8 / 10
Official trailer
Striptease has one of the worst reputations of any studio film of the 1990s, and most of that comes from people reacting to Demi Moore’s paycheck instead of the film. Watch it as what it is, a Carl Hiaasen comedy about Florida politics, and it’s a good time.
Andrew Bergman wrote and directed, adapting Hiaasen’s novel. Moore plays Erin Grant, who loses custody of her daughter to a wheelchair-thieving ex-husband and takes a job at a Fort Lauderdale club to fund the appeal. Burt Reynolds plays Congressman David Dilbeck, a sugar-industry puppet with a drinking problem and no impulse control.
It cost about $50 million, made roughly $113 million, won a pile of Razzies, and gets an 8 from me. I had a far better time with it than its reputation promised. The satire bites, Reynolds is shameless in the best possible way, and the film is sharper about Florida than anyone gave it credit for.
The Setup
Erin’s ex-husband Darrell steals wheelchairs for resale. A judge gives him custody anyway, because Erin’s job as an FBI secretary ended when the Bureau found out about him. Now she strips at the Eager Beaver to pay lawyers, and the court holds that against her too.
Dilbeck sees her dance, loses his mind over her, and assaults a customer with a champagne bottle in the process. A man in the club recognizes the congressman and decides to blackmail him.
Sugar money, a corrupt congressman, a murdered blackmailer, a bouncer with a philosophy, a private detective, and a mother trying to get her daughter back. That’s a Hiaasen plot, and the film keeps most of it.
It’s a Satire
The film’s biggest problem was marketing. It was sold on Demi Moore’s body and reviewed as if it were meant to be serious, and it’s neither. Everyone in it is grotesque, the politics are the joke, and the strip club is the straightest workplace in the story.
Hiaasen writes about Florida as a place where money, real estate and agriculture have eaten the state, and where the only decent people are the ones with nothing to gain. That’s all here. Big Sugar buys a congressman, the courts fail a competent mother, and the villain gets exactly what he deserves in a way no serious film would attempt. Watch it next to a Coen brothers picture of the same era and it plays as the same genre. Nobody read it that way in 1996.
For Writers
Striptease was marketed as one kind of film and written as another, and the mismatch destroyed its reception. Audiences judge a story against the promise they were given, not against what you meant. When you write, make sure the opening pages, the title and the cover copy set the same expectation the book delivers. Read your first chapter and your blurb side by side. If they suggest different genres, one of them is lying, and the reviews will punish you for it. Readers rarely forgive a book for not being the book they were promised.
The Court Plot
Nobody talks about the custody thread, and it’s the strongest writing in the film. Erin does everything the system asks. She works, she pays lawyers, she keeps her daughter fed. The court still hands the child to a man who steals wheelchairs from hospitals. The reason is the job, and the film is clear-eyed about it. A judge will accept a criminal father over a mother who takes her clothes off for money, and Erin knows that before she starts. That’s what drives the story. Without it, the film is a series of Florida grotesques. With it, everything Erin does has a reason a viewer can feel.
For Writers
The custody fight gives a film full of grotesques one character with something real to lose, and every absurd scene gains weight from it. Comedy needs one person the reader can take seriously. When you write satire, give at least one character a stake nobody would laugh at, and let the farce happen around them. Identify the straight man in your comic cast. Make sure their problem would still be a problem in a realistic novel.
Burt Reynolds
Reynolds is the reason to watch. Dilbeck is a drunk, a lecher and a coward, and Reynolds plays him with no vanity whatsoever, smearing himself in Vaseline, eating lint from a dancer’s clothes, weeping about his own importance. It came in the middle of his career slump, a year before Boogie Nights put him back on the map, and it’s the same instinct: a star willing to look repellent for a good part.
He walks away with every scene he’s in, and the Razzie he won for it is one of the dumber awards decisions of the decade.
I laughed harder at Reynolds than at anything else in the picture. Watching a star of his size let himself look that pathetic is a pleasure I don’t get nearly often enough.
Demi Moore
Moore was paid $12.5 million, then the highest fee ever given to an actress, and the number became the entire conversation about the film. She’s fine in it. Erin is written as competent, furious and out of options, and Moore plays her without asking for sympathy.
My reservation sits with Moore. She plays Erin straight, and the story needs that, but I wanted more bite and wit inside the anger. Next to Reynolds and Rhames she’s the least fun person on screen, and the lead of a comedy shouldn’t be. That’s most of the distance between this 8 and a 9. The dancing is filmed straight, and that’s part of why reviewers were uncomfortable. It’s a job. The film shows the work, the customers, the rules and the money, and treats the club as a place with professionals in it.
Her best scenes are with her daughter and in the courtroom, where the film’s actual argument lives: a woman doing legal work to support her child is punished for it by a system that let a wheelchair thief keep the kid.
The Supporting Cast
Ving Rhames plays Shad, the club’s bouncer, as the moral center of the picture, and he’s very funny doing it. His subplot with a cockroach in a yogurt container is pure Hiaasen.
Rhames is my favorite thing in the film after Reynolds. The cockroach business is so dumb and so specific that I was grinning every time it came back.
Armand Assante plays the detective working the murder, Robert Patrick is memorable as the wheelchair-stealing ex-husband, and Paul Guilfoyle plays Dilbeck’s fixer, the lobbyist Malcolm Moldowsky. Rumer Willis appears as Erin’s daughter.
The club dancers are written as people with opinions and shifts and kids, and that’s rarer in films about this subject than it should be.
The Razzies Problem
The film swept the Golden Raspberry Awards, including worst picture and worst actress, and that verdict has stuck for thirty years. It was a lazy call then and it looks worse now.
The Razzies in that era rewarded whatever the press had already decided to mock, and a film with a famous actress taking her clothes off for a record salary was an easy target. Nobody was assessing the satire. Since then, it’s picked up defenders who describe it as an underrated black comedy. That’s the right reading, and it’s why this sits at 8 instead of down where its reputation lives.
For Writers
Striptease has spent thirty years buried under an award designed for headlines instead of judgment. A bad reception can be about the conversation around a work instead of the work itself. When your book is badly received, separate the criticism of what you wrote from the noise about who you are or what it cost. Go through your worst reviews and mark which ones engage with the actual text. Learn from those. Ignore the rest, however loud they are. Volume and insight have never been the same thing.
Florida
It gets the state right. Sugar money, bought politicians, strip malls, swamp, heat, and a legal system that works better for the crooked than for the competent.
Hiaasen has spent a career writing about that Florida as a journalist and a novelist, and the adaptations that work, this one and Ruthless People’s cousins in the Elmore Leonard tradition, keep the rage underneath the comedy.
That’s what most reviewers missed in 1996. It looks like a film about a strip club. It’s a film about who owns Florida.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Striptease puts a serious argument, a competent mother punished by a corrupt system, inside a comedy about grotesques, and the anger underneath gives the jokes their weight. Satire needs something it wants changed. If your comedy isn’t angry about anything, it’s just jokes.
Is Striptease worth watching?
Yes, if you go in knowing it’s a Carl Hiaasen satire and not the erotic drama it was sold as. Burt Reynolds is astonishing, the Florida corruption plot is sharp, and it’s funnier than thirty years of Razzie jokes suggest.
It’s an 8 from me. The reputation is a marketing failure that hardened into received wisdom, and I’d take this over plenty of the respectable prestige pictures of its year. Reynolds alone justifies the rewatch, and the Florida anger underneath the jokes is what makes me come back to it as a comedy with something to say.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Striptease (1996), The Numbers
- Striptease (film), Wikipedia
- Striptease (1996), IMDb
