MAGIC MIKE is beefcake served well-done

MAGIC MIKE
(dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Last Tuesday afternoon I sat down at the Mission Valley movie house, medium popcorn in hand and credit card receipt thankfully not listing the movie title, ready to see “Magic Mike.” Young women of similar ages and dress sat near me. We made eye contact. They quickly turned away to indicate it was not intentional. Their cell phones were out texting. My cell phone was in the car, texting service disabled. Some pontificated whether Matthew McConaughey’s nudity would extend beyond the usual shimmering chest.

All of this is not to impress you. Rather it is to indicate that until start time, it felt like I was crashing their party. Then the movie began, and it quickly became clear they crashed mine.

For “Magic Mike” is the DAMNDEST male stripper movie you’re ever likely to see. Closer in spirit to “Boogie Nights” than Chippendales, here is a movie of seediness, grim realities, and how it must feel when your entire resume is a chiseled torso. Any movie about male strippers can capture the gleeful cavalcade of gals hurling dollars at their thrusting beefcake. This one lingers on the scene the next morning as the men sadly smooth those dollars out under phone books.

What drives the movie, even as it gradually descends into depravity, is its sense of dogged earnestness. With the easy charms of stars Channing Tatum and McConaughey, this could have easily delivered a fun girls’ night out that most of its target audience probably expects. Certainly its strip numbers have the exuberant choreography of a musical. Or it could have fell to the traps of self parody, a series of morning-after shots of the dancers waking up next to their own vomit, trudging back into the pit of their own existence.

Instead, director Steven Soderbergh takes a rather obvious thesis – that taking your clothes off for strangers is no way to feel good about yourself – and beholds it with the wonder of a man who just discovered how to turn Grape Nuts into platinum, following that idea right to the end. This might sound like a rather cheap knock at the man and his film. On the contrary - the approach is refreshing and engaging.

You could call this movie silly. You could call it ham fisted. But you sure can’t call it ironic. And thank god for that.

Not to mention the movie’s base fascination as a “how the sausages are made” story. Like “Casino” or “All About Eve” or any good movie that takes us behind the scenes of a forum we already know, “Magic Mike” pops as a work that has done its research. As backhanded a compliment as this might sound, the movie feels like it knows a LOT about male strip clubs. How I love it when a film can present a world to me I never knew before.

This is not a deep movie. This is not a profound movie. What it IS, however, is clear eyed and full-hearted. Some of its characters find happiness in the strip club, some yearn to escape, but they’re all treated to the same respect in a work that weaves comedy, melodrama, and occasional exuberance with ease.

If Gene Kelly showed his nipples in his movies, it might feel something like this.