Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This month, we’re having ourselves a little Striptease, nominee for six Razzies, winner of five including worst picture, and derailer of careers in exactly the way the Razzies always dream of being.
I’m going to spare everyone yet another explanation of my Unifying Theory of the Razzies. If this isn’t your first Raspberry Picking rodeo, you already know it. If you’re new here, the 240-characters-or-less version is: the Razzies hate pretty actresses, and love nothing more than tweaking the noses of successful pretty actresses. But in these parts, we are less concerned with nose-tweaking qua tweaking and more concerned with whether the nose-tweaking was deserved. We turn here to the case study of one Demi Moore.
It’s been a long time since we heard much from Demi Moore, but if you’re at least my age, you remember a time when Demi Moore was everywhere. After her first tastes of success in her not-so-humble Brat Pack beginnings, Moore starred in a string of early ‘90s megahits, beginning with Ghost (1990) and continuing with A Few Good Men (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), and Disclosure (1994). Sure, she got some lousy reviews in 1995 between The Scarlet Letter and Now and Then, but who cared when people lined up several times around the block to see her films? It was only logical to assume that whatever studio tentpole she chose in 1996 would rake in swimming pools full of money. Cue a furious bidding war between two sets of film producers to see who could get Moore to film their movie first. The loser was G.I. Jane, which would eventually hit theaters in 1997. The winner was Moore herself, who walked away with a paycheck of $12.5 million – the highest ever secured by a lead actress in a film at the time – to get naked in a strange little picture with the eye-catching title of Striptease.
Striptease, directed (and written, and produced) by Andrew Bergman, was based on Strip Tease, a bestselling 1993 novel by Carl Hiaasen, journalist for the Miami Herald and trailblazer of the “bunch of lunatics in South Florida” crime novel genre. Strip Tease tells the story of Erin Grant, an embattled single mother who takes up exotic dancing to make ends meet and ends up enmeshed in the corrupt politics of sugar tycoons after a sleazy politician becomes obsessed with her. I have not read Strip Tease, but as a resident of South Florida myself, I am legally required to have read at least two Hiaasen novels, in my case Double Whammy and Stormy Weather. His novels strike me as tricky beasts for screenwriters to tackle. While they rely on colorful eccentrics and clever dialogue, they also depend on their author’s complicated love for the state of Florida – a place where bales of cocaine fall on neighborhood Crime Watch meetings and people nicknamed “Crazy Joe” and “Mayor Loco” face off for control of major cities – and its particular brand of all-permeating nuttiness. An inexperienced writer risks losing the humor for the plot, or treating the characters’ antics with contempt where their creator intended bemused affection. But surely, if anyone was going to hit a slam dunk with a Hiaasen adaptation, it was the writer of such comedy classics as Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, and The Freshman, right?
Not so much. Audiences and critics alike savaged Bergman and Moore, dubbing the latter “Gimme Moore” for her very public salary negotiations over the film. To everyone’s surprise, Hiaasen himself liked the film and considered it a faithful adaptation of his novel, but he was the only one. Striptease failed to make back its budget at the domestic box office. It got Bergman a life sentence in director jail; he has only made one film since, a poorly-reviewed biopic of Jacquelin Susann called Isn’t She Great (2000). As for Moore, her career nosedived into a pit from which it never fully escaped; she’s had a bit of a resurgence in her later years as she moved into character-actress roles, but she would never again be the massive box office draw she once was. Striptease built the coffin and G.I. Jane – remember G.I. Jane? – nailed it shut.
Was it all warranted? Was Striptease really so awful as to justify so many death sentences?
THE STORY
A behind-the-scenes story like that of Striptease always makes me root for the film a little bit. When a movie gets such a universal drubbing, I feel sorry for it, and my instinct is to take it home and try to love it, like it’s an abandoned puppy on the side of the road. But if the puppy then scratches up my floors and vomits all over my house, it’s going to be quite a bit harder for me to maintain my goodwill.
We open on a shot of a Fort Lauderdale courthouse that zooms in so quickly and shakily that I wonder if a button on the camera got stuck. Inside, Erin Grant (Moore) is in the thick of a nasty fight with her no-good husband Darrell (Robert Patrick) for custody of their daughter Angela (Rumer Willis, Moore’s real-life daughter). Erin has recently lost her job as a secretary for the FBI due to Darrell’s drug-fueled shenanigans, and because she is unemployed, Judge Fingerhut (Louis Seeger Crume) grants full custody of Angela to Darrell, who does good honest work snitching to the cops and stealing wheelchairs from hospitals. The judge also notes that Darrell used to be a great high school football tackle. I imagine the movie believes it made a caustic satirical observation about systemic sexism and how unfairly our society treats single mothers. It leaves me wondering if anyone involved in the writing of this story has ever been within one thousand miles of a custody battle in the United States.
