The Problematics: ‘Pretty Woman’, A Date Movie Wherein Prostitution Looks Positively Quaint

“Sex work is work” is the rallying cry of a movement that, as Vox explained in a 2019 article, is not at all new. I can’t argue with that, but I can attest that in 1990, the year that the Garry-Marshall-directed romantic comedy Pretty Woman was released, the idea had not yet reached the mainstream, let alone the semi-mainstream.

With the slogan in mind, though, one can conceivably pronounce the movie, in which an Archetypal Business Shark Of Comatose Soul has his better angels revived via a week-long assignation with a Hollywood-Boulevard-walking prostitute, as a little bit prescient. “We both screw people for money,” said prostitute (Vivian) reflects to said Business Shark (Edward) after a dinner at which Edward’s great-white-attack was stubbornly deflected. While the movie is alternately vague and trite in considering just what it was that got Vivian into sex work in the first place, the movie’s scenario, and its ultimate “moral,” doesn’t work unless the audience accepts that what she does is labor. Not for nothing does the movie actually begin with the line (spoken by a party magician), “Remember what they say, it’s all about money.” 

The story of how tyro screenwriter J.F. Lawton had his dark gritty vision mutated into a rom-com confection by studio heads and their go-to creative types has been iterated over and over. As, too, has the tale of how Owen Gleiberman, the chief film critic for the fledgling soon-to-be-print-mag-powerhouse (hard to believe now, I know, I know) Entertainment Weekly, was lambasted by concluding his own qualms about the movie necessitated he give it a “D” rating. Because Pretty Woman was a cinematic unicorn. One of those items whose objectionability, such as it is, was steamrolled as flat as Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon by sheer Star Power. That’s right, Hector Elizondo…

OK, no. Elizondo is in it (he was Marshall’s good friend and good luck charm), but obviously he’s not the Star Power person.

That person, of course, was Julia Roberts. In the late ‘80s she did an agreeable “juvenile” turn in Mystic Pizza, and then helped make major waterworks happen in Steel Magnolias. Big pictures both, but also demographically limited. For lack of a better term, “chick flicks.” Pretty Woman, on the other hand, was a date movie all the way, and not in the sense of “wanna date.” And it was also a showcase. Talk to a Pretty Woman fan and they’ll tell you, it’s all about her. The megawatt smile, the spring-loaded laugh, all that. 

So nowadays, when spending a week with a prostitute is not so much an anomaly and very much a high-priced “girlfriend experience,” the movie’s depiction of street-walking feels more quaint than overtly objectionable. And the haggling that the buttoned-up, enigmatic Edward does with Vivian actually feels more realistic than crass today. When she tells him she charges a hundred dollars an hour, he says “You gotta be joking,” and she shoots back, “I never joke about money.” In today’s atmosphere of overwhelming income inequity, and the gig economy, nobody else is joking about money, either.

Anachronistic/cheesy needle-drops and other bugs notwithstanding, the movie goes down real easy, reminding one, as Overboard did, that before he got stuck in the rut of those dreadful “holiday” romcoms on which his career went out, Garry Marshall was a better-than-average crafter of Hollywood comedy. Interestingly, this was an R-rated movie on purpose — at the time and after, studios generally favored PG-13 for its rom-coms — and while there’s no nudity, the language is profane whenever it wants to be, the eventual dramatic violence realistic and disturbing, and the sex is, well, a thing. While Marshall and company wisely sidestepped it for most of Overboard, it has a place here. While we understand that Edward is lonely in general and needs to have a companion for his business dinners, Vivian is who she is, and this leads to a freighted exchange on their first night in Edward’s penthouse, after the I Love Lucy reruns on the tube are over.  “What do you do?” Edward asks, re the erotic menu.  “Everything,” Vivian says. “But I don’t kiss on the mouth.” “Neither do I,” says Edward. It’s a metaphor, get it? And among other things it means when they fall for each other (which is after we see them sharing a bath, and after we see them having piano sex), they will kiss on the mouth. 

Roberts frankly makes every one of her scenes a pleasure to watch. She had a pretty formidable performance apparatus from the start, meaning that her confrontations with snooty Rodeo Drive clothing store salesclerks are never overplayed. (Although I think Paris Hilton ended the era in which Rodeo Drive clothing store salesclerks would reflexively turn away a woman dressed like Vivian.) (And it is not for nothing that the most prominent nice salesperson in the shopping scenes is played by Elinor Donahue of Father Knows Best fame.)

And Richard Gere plays off of her brilliantly. He lays back and lets her do her thing, and then he balances her. Very Zen of him.

When the movie is on autopilot, it may occur to you that prostitution, as a theme, has little to do with what’s going on; it’s just a pretext for abrasion that builds to explosion that leads to resolution. But the movie is smarter than that — it doesn’t let the elephant in the room leave the table, such as it is. As when Edward’s ultra-smarmy lawyer Stuckey, played by a pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander, verbally disparages Vivian before sexually assaulting her in a genuinely ugly confrontation. Stuckey can’t complete his actions — Edward walks in and punches him out — but a point is made. 

As is the case when Vivian and Edward’s mostly idyllic week together — during which, among other things, Vivian passes the first-time-at-the-opera test (“If they love it they always love it,” says Edward, who must be the world’s most soulful hostile takeover guy) — and Edward tries to negotiate a continuation of their arrangement. Vivian takes umbrage. Edward says, “I never treated you like a prostitute,” and she says, “You just did.”

We all know the literal storybook ending and the famous line “And she rescues him right back,” which I always found a little puke-worthy. But I still am pleasantly surprised that in its absolutely conventional way, Pretty Woman presciently acknowledges that even fairytale relationships are, in their own way, transactional. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.