Pretty Woman movie review & film summary (1990)

There is a subplot involving Gere's attempts to take over a corporation run by an aging millionaire (Ralph Bellamy) - a man whose lifework he is prepared to savage, even though he actually likes him.

There are broad Freudian hints that Gere's entire career is a form of revenge against his father and that Bellamy may be the father figure he is searching for. But he has an impulse to hurt what he loves, and there is one particularly painful scene in which Gere reveals to a friend that Roberts is a prostitute and Roberts gains a certain insight by how hurtful that betrayal is.

I mentioned that the movie is sweet and innocent. It is; it protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. Actresses who can do that and look great can have whatever they want in Hollywood.

Gere's career is on a roll right now, after this movie and the completely opposite, swaggeringly erotic character he plays in "Internal Affairs." In Esquire magazine a few months ago, a collection of Hollywood jokes included one where the punch line was that a producer was going to be stuck with Richard Gere in his movie. After these two movies, the joke doesn't work anymore.

The movie was directed by Garry Marshall ("The Flamingo Kid"), whose films betray an instinctive good nature, and it is about as warmhearted as a movie about two cold realists can possibly be. I understand that earlier versions of the screenplay were more hard-boiled and downbeat, and that Marshall underlined the romance.

There could indeed be, I suppose, an entirely different movie made from the same material - a more realistic film, in which the cold economic realities of the lives of both characters would make it unlikely they could stay together. And, for that matter, a final scene involving a limousine, a fire escape and some flowers is awkward and feels tacked on. But by the end of the movie I was happy to have it close as it does.