By the time Magic Mike XXL reaches its unsatisfying climax, you might think its awkwardly enumerated title is a threat — not a mixed-up Roman measurement of greatness but counting down for even more sequels to Magic Mike, the 2012 male-stripper hit.
Executive producer Steven Soderbergh and co-producer Channing Tatum (who plays Mike) have chucked the first film’s stupid pretense about an exotic dancer who really just wants to run his own construction business. Now Mike stashes his custom-furniture trade and hits the road with his old stage buddies, heading for a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Concentrating on the dancing (really more dancing than stripping), Tatum and Soderbergh stumble upon an odd genre hybrid — a new-millennium non-musical that falsifies social realities in the same mold as Flashdance, 1983’s ludicrous hit about a female welder who wants to be a ballerina.
Hollywood’s inability these days to honestly represent working-class life traps Soderbergh.
Hollywood’s inability these days to honestly represent working-class life traps Soderbergh; despite his indie-film “genius” status, he seems as remote from normal human experience as those high-concept Hollywood con men behind Flashdance. Note the beer-commercial bonhomie among the sex-workers: Mike’s friendly question (“How’d I know you so long and not know you were in Desert Storm?”) would be better directed to the filmmakers. These shallow characters shamefacedly deny their lowdown labor — as when Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) insists, “I’m not a stripper, I’m a male entertainer!”
So while a proper musical uses song and dance to express its characters’ feelings, the Magic Mike franchise choreographs self-denial. The dancing here is used only to sell sex. These numbers are as unrelated to psychology and emotion as the numbers in Flashdance were detached from the plot. This makes for a particularly unmoving and non-erotic spectacle.
#related#Soderbergh (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) shot the film in dark, uncentered compositions and (under another pseudonym) edited the movie’s off-kilter rhythms. He and his team, screenwriter Reid Carolin and director Gregory Jacobs, are not burlesque showmen; unable to articulate the skill and pleasure of performance, they stage dances that lack emotional elevation.
Tatum’s two solos are negated by an overblown finale. The showbizzy results seem both half-hearted and debased: When Mike and the troupe visit a brothel-like club owned by a woman, Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith), they witness Malik (Stephen “Twitch” Boss), who shows the outstanding acrobatics of a great and original dancer, but the scene itself has sociological prurience, promoting black sexuality as primitive, even corrupting. Its complement is a scene of suburban white women relaying their marital frustrations in an effort to seduce Mike’s smiley wastrel gang.
This reveals the filmmakers’ intent to exploit sex as a gimmick rather than reveal emotion. They seem surprised to have realized that Magic Mike was a box-office bonanza more than an exploration of the zeitgeist. Through their high-minded, low-brow existentialism, the dance numbers go nowhere: The finale at the strippers’ convention spotlights several strangely unconvincing set-pieces based on vague, lurid fetishes. Modeled after the far superior ecclesiastical fashion show in Fellini’s Roma, this backstage climax both indulges and condemns decadent desire and decadent labor. There’s no feeling for the performers’, or their audience’s, investment in this circus. The politics of Magic Mike XXL aren’t crowd-pleasing, they’re crowd-patronizing.
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The new French non-musical Eden also gets existential. Director Mia Hansen-Løve follows 20 years in the life of Paul Vallée (Félix de Givry), a Parisian club DJ obsessed with American underground dance music. Paul, who seems uninterested in the sensual pleasures of music and dance, reflects the coterie attitudes of hipster film geeks who disdain the humanistic and aesthetic richness of classic cinema. For them, Hansen-Løve, her husband, Olivier Assayas, and even Soderbergh are culture heroes whose lo-fi aesthetics work toward extracting emotion and feeling from cinema.
Just as the dance numbers in Magic Mike XXL are separated by anomic interstitial scenes of the actors looking off, with backs to the camera, or in undiscernible silhouettes, Hansen-Løve chronicles the late 1990s to the present era of dance music in an equally affectless way. The trancy music keeps the film from having pulse because Hansen-Løve is against pulse. Music and dance don’t provide the characters in Eden joy or a sense of accomplishment; they’re like the proles in Magic Mike XXL, who can’t quite grasp that they’ve bought into the diminishing concept that one’s work equals one’s worth. Eden is a cavalcade of desperation.
Hansen-Løve’s imagery is mostly peripheral, and her glum storytelling is typified by Paul’s American expat girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) publishing a short story titled “Lost Souls.” Career failures, suicide, and betrayals all lead to the boyish, bratty Paul resignedly reading the poet Robert Creeley’s pronouncement, “It is all a rhythm . . . In death, I’m dead then / In life also dying.”
Eden’s chic remoteness reneges on sensuality just as Soderbergh’s style dulls pleasure in Magic Mike XXL. These pessimistic non-musicals are also, ultimately, anti-cinema.
— Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.