Magic Mike – directed by Steven Soderbergh. Backstage Stripshow. 110 minutes Color 2012
★★★
The Story: Experienced male strippers introduce a teenager to their chorus.
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We haven’t got much story here. And the teenage lad is not a performer of much interest. But that’s not the problem.
The problem lies with the director’s penchant for dialogue improvisation, with the notion in his noggin that improvisation produces an effect, if not the reality, of natural spontaneity. What it actually produces is a baroque elaboration of painful discursiveness. The décor of the palace of Versailles is a final resting place for the over-complicated. Improvisation generally leads to splashing around in the shallows. Its effect is arch, longwinded, and spurious. It enervates drama. And it does not allow the audience to reveal human nature any farther than a raindrop’s circles in a puddle.
The effect on this material is that it attenuates the material beyond necessity, style, or stretching point. The result: so much time is wasted by the halting of scenes with their improvisation that there is hardly a story at all.
It doesn’t matter that a very good actor, Channing Tatum, is called upon to engage in it. In natural, real life people come into big dramatic scenes knowing their feeling exactly. Whatever hems and haws it takes to arrive at their utterance are over once over. Underlying the style lies a disgraceful bid for sympathy.
The annoyance of the inappropriateness of this style of directing – for which Soderburgh is renown – is remedied in part by the garish dancing of the men, particularly Tatum, whose métier this world once was. He is astonishing to behold.
It is also salvaged in part by the verve of Matthew McConaughey, playing the strip club owner. As an actor, his application to the moment is admirable, and just what’s needed to play a character living on a racket. His seizure of every actor on stage with his attention enlivens every scene he is in. He is an actor of great wit, as well, which means he is quick enough and willing enough to play a character where he can make the joke be on himself.
The sequel, Magic Mike XXL, is better. For one thing, it has a story. It also has more interesting women. In Magic Mike all we have is Tatum’s leading leady, a pill. In Magic Mike XXL we have Andie McDowell and Jada Pinkett-Smith, both brilliant, both fascinating, both fun. The dancing more than carries both films, but in Magic Mike the only reason to revisit the film is the dancing itself. None of which is improvised.