PRETTY WOMAN
With Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo, Alex Hyde-White, and Hector Elizondo.
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Vivian, still dressed in her gaudy hooker clothes, is snubbed and humiliated in a Rodeo Drive boutique, but then enlists the assistance of a hotel manager (Hector Elizondo) and later Edward himself in purchasing her wardrobe for the week. Edward, meanwhile, in the course of planning the takeover of a ship-building company, reveals to Vivian that his estrangement from his recently deceased father is behind both his corporate ruthlessness and his emotional blockage. Thanks to Vivian, however, who gradually falls in love with him, he begins to become more human, and, without his lawyer’s knowledge, works out a friendly merger between himself and the shipbuilder (Ralph Bellamy).
He wants to set Vivian up as his mistress in New York, but she refuses, explaining that he’s still treating her like a prostitute, and recounts her highly original childhood fantasy of being rescued from a tower by a knight in shining armor. But when he turns up later with a bouquet of flowers at her apartment–just as she’s leaving to start a new life in San Francisco–and climbs the fire escape to her window to “rescue” her, she agrees to “rescue him right back.”
In many respects, though, the movie’s real focus is neither sex nor money per se but the awe and class anxiety experienced by Vivian when she moves off the street and into Edward’s hotel, the Regent Beverly Wilshire–awe and anxiety the audience clearly shares. Like her, we’re expected to say “Wow” when we enter the hotel lobby, and when we enter Edward’s sumptuous penthouse suite, we’re supposed to be too amazed even for words. Champagne served with strawberries, a montage of Rodeo Drive shop signs and window displays, a fancy restaurant, a flight in a private plane to San Francisco to attend the opera, are all meant to evoke a hushed, almost religious response, as well as nervousness about behaving the “wrong way” in relation to such holy privileges–as Vivian often does, providing most of the film’s laughs. Gulping the champagne too quickly before getting to the strawberries, being humiliated and then later taking her revenge in the Rodeo Drive boutiques, causing an accident with the restaurant silverware, and responding to the opera by saying, “It’s so good I almost peed in my pants” (which Edward translates to a nearby dowager as, “She said she liked it almost as much as The Pirates of Penzance”): these moments provide frissons roughly equivalent to the one when Woody Allen sneezed into a heap of cocaine in Annie Hall. That is, they cater both to the audience’s voyeuristic interest in opulence and to a nervousness about behaving “correctly” in the presence of such conspicuous consumption.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Ron Batzdorff.
