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Just when you thought you had seen the last of “Michael Jeffrey Lane” (Channing Tatum), he comes along and decides to surprise you. As perhaps only a male stripper can. Even if a “retired” one. Indeed, Mike is rather easily lured out of his retirement with a few mere words from a “wild card” of a socialite named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault—since we must add that last part to her name now). A woman Mike encounters at a party where he’s tending bar. Just another in a series of gigs that he’s been forced to take on in the wake of his furniture company closing. For, per our as-of-yet unknown narrator, a global pandemic isn’t very conducive to one’s business. And, considering the last time we saw Magic Mike was in the pre-apocalypse era (2015), things are looking even bleaker for the “ex” stripper than they did in Magic Mike XXL (which features, among other presently fallen stars, Amber Heard and Stephen “tWitch” Boss).
So it is that our narrator also informs us, “Like many forty-year-old millennial white males, Mike Lane found himself alone and adrift in an ocean of failed relationships and unrealized dreams.” Because, no, fulfilling drink orders was not his “dream.” Though, in some ways, bartending isn’t unlike stripping. You’re still performing a series of acrobatic maneuvers ultimately aimed at pleasing people. As Mike seems to almost immediately please Maxandra by disarming her during their first interaction via the question, “You gettin’ what you want?” When she does a double take at this, he clarifies, “With the fundraiser. It looks like it’s going all right.” Something in her shifts, as though a light has gone on—especially after Mike mentions, “People like to look at what they can’t have.” Hearing from a party guest that Mike used to be a stripper (/maybe more), Maxandra is emboldened to invite him into her house after the party is over.
When Mike insists he doesn’t do “that” anymore, and that the price to make him would be sixty thousand dollars, Maxandra offers six thousand. And so begins “the dance.” Lucky Daye’s “Careful” plays over the speakers of her living room as Mike delivers a seduction that borders the fine line between sexy and comedic (as most seductions are fundamentally absurd). It’s already at this early juncture that we can see the parallels that align Pretty Woman with this particular installment of the Magic Mike series. For in no other Magic Mike movie was there any older, well-to-do “patron” offering cash in exchange for no sex. At first anyway. For on that initial night when Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) is picked up by Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) and taken to the Regent Beverly Wilshire, she’s all about securing the bag. Until she realizes that, for Edward, the encounter isn’t really about sex—though, again, not until later. When Vivian tells him in the car on the way, “I never joke about money,” Edward replies, “Neither do I.” They seem like a perfect fit right out the gate. The same goes for Mike and Maxandra, the latter, in her Edward role, challenging Mike to make more of himself. To actually pursue his true passion. This is broached when she inquires, “Do you like bartending?” Mike shrugs, “Sure, uh, it’s not really what I do, but yeah. Why not?”
Vivian essentially feels the same way about prostitution, but clearly makes the most of it (this includes calling herself a “safety girl” when she shows Edward an array of condoms from the selection contained within her thigh-high boot). Edward, however, can already see that she’s so much more—finding out just that when he catches her with dental floss in her hand, as opposed to the illicit drug he assumes it must be (stereotyping sex workers as usual, but, hey, it was the 90s). Increasingly charmed with Viv throughout the night, the two finally “seal the deal” to the background of an I Love Lucy episode, of all things. The following day, just as Maxandra will ask of Mike, Edward proposes they spend a much larger block of time together (one week to Mike and Maxandra’s one month). As Edward puts it, “I will pay you to be at my beck and call.”
As will Maxandra for Mike, promising him the original sixty thousand dollars he suggested if he accompanies her to London. Cajoled into going, despite having no idea what the “job” he’s being offered actually is, Mike finds out that Maxandra believes in his talent and potential so much that she’s enlisted him to be the new director/choreographer of a play she wants to revamp called Isabel Ascendant—which means they’re keeping the first scene from said play and turning it into, essentially, a Chippendales act.
The “May-December” romance that continues to blossom throughout this period of collaboration is astutely observed by Maxandra’s daughter, Zadie (Jemelia George)—she being the one who has been intermittently inserting her narrations this whole time. While Salma Hayek Pinault is fifty-six, Julia Roberts—ergo, Vivian Ward—was twenty-three in 1990, when Pretty Woman came out. A vast difference compared to Mike’s forty (Tatum himself is actually forty-two). Roughly the age Richard Gere was in 1990. The gap between Gere and Roberts was obviously larger in part because it was (and is) so commonplace for men to pursue younger women without half as much judgment as older women opting for younger men. This is made patent when Maxandra’s husband, Roger Rattigan (Alan Cox), who seems to be some faint foil for Hayek’s own rich husband in real life, cuts her down by saying, “I know when you’re being used. Don’t you see that? Darling, I know we’re all getting old, but I didn’t know you were so desperate.” No one would ever dare say such a thing to Edward about his younger woman choice—instead only making mention that she’s a hooker as a point of contention.
The power and age dynamics at play in both Pretty Woman and Magic Mike’s Last Dance are what make the tension (primarily sexual) in both feel so palpable at any given moment. And while both Edward and Maxandra could have “chosen” any non-“for pay” companion, each thought they were going to spare themselves from emotional attachment if it was under the guise of a “business proposition” instead.
In the famous final scene of Pretty Woman, Edward asks Vivian, “So what happened after he climbed the tower and rescued her?” Vivian replies, “She rescues him right back.” The same goes for Mike and Maxandra, even if the latter does have to abandon “her” fortune in order to be with Mike. Because, naturally, the fortune belonged to her husband, who, quelle surprise, has an utterly strangling series of prenup clauses that makes it impossible to live freely without just abandoning the cash altogether. But at least Maxandra can acknowledge the unfairness of being in an Edward role without actually being an Edward. This by telling her driver/butler, Victor (Ayub Khan Din)—the requisite Barney (Héctor Elizondo) of the movie—“[Mike] believes in me, and I have to go tell him that our show about empowering women is dead because I’m so fucking powerless.” Nonetheless, Mike will not let her give up all they worked toward during their last few weeks together. Which is why Maxandra’s power, in the end, is still delivered by the presence/swooping in of a man. Making her little better, “station in life-wise” than Vivian.
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Genna Rivieccio
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