Pretty Woman

It is a rare thing to get to witness an actress becoming a star in a single movie, but that is exactly what we witness happening with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Playing Vivian Ward, a down-on-her-luck prostitute who works the corners of Hollywood Boulevard back when it was a seedier stretch of pavement, Roberts doesn't so much exude warmth and charisma as she embodies it. The movie itself, a modern update of the Cinderella story, is as contrived as you get--isn't that not-so-secretly what we want?--but at no point is Roberts' performance, and in some way virtually every role she has played since then has been a response to Vivian, either trying to recapture her seemingly effortless radiance or playing against it(movies.nytimes.com).

Pretty Woman is often described as a romantic comedy, perhaps because director Garry Marshall was best known for comedies, but revisiting it after not having seen it for several years, I was surprised to find that it has far fewer comedic moments than I remembered and many more dramatic ones. People tend to think of it as a comedy because of the way in which it fulfills romantic expectations with such charm and good humor, but what they forget is the way in which that charm and good humor is but a thin buffer against the film's darker elements. The ending is so sugary that it's easy to forget the way it begins on Hollywood Boulevard with crack dealers, police investigating a dead prostitute found in a dumpster, and Vivian arguing with her roommate Kit (Laura San Giacomo) about using their rent money to buy drugs(www.ew.com).

But then Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), a handsome, but emotionally strangled corporate raider from New York who has just broken up with his girlfriend, pulls up in a borrowed Lotus ...