Erin needs money to have a chance at regaining custody of Angela on appeal, so she gets a job in a seedy section of Miami as a stripper. Sorry, a dancer. This is a distinction Striptease will loudly, repeatedly, and with ever-increasing gusto insist that we respect, despite never doing so itself.
One night at the Eager Beaver, the strip-I-mean-dance club where Erin works, Congressman David Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds – yes, that Burt Reynolds) comes in with his nervous wreck of an aide Erb Crandall (Robert Stanton) to enjoy some harmless adult entertainment. The cause of Erb’s anxiety swiftly becomes clear as a single glance at Erin drives his boss into a fanatical lust-crazed frenzy. The Eager Beaver’s dutiful bouncer Shad (Ving Rhames) will do his best to protect Erin, but another fan of hers, the pleasantly dorky Jerry Killian (William Hill), sees an opportunity to get Erin to notice him: he can help her use Dilbeck’s infatuation with her to coerce him into influencing the judge in her custody dispute. But, in the grand tradition of politicians everywhere, Dilbeck has powerful and corrupt connections in the business world – in this case, to Florida’s moblike sugar cane industry. His fixer, Malcolm Moldowsky (Paul Guilfoyle), is determined that he remain in office, and is willing to go to extreme measures to make sure no one embarrasses him before his upcoming election.
So Jerry’s body turns up in the lake where Miami-Dade Police Lieutenant Al Garcia (Armand Assante) is on a fishing trip with his family. Garcia, upon learning Erin’s plight, becomes determined both to take down Dilbeck and get Erin’s daughter away from her loser ex – even though it might mean putting Erin and Angela in harm’s way.
There is a sadly abandoned subplot in which Shad the bouncer schemes to defraud a yogurt company by planting dead cockroaches inside yogurt cups, and as with so many bad movies, this subplot should have been the main plot.
THE BAD
Well, we might as well start at the root cause. I hate to kick a man when he’s been down for 27 years, but Andrew Bergman did write and direct the darned thing, and he didn’t do a stellar job of either.
Striptease, a putative comedy, contains one line that got me to laugh: when Garcia tells Shad, during the final pursuit, that “[we’ve got] a cop and a bouncer, plus two strippers and a kid. We’re in great shape.” I suspect credit for that line goes to Carl Hiaasen (and Armand Assante) rather than Andrew Bergman. I further suspect that Bergman’s contributions were more along the lines of Dilbeck’s pathetic croon of “just the touch of your hand sets my pecker on fire,” followed by Erin’s flat, bitter “maybe you should see a doctor.” For the life of me, I do not know what Bergman could have been thinking when – if – he coached some of these line readings. The man helped write Blazing Saddles! He knows how to make things funny! What the hell happened?
His direction of the motion picture isn’t much to celebrate either, as his version of “directing” here seems to be to point in a random direction and tell everyone to start rolling. He does not appear to understand at all the role of the filmmaker in creating, and maintaining, the tone and mood of a film. The stripping-I-mean-dancing sequences – the interminable stripping-I-mean-dancing sequences – can commit neither to being erotic nor anti-erotic, and content themselves with merely existing. The pottery scene in Ghost is a thousand times sexier; so, for that matter, is the scene in Ghost where Whoopi Goldberg commits check fraud. We might have gotten a livelier comedy if someone with a steadier, less excitable hand had simply filmed Armand Assante reading Strip Tease.
And then there’s Demi. Poor Demi. The only charitable explanation I can think of for Demi Moore’s performance is that someone told her she might be an Oscar contender if she did a good job, because she seems desperate for everyone to love her. I don’t mean the character seems desperate; I mean that Moore herself seems to keep glancing towards the audience to check if we’re charmed, impressed, laughing, turned on, or having any reaction at all.
At the same time, her approach to Erin is listless and dour, completely lacking in the disarming wittiness a character like Erin needs to have a prayer of working at all. This is an especially strange approach where everyone else is going out of their way to be goofy: Reynolds and Patrick are having a great time mugging wickedly about, and Erin’s fellow strippers-I-mean-dancers, in their too-seldom moments in the spotlight, at least show hints of Hiaasen-style uninhibited wackiness. Moore, on the other hand, seems to be trying to “humanize” Erin, to “give her depth,” and in doing so, she removes all potential depth from Erin by stripping-I-mean-dancing away her personality.
