The Full Monty

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by John Simon

EVEN though it may be the worthiest new film around, I found The Full Monty offputting because I had serious trouble understanding it. There was a brief period when British films featuring Cockney or regional speech were subtitled, a practice I applauded. But the practice soon died out whether for economic reasons or from shame at seeming condescension, I dont know. And here I was left struggling with the street talk of Sheffield.

It may have to do with my being foreign born, but the first twenty or thirty minutes proved well-nigh impenetrable, and even the remainder rather hit-or-miss. To be sure, I am not one of those who kid themselves into laughing along without full comprehension. In any case, though, The Full Monty, written by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Peter Cattaneo, is deft and interesting. Some unemployed steelworkers stumble onto a Chippendale club: male strippers performing for an all-female audience. Gaz, the protagonist, actually sneaks in with his young son, Nathan, and is astounded by the participatory zeal of four hundred women customers roaring their approval at handsome, muscular males who strip down to a g-string.

Meanwhile he and his mates, such as the overweight Dave and the overage Gerald, their office supervisor before he was let go, cannot find employment. Gerald has to lie to his wife and pretend he goes to work; Gaz cannot meet his child-support payments, and his remarried wife threatens him with a jail sentence. So the fellows conceive the desperate idea of becoming strippers even though they are scrawny or obese, over the hill or under a passel of inhibitions. But they propose to make up for such deficiencies by revealing the full monty Australian slang for a horse that is a sure bet. In this case, total nudity.

The film contains riotous scenes, notably the audition for a few additional strippers, with little Nathan handling the music from a ghetto-blaster. The men get into trouble with wives, mothers, and the law, and especially with one another; yet throughout their physical-fitness training and attempts to learn to dance, their solidarity grows. One chap gets a job as a department-store floorwalker at the very place from which the others propose to steal clothes for the show, and more such shenanigans. Its funny, its pathetic, and its believable. Even so, I wish I had gotten more of it.

The cast is certainly a motley crew. Robert Carlyle (the sociopathic Begbie from Trainspotters) is a persuasive Gaz, but, great Scot! (or great Yorkshireman!) is he hard on the eye! English teeth are notoriously bad, but Carlyle manages to look carious all over. Tom Wilkinson is solid as always as Gerald (he was, among other things, the clergyman living in concubinage in Priest); Mark Addy, as the adipose Dave almost quitting from embarrassment at his fat, is fine; Emily Woof manages to register even in the tiny part of Gazs ex-wife; and the nine-year-old neophyte William Snape is wonderfully unspoiled as Nathan. All the others are right too, scruffy and unstilted, and the locations positively ooze authenticity. The climactic scene the big strip, and how the men and women take to it couldnt be more awkwardly funny, eliciting both mischievous and compassionate merriment.

An additional bonus is the total absence of prurience. The dialogue, as far as I followed it, was amusing in a wholly natural way, and the production design and cinematography help make it, like Lears hand, stink of humanity. Even if you get no more than half, you wont be half bored. Only a trifle frustrated.