I’ve seen Pretty Woman (1990) at least three times, once when it came out, once before on streaming, and just last night. I like it. It’s a nice romantic comedy and something of a fairy tale, but that’s OK, I suppose.
It is very much a story of its time. Richard Gere plays a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, but not one so ruthless as Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). Julia Roberts plays a Hollywood street walker, Vivian Wood. Lewis picks her up, as much because she seems to know something about the car he’s borrowed from his lawyer (a Lotus) than anything else, and ends up engaging her for the week, where she accompanies him to several business meetings, but also a night at the opera. They fall in love, of course; he relents on the deal he’s been chasing; and she goes back to New York with him where, we are to presume, they live happily ever after.
The world, of course, is not like that, not quite. And I doubt that anyone over twenty who saw the movie believes that. But it’s a nice alternative to Gordon Gekko. I can even believe that Gordon Gekko would have liked it, or if not Gekko himself, perhaps his understudy, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen). Corporate raider types are probably not long on self-knowledge, no more than today’s Silicon Valley tech bros, and so boot
And perhaps that’s why I like it. It’s as though Gordon Gekko is so reprehensible in his thralldom to Homo economicus that Hollywood just had to show us an antidote. It picked a perennial, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, disguised, this case, as a hooker who knows how to drive a stick shift and carries a rainbow assortment of condoms in her thigh high boots. Which is to say, the film acknowledges that we need some kind of Homo ludens alternative, even one that includes a bunch of rich folks stomping divots on a polo field.
The movie resonated with the public and made Julia Roberts a star. From the Wikipedia entry:
Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics upon release, but widespread praise was directed towards Roberts' performance and her chemistry with Gere. It had the highest number of ticket sales in the US ever for a romantic comedy, with Box Office Mojo listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets. The film grossed US$463.4 million worldwide and at the time of its release, was the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($701 million at the time), Star Wars ($530 million at the time), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($474 million at the time), and Jaws ($470 million at the time). It was also the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (surpassing Rain Man) until it was surpassed by Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, but remained the highest-grossing R-rated film released by Walt Disney Studios (surpassing Cocktail), holding the record for 34 years until Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed it in 2024.
From critic snippets Wikipedia:
Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics, with positive reviews praising the stars' chemistry and the dialogue. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 64% based on 78 reviews. The website's critical consensus states, "Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
The film's detractors criticized the overuse of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope.[14] Others opined that the film sugarcoats the realities of sex work. [...]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D," saying it "starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy" and becomes a "plastic screwball soap opera", with the "kinds of characters who exist nowhere but in the minds of callowly manipulative Hollywood screenwriters". Gleiberman conceded that with the film's "tough-hooker heroine, it can work as a feminist version of an upscale princess fantasy." [...]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave a positive review, praising how the film is about "a particularly romantic kind of love, the sort you hardly see in the movies these days". He added it "protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. [...]
The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote: "Despite this quintessentially late 80's outlook, and despite a covetousness and underlying misogyny [...] 'Pretty Woman' manages to be giddy, lighthearted escapism much of the time. [...]
Carina Chocano of The New York Times said the movie "wasn't a love story, it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern." In a 2019 interview, Roberts expressed uncertainty over whether the film could be made today due to its controversial premise, commenting, "So many things you could poke a hole in, but I don't think it takes away from people being able to enjoy it".
I’m with Ebert on this one.
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