On the other hand, Burt Reynolds as Congressman Dilbeck swings about as far in the other direction as he possibly can. I hesitate to call his performance “bad”: he’s extremely committed to playing Dilbeck as a disgusting nincompoop, and a disgusting nincompoop he surely is. But, despite the best efforts of Tom Green, Jenny McCarthy, Joe Eszterhas, and Will Ferrell, I still do not find nincompoopery especially funny, and Reynolds isn’t funny here. He’s just gross and weird, and his gross weirdness does not play well off Moore’s dead-eyed boredom.
And to make the whole enterprise even more insulting, it’s nearly two hours long. If Striptease had the decency to admit that it’s a smelly, grubby little fart of a movie and relish its own smelly grubbiness, I might be able to muster some respect. But no, it has to be a smelly, grubby little fart of a movie that believes that, if it really wants to, it can be highbrow entertainment. With strippers-I-mean-dancers.
THE GOOD
Now, despite how down on Striptease I’ve been so far, its only film-killing problems are the directing, the writing, and the stars. Those, you may reasonably say, are pretty big problems. But a lot goes on in the background of Striptease, enough to barely fish the movie out of the toilet, and enough to show that a good time was hiding in here somewhere.
First, we have the supporting cast, who all took diligent notes during the classes that Demi Moore apparently slept through. Ving Rhames throws everything he has at his tired old cliche of a role, and the result is easily the most likable character in the film. Robert Patrick as Darrell Grant is truly a Hiaasen character brought to life, a wonderfully gormless perpetual avoider of karma, and always the most interesting thing onscreen in his scenes.
As Lieutenant Garcia, Armand Assante gives an amusingly understated performance with some Leslie Nielsen-esque undertones that are never brought to the front the way they should be. I do not know if “South Florida by way of Queens” is his natural accent, but if it’s not, he nails it. The other strippers-I-mean-dancers, too – especially Urbana Sprawl (Pandora Peaks) and Sabrina (PaSean Wilson) – bring some much-needed spark and Hell, even Rumer Willis brings a warm little-girl sweetness to playing her real-life mom’s movie daughter. The movie gets far too serious and stern whenever Angela shows up, because it wants us to know that it takes the matter of child welfare very seriously, but we can’t blame the kid for that.
The upbeat, bass-heavy music by Howard Shore (yes, that Howard Shore!) also does a lot of heavy lifting in keeping the film’s energy from sinking into the abyss. It’s very different from his work on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and possibly even more essential.
Speaking of music, Erin’s taste in stripping-I-mean-dancing music is darn good. I love me some Annie Lennox too, girl. And “Eager Beaver” is a pretty clever name for a strip-I-mean-dance club.
You must understand, I wanted to like Striptease. I thought there was a chance I might. I thought perhaps we’d have another Lonely Lady, a fearless performance by a misunderstood lead actress trapped inside a flood of sexist nonsense. Instead, we got something much closer to a Catwoman, in which a Serious Actress demanding to be taken Seriously clashes repeatedly with filmmakers who mostly want to see her naked butt. The resulting film is soggy and flavorless, too serious to be funny, too dumb to be serious, and too skittish and up its own rectum to even be good porn.
As for Demi, though? She starred in enough other stinkers right before her slump that it’s hard to claim Striptease did her wrong. But it’s also hard to be scandalized by a $12.5 million payout for a crappy movie when Keanu Reeves made $30 million for a pair of wretched Matrix sequels, or when Johnny Depp made $68 million for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which was an assault on the eyes and ears and heart in a way Striptease couldn’t dream of. Many before me have observed the ingrained sexist double standards in Hollywood, and many more will do so after me. I will simply observe that people have both made and lost far more money in far more shameful ways – for example, by making Bio-Dome and The Stupids, two brain-fryingly miserable films that Striptease beat out for multiple Razzies. It’s always more fun to see cinematic dreck that really deserves a good thrashing get what’s coming to it, but you can always count on the Razzies to punish mediocre misfires like Striptease when a pretty, successful actress is involved.
Quality of Movie: 2 / 5. Nothing here reeks of incompetence, but with every hour of distance I get from Striptease, the less I have to say about it at all.
Quality of Experience: 1.5 / 5. Unless you’re desperate to see Demi Moore’s breasts, there’s nothing here that warrants anywhere close to two hours of your attention.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.