Salon | "The Full Monty"

Guys' night out

IN "THE FULL MONTY," SOME UNEMPLOYED
BLOKES FIND THAT TAKING IT ALL OFF
IS MORE THAN JUST A PUT-ON.
DIRECTED BY PETER CATTANEO
STARRING ROBERT CARLYLE, TOM WILKINSON
AND MARK ADDY
BY LAURA MILLER
IT OUGHT TO be easy to dismiss "The Full Monty" as a sliver of low-budget comedic meringue, a bit of art house fluff, but doing that isn't so easy now -- not after a summer of so many fallen soufflés. With no chewy, ambitious themes, no movie-star charisma or auteur flourishes, "The Full Monty" is the kind of movie that critics underestimate and audiences love -- or at least that crucial segment of the film-going public who occasionally select some little film ("Il Postino," "Strictly Ballroom," "Shine") to elevate to the status of surprise hit. The story of six laid-off steel workers in Northern England who put together an unlikely male stripper act, "The Full Monty" has done so well in the handful of metropolitan theaters where it was first released (pulling in $202,122 from six screens over the Labor Day weekend alone) that Fox Searchlight Pictures will be giving it a wide release today.
"Pretty soon, men won't even exist except in zoos," says Gaz, the movie's hero, to his mates as they sit around a dreary room dubbed The Job Centre, waiting for work that never comes. After sneaking into a club on Women Only night, he had witnessed the local lasses screaming for the Chippendales dancers -- and one resourceful patroness gleefully pissing in a urinal, in defiance of nature and to her friends' vast amusement. Can masculine extinction be far behind?
A thick vein of despair runs through the center of "The Full Monty," and the movie taps into it frequently, without ever quite dying the comedy black. Gaz's insolvency threatens his relationship with his beloved son, Nathan, and his best friend Dave is so demoralized he can't have sex with his wife. Gerry, their former foreman, hasn't even told his own wife that he's been out of work for six months. "She's out on High Street right now, with her MasterCard," he wails. Yet another fellow, Lomper, joins the troupe after Gaz and Dave thwart his suicide attempt.
Director Peter Cattaneo adds this real world ballast to what's essentially a romp without weighing the whole thing down -- no small feat. That he pulls it off without a moment of cheesy sentimentality, cheap humor or condescension also makes "The Full Monty" a rare thing among art house dark horses. The movie is so seamlessly buoyant and enjoyable that it's easy to miss how carefully and sensitively it's made. Genuine charm always looks effortless.
Furthermore, for a movie hinging on only one joke -- the naiveté of Gaz's scheme to rake in a pile of money by doing "the Yorkshire" version of the Chippendales act with his motley assortment of pals -- "The Full Monty" proves marvelously resourceful. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and Cattaneo count every petal of that joke with wit and tenderness. The first time Gaz demonstrates his ecdysiast technique by shedding his jacket and swinging it over his head, the change and keys flying out of his pockets send his friends scurrying for cover. The boys shoplift a copy of "Flashdance" to study Jennifer Beals' moves, but Dave can't get past how badly she welds: "That joint wouldn't hold up for a day!" They all contemplate with dawning horror the prospect of being scrutinized as critically as they examine a model in Cosmopolitan. "That's different. We're blokes!" Lomper protests.
Being a bloke, of course, ain't what it used to be. As cockeyed as their little project may seem, engineering it loosens the men up and pulls them together by taking them a step outside their straitjacket definition of masculinity. Standing in line at the unemployment office, they unconsciously mime their routine when Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" comes on over the radio. Arrested for indecent exposure after being caught rehearsing in the abandoned steel mill, they study a security-camera videotape of their "crime" at the police station, and even the constable gets drawn into a critique of the act. Something irresistible's afoot. "The Full Monty" is part of a venerable genre -- call it The Healing Power of Show Business -- but the laughter it calls forth has a certain ring of relief and exhilaration to it, a ring that old-fashioned "drag" humor never inspired before.
On their big night, the lads (made famous by a tabloid exposé of their arrest) take the stage, intent on offering their neighbors complete frontal nudity, "the full monty." Cattaneo photographs them as flatteringly as Adrian Lyne shot Beals, but it's their faces that really shine, the confident tilt to their shoulders that's the main treat. Despite their less-than-Grecian physiques, they've achieved a genuine sexiness, strutting stuff they didn't know they had. The full monty is the least of the revelations Gaz and company offer the lasses, who have never see their men so sublimely frivolous, so free. It's no wonder, then, that they cheer so loudly, and that more and more film audiences feel inclined to join them.
Sept. 5, 1997
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