MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Pretty Woman’: Roberts’ Legs, a Cold Heart

Updating “Pygmalion” and sprinkling it with Cinderella dust may seem like a perfectly workable idea until you get into the nuts and bolts of “Pretty Woman” (citywide). Here, Richard Gere’s bored cipher of a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, transforms Julia Roberts’ happy Hollywood Boulevard hooker Vivian Ward into a lydie he can pass off at a polo match in less than a week.

Nothing works, except perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts’ lean, well-tempered midsection and her roughly eight yards of legs that, in this frail comedy, are worked until they’re almost a story point of their own.

You’d be crazy to deny the pleasure of Roberts in motion, even though it may be a Stepford Wife action, but is this the sexual climate in which to make Eliza Doolittle a hooker? Whether or not Vivian carries multicolored condoms, her “buffet of safety” in her thigh-high boots and doesn’t kiss on the mouth, is it possible not to look at her as a ticking sexual time-bomb?

J. F. Lawton’s script supposedly evens things out since Edward says that he doesn’t kiss on the lips either. Must have been fun for his ex-wife and the ex-girl friend he dumps at the film’s opening. In fact, Edward’s dour observation to Vivian, “We’re so similar, we both screw people for money” is this pair in a nutshell. Are we having fun yet?

Only if you crack up at the swells of Beverly Hills, having their eyebrows raised to their hairlines by the antics of a hooker, dressed minimally, among them. Please. Have you strolled around Beverly Hills lately? Assume that a great body and a dearth of clothes makes a hooker and you’ll get yourself nailed by one tough aerobics fanatic.

In his earlier movies like “Flamingo Kid,’ director Garry Marshall’s touch, his eye and his timing were precise and on-target. But in “Pretty Woman” he’s become broad, smirky and flaccid.

All he’s asked of his stars is that they be a matched pair of beautiful automatons. Roberts is stunning but cool as plastic, something she’s been in everything since the modest “Mystic Pizza.” It was impossible to care whether she lived, died, had that baby or didn’t in “Steel Magnolias.” Vivid, real Sally Field--for all the excesses required of her--acted Roberts right off the screen in that one. Here, Laura San Giacomo, shoe-horned into a too-small role as Vivian’s hooker-roommate, bursts out of it, giving contrast and shading where Roberts merely gives us something perfect to gaze at.

And nothing but the Gere facade is being required of him here, unfortunately. Gere got a chance to tear loose in “Internal Affairs” playing a cop who controlled everything, a string of ex-wives and children and a network of drug connections with laid-back charm, dexterity and inventiveness. It was a performance that may have had a lot to do with director Mike Figgis’ demands on him.

Something is supposed to work a change on this iceman, Edward, but the movie doesn’t tell us what. Worst of all “Pretty Woman” (MPAA-rated R for situations, language) is brute lazy. The sheer, grin-making fun of “Pygmalion”/”My Fair Lady” was the weeks and weeks of work that Eliza put into her transformation. Deportment, carriage, small talk--remember the small-talk lessons? Eliza blossomed in stages, wit attending her at every stage.

At today’s jump-cut pace, it takes Vivian one afternoon in one Rodeo Drive boutique to learn everything. How not to make herself up like Joan Cusack, Staten Island secretary in “Working Girl.” How to transform a tumbling mane of hair into a perfect chignon. The friendly hotel manager, Hector Elizondo, one of the film’s dry delights, who takes a shine to Vivian, supposedly takes care of the rest, the intricacies of which fork to use, where not to spit out your gum.

“Pretty Woman’s” shorthand Cinderella message is: Wear the right clothes, know what every hooker knows and the world is yours. Even “Working Girls’ ” delirious wish-fulfillment worked a little harder than that. Her boss’ clothes may have been Melanie Griffith’s character’s entry-card and she may have had that bod for sex, but those months of night school were her ace in the hole.

The film makers have no wit to help us learn to love Vivian, as witness her blurted reaction to her first opera. Granted that a lot of time could be spent catching Julia Roberts’ face in this light or that, but, in the long run, does Manhattanite Edward really want a life with this angel, given the charmless lines the writers have laid on her?

With “Pygmalion” for its launching pad, with its take-the-girl-to-her-first opera scene from “Moonstruck,” with Edward’s moody, solo piano playing from “The Fabulous Baker Boys” and Vivian’s all stops-out shopping blitz from “Big Business,” this is a movie that barely has a moment to call its own. The ones it has are gamy, materialistic and possibly life-threatening. Some fairy tale for the Nineties.

‘PRETTY WOMAN’

A Touchstone Pictures presentation in association with Silver Screen Partners IV of an Arnon Milchan production of a Garry Marshall film. Executive producer Laura Ziskin. Producer Milchan, Steven Reuther. Director Marshall. Screenplay J. F. Lawton. Camera Charles Minsky. Production design Albert Brenner. Editor Priscilla Nedd. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Co-producer Gary W. Goldstein. Music James Newton Howard. Art director David Haber, set decorator Garrett Lewis. Sound Jim Webb. With Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo, Alex Hyde-White, Hector Elizondo, Elinor Donahue, Patrick Richwood.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).