“Hustlers” is about women and female friendships and how those friendships can become family — but it’s also about how those friendships develop in the absence of support from men. Both Lopez’s Ramona and Wu’s Destiny are single mothers with no evident support from the respective fathers. There is money to be made at the club, but only if you pay out to the gatekeepers, endure their come-ons, vague threats and shakedowns (“You want to keep working VIP?”), and please the high-rollers who come in through the back into a room with no cameras and no consequences. Throughout the movie, we see men failing these women, from Destiny’s former puppy-dog-faced suitor who hides in his sauna so his wife won’t hear him taking her call, to Ramona’s jerk manager at the Gap, where she lands briefly after the financial crisis, who refuses to give her time off to pick up her kid.
The movie got no Oscar nominations.
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By Rachel Sklar: A former lawyer who writes about media, politics, gender and culture
It was gorgeous, stylish, dark, gritty, edgy (homemade drugs, for all of you people who loved “Breaking Bad!”), thrilling, and the perfect cocktail of morally ambiguous yet righteous (once again, for all of you people who loved “Breaking Bad”). It was a stripper movie, a heist movie, a buddy comedy, a drug movie, a capitalist fable, an exploration of friendship and family, a period piece — and there were tons of gorgeous, amazing women looking super-duper hot. It even had a training montage featuring feats of physical prowess by an elite athlete at the top of her form. Like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but with Cardi B and Lizzo! Based on a true story! The Academy was gonna love it. Right? Right?
Well, the Academy loved “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which got nominated for best director and best adapted screenplay (among others) in 2014, but somehow, something changed when the women were the wolves instead of the playthings.
Despite amazing buzz, a star-studded cast, impressive box office, great reviews and a steady awards-season drumbeat, “Hustlers” came up empty across all categories when the Academy Award nominations were announced.
Whatever could have made the difference here? Could it be that the heroes of “Hustlers” were … women? Could it be that it focused on women pointedly to the exclusion of men? Sure, there were men in the film — someone had to throw cash at J. Lo! — but they were nameless and generic, not characters to be developed and considered. In the “Hustlers” universe, the women are the protagonists and the ringleaders, driving the action and working together to learn, grow and experiment with grand larceny. The men are a means to an end in terms of money, but they provide little to support or nurture the women — they are either foolish marks to exploit, or corrupt and abusive of their own powers at every step along the chain. The men are an anonymous collection of whiny boyfriends, sulky husbands, petty managers or guffawing cops, and they all undervalue and underestimate the women. There are two, maybe three sympathetic men in the movie, plus Usher. Otherwise, it’s a matriarchy functioning on female power and connection. (Is there a male version of that?)