as defiantly bratty in the face of obscene wealth, and she’s just as friendly to fellow staff workers who serve the same clientele. Marshall mixes sex & slapstick in a way that recalls Baker’s sensibilities in Roberts’s first sexual act with Gere, having her initiate fellatio between giggling fits during an I Love Lucy rerun. I doubt even Baker would call Anora a refutation of Pretty Woman, given that Roberts’s declaration that her tryst with her new client is just like “Cinder-fuckin’-rella” might as well have been recited word-for-word in his version of the story.

Overall, Anora really is the better film. It’s got an anarchic energy that swings wildly from comedic confection to bitter drama within the span of a single scene, whereas Pretty Woman is almost pure confection. After Roberts’s & Gere’s first night together, they immediately slip into a comfortable, domestic dynamic, and most of their scene-to-scene interactions are genuinely romantic, like their Moonstruck trip to the opera or the john playing Vivian’s body like a grand piano. The darker notes of a rape attempt (from Gere’s sleazy lawyer, played by Jason Alexander) or a fellow sex worker’s body being discovered in a nearby dumpster are just illustrations of why the fairy-tale romance is necessary for Vivian, who will accept no less. Gary Marshall is working in tonal contrast there, while Baker lets opposing tones wrestle & tangle until they’re indistinguishable. The audience is scared for Ani in the same scene where we’re laughing at the bumbling incompetence of the male brutes keeping her in place. All we’re really allowed to feel for Vivian is pure adoration, only scared that Julia Roberts might hurt her back carrying the movie while Richard Gere shrugs & mumbles his way through the script. She does so ably, though, with a 3,000-watt smile.

-Brandon Ledet

White Palace (1990)

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From the Criterion Channel’s recent Erotic Thriller streaming program to Karina Longworth’s recent “Erotic 90s” podcast run to the documentary We Kill for Love‘s exhaustive catalog of the erotic thriller’s DTV era, much attention is currently being paid to streamy Hollywood smut from decades past.  The dumbest, schlockiest, most preposterous VHS rentals of yesteryear are currently being paraded around as high art worthy of deep academic analysis, no longer just late-night time filler for horndogs.  It’s a great time to be a cinephile.  If I were going to throw one more lost-to-time erotic artifact on top of this already mountainous pile of moldy cassettes, I’d like to direct audiences to the 1990 melodrama White Palace, which stars two icons of the genre – Bull Durham‘s Susan Sarandon & Sex, Lies, and Videotape‘s James Spader.  White Palace is worth revisiting for the same reason all of these sweaty schlock “classics” are; it’s proof that Hollywood used to regularly make racy movies for adults instead of four-quadrant crowdpleasers where “everyone is beautiful, and no one is horny.”  It’s also great contrast to the more desperate, over-the-top erotic thrillers of that era, in that its own sexuality is much more confident, relaxed, and underplayed than its competitors on the Major Video shelf.  While most Erotic 90s™ relics twisted themselves in knots trying to steam up the audience, White Palace simply casts the two hottest actors in Hollywood as its leads and lets their chemistry do the work.  It makes it look easy.

“The story of a younger man and a bolder woman,” White Palace stars Spader as a highly successful 20-something lawyer and Sarandon as his disheveled 40-something diner waitress – the hottest woman on the planet.  They first lock eyes when he Karens out demanding a refund at her knockoff White Castle burger joint; they quickly bond over cheap booze & familial grief in the bar down the street; and then, against all glaring red flags that they are not made for each other, they bone.  They bone a lot.  There’s nothing especially sinister nor traumatic to get in the way of their boning either.  Transgressing the borders of class & culture (he’s Jewish; she’s a godless hedonist) is certainly taboo in the context of an American romance, but it’s not an insurmountable hurdle for their passionate fuck fests.  If you compare it against the twisty illogic of the era’s erotic thrillers—the identity hijack of Single White Female, the underground bisexual conspiracy network of Basic Instinct, the virtual reality espionage of Disclosure, etc.—this erotic drama’s central conflict is relatively tame & understated.  If anything, its biggest transgressions are in how often it centers female pleasure in its animalistic boning sessions, integrating cunnilingus & vibrator use with the same frankness as fellatio.  Even with most of Spader & Sarandon’s thrusting hidden under a thin layer of bed sheets, it’s incredible that they got that much honest, non-misogynist sexuality past the sex-negative ghouls at the MPAA.  Usually, they’d have to punish the sexpot diner waitress for her crimes against decency with a last-minute storm of Fatal Attraction bathtub bullets to justify the indulgence, but this movie is much more wholesome & low-key than its hyperviolent equivalents.

White Palace is a glorious time capsule of early-90s cheese & sleaze.  You may want to snicker at its saxophone-heavy scoring of St. Louis tourism shots, or its sex montage set to a chipper country tune about the joys of fucking younger men, but its most dated qualities are central to its charm.  There are plenty of 90s-specific casting choices to celebrate in the supporting cast too, including Misery‘s Kathy Bates, Pretty Woman‘s Jason Alexander, and two central players from the iconic Jewish sitcom The Nanny (Renee Taylor & Rachel Chagall).  Its adjacency to more histrionic Erotic 90s classics is its greatest strength, though, even if you can only feel their twisted influence in scenes where Sarandon is encouraging Spader to drive while wasted or where Spader stares at his wife’s grave while listening to mental replays of Sarandon’s moans.  In a way, it’s White Palace‘s resistance to indulging the trashier war-of-the-sexes tropes of the era that’s holding it back from being critically exalted among the best of its kind.  It’s just not flashy enough to earn the same attention as all-out smut fests like The Doom Generation, which just enjoyed a full theatrical victory lap among all this Erotic 90s fanfare.  Instead, it’s currently unavailable to watch by any legal means other than, I suppose, borrowing the out-of-print Full Screen DVD I happened to find at a local thrift store.  White Palace wasn’t quite sleazy enough to earn a spot in The Criterion Channel’s Erotic Thrillers package, so its day in the sun as a recovered erotic relic is still to come (and come and come and come).  I hope to see it come soon.

-Brandon Ledet