Magic Mike

Steven
Soderbergh offers up the hunky populist flipside to his lo-fi call girl
depressive The Girlfriend Experience. Slyly commenting on the last
decade or so of his Hollywood film career, he punctures the myth of the
American Dream, and provides a little something for the ladies all at the same
time — that’s right: Channing Tatum’s bare buns show up in the first five
minutes. Bam! Done. Magic Mike sells itself as Cocktail for the
new and raunchier millennium, but it reveals that Soderbergh is too
intellectually restless to sell out — even when he’s supposedly selling out.

With
one foot in the multiplex and the other in the art house, the filmmaker’s
studio assignments have never fully embraced their craven box office goals.
Whether it’s been the Ocean’s 11 hits, Contagion or Oscar bait
like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, Soderbergh can’t help but screw
with convention. Even in his most commercially minded movies you’ll find
oddball thematic exercises, misdirected expectations, intellectual in-jokes and
experiments in style and form.

Still,
anyone who surveys the last decade of his career would be hard-pressed to find
anything approaching the passion he demonstrated in The Limey, Out of
Sight and King of the Hill. There have been artsy side projects to
be sure (Bubble, Che, The Informant!), and his attention
to craft has never been in question. But somewhere along the way it seemed as
if Soderbergh stopped putting his heart and soul into his work and instead
started tinkering with subtext, deconstruction and meta-narratives. It’s as if
movie-making has become an elaborate Sudoku puzzle.

Strange
as it may sound, Magic Mike‘s male stripper money shots are less a
celebration of Tatum and company’s impressive pecs and abs and more the jaded
reflections of an artist who’s lost faith in his career choices. How else do
you explain the frequent and lingering shots of crumpled money being tossed at
his cast, or a scene with Tatum in which a fellow stripper graphically enhances
himself with a penis pump in the foreground? Can you say “metaphor”?

Soderbergh
has always wrestled with the psychological, economic and emotional toll that
work puts on our lives. And though he always finds the high points, compromise,
disappointment and discouragement have become the defining message of his
recent efforts. Which, of course, feeds into the director’s announcement that
he’s decided to retire from filmmaking to become a painter. Magic Mike is one of three final projects.

The
story centers around Tatum’s Mike, a hard-working, entrepreneurial guy who
dreams of becoming a custom furniture designer. To earn enough to make that
dream a reality, Mike climbs the economic ladder with stacks of dollar bills
earned from his nights as a popular male stripper (inspired by Tatum’s
real-life experiences) at a popular Tampa Beach spot (run by Matthew
McConaughey). Taking a directionless young stud (Alex Pettyfer) on as his
protégé, Mike is introduced to his attractive, no-nonsense sister (newcomer
Cody Horn), and starts rethinking his life choices. The beautiful women and
endless partying have lost their luster, and Mike, now 30, has grown weary of
the constant hustling and rationalizing.

Thematically,
this is where Soderbergh lives, and female audiences who came for some
bun-tastic bump and grind (which the first 40 minutes delivers in spades) may
be surprised by the melancholy tone of the second half. Magic Mike becomes another of his explorations into how our jobs, no matter how glamorous
they seem on the surface, can deplete our souls. Money is depicted as the lure,
the goal, the limiting factor and the ever-present yardstick. Life is measured
in nickels and dimes. It’s a point that’s driven home when Mike, determined to
secure a small business loan for his entrepreneurial dream, discovers that a
credit score is far more important that the briefcase full of wrinkled singles
he offers as a down payment.

True
to Soderbergh’s recent run, Magic Mike is yet another cinematic
sleight-of-hand, a movie that seems to promise some guilt-free “wham-bam, thank
you, man,” but ultimately asks its audience to contemplate the spiritual toll
of its decisions.

This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2